Zeros and Ones

Disclaimer: The following is a first hand account authored by yours truly, an A Class Geek. Anyone who anticipates reading the following and thinking of words like “lame”, “geek”, “nerd”, “a@#” etc, is requested to leave right away. As for the fanboys, welcome gentlemen. What I am attempting below, is basically, to name my most favourite games, hoping that it will strike a familiar chord.

The year was 1990 and it was the year that marked the beginning of the great journey. My folks got me the new Nintendo Video Game (NES) console and a cartridge with 128 games in it. It was as though I had been shown the doorway to a new, fabulous, fantasy realm.

Arkanoid, Tennis, Road Racer, Battlefield, Contra, Mario and Luigi, Othello, Lunar Ball, Robocop and of course, our all time favourite, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and its various sequels and variants among so many other games, dictated the course of my childhood. Not that I wanted to stay aloof, I rather enjoyed the whole VG thing and embraced it wholeheartedly. My fondest memory is when after finishing Contra, I was adorned with the title, hero of the universe. I truly felt special.

In 1994 I was introduced to smashing fellow called Dave and boy was he dangerous, leaping over danger, shooting at his enemies and although he made the heroes of Contra look rugged and macho, a sort of James Bond (Dan Craig by the way) aura of sorts emanated from him, even if it was only 0’s and 1’s. A friend of mine, the early bird, had a computer with the latest OS, Windows 3.1 on it and on one visit, showed me a game called Prince of Persia. It looked awesome and I was hooked. A few years later, I would manage to track down the exact same game on a cartridge for my VG.

In 1996, my folks got us our first “multimedia computer”, My granny had just returned from the US and my cousin sent us a copy of Encarta and these three games, Age of Empires II, Warcraft II and something called Doom. I’d never really heard of them before. I had no clue as to what I was getting myself into back then and yet, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, my games and I. IDDQD , IDKFA and IDCLIP (I actually still remember these cheats from over 10 years ago) were the saviours against the juggernaut of enemy forces. The war of the Orcs and Humans was memorable and the introductory cut scene background score is still fresh in my mind as was that between the Byzantines and Britons.

I had been given a 256 games’ demo pack along with the computer and the one game which I really can’t forget from the plethora is this neat little game called Terminal Velocity which was a futuristic flight sim of sorts, in fact I went out and picked up one of those early joysticks, the calibration of which would constantly get scrambled and have me tumbling to a rocky demise. Cricket 97 was another one of the games from the time which in time, I would truly suck at. A couple of other early games I tried my hands on but never completed were Myst, In the First Degree (little did I know back then that I’d be a lawyer someday), King’s Quest and this fascinating game called Angel Devoid which I couldn’t finish simply because my newer system later on, wouldn’t support the VGA graphics or something. Angel Devoid is one game which I wished I had finished. Those were games which were made which real people and would fall within a very different genre. Special mention: Carmageddon, Carmageddon 2 (my personal favourite which also introduced me to Iron Maiden) and Carmageddon TDR 2000 (which was a cartoonish version of its predecessors).

A couple of years later a saw a Star Trek game for PC in a shop and on the cover was splashed the words “3D Card required”. It didn’t make any sense to me. Soon enough, I realised what it meant. In 1999, we procured a new system with a faster processor, Intel Pentium something or the other with the Windows 95 OS which we upgraded to the brand new Windows 98 later and onboard 3d graphics. My earliest games on this, my brand new rig, were Cricket 99 and Lara Croft and something about a Revelation. While the revelation thing crashed bang in the middle of the game and quit to desktop (something was wrong with the CD), the Cricket thing seemed easy beyond a point.

Once my bud Avishek hopped onto the PC bandwagon, despite the Y2K craze, games like Recoil, Star Wars Pod Racer, Soldier of Fortune, Star Wars The Phantom Menace, Quake III, Unreal Tournament and of course Need for Speed dominated our lives. (Yeah! We were major geeks back then, still are in fact) and some 5 or so years later, Age of Empires II began to make more sense than it did when I was 11. This WWII themed game called Commandos II was especially fascinating, with the level of details and the missions which were truly, very well crafted.

A year into college and I got my first comp with a 3D card (I’m refuse to name the card) and the comp later went on to be known as the cursed comp, the tenure of which ended with the GeForce 128 MB 6600 GT. This “revolutionary” new system allowed me to play GTA Vice City, Postal, Rise of Nations, Medal of Honour, Call of Duty, United Offensive and after the 6600 GT, Call of Duty 2 as well. Some of the levels from COD, especially breaching the Nazi Reichstag and planting the Soviet flag and the levels where we’re called to defend out positions especially in COD 2 were memorable. My favourites of the time though, were still Age of Empires II and Rise of Nations.

After my graduation, the system was retired and moved where it lies, unused, a memento of a time gone by and ushered in the era of gaming on my laptop, the HP Pavilion dv6000 which isn’t very much more powerful than the PC although I finally laid my hands on GTA San Andreas, Command and Conquer Tiberium Wars, Panzers Phase I, NFS Most Wanted and a few more.

In October 2009, my folks got me my big upgrade and thus came along my PS3®. I’m hooked to the graphics, the gameplay and some of the plots of the games which are the deepest and most involving I’ve ever experienced. I’ve completed Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and am currently, intermittently playing Heavy Rain, Battlefield Bad Company and Batman Arkham Asylum.

Though none of these games can even compare to the games of the 80s and early 90s, one can clearly discern their evolution and I for one, though haven’t played many famous games of the various eras, am still proud to have been (and continue to be) a part of this evolution. While Project Natal and the Playstation Move (which is similar to the Wii concept) will revolutionise gaming , I can’t wait till we slip on a pair of Goggles and slip away into our very own ‘Quest World’.

I have a LAN opponent waiting to crush me in AOE II. That’s enough idle, arbitrary rambling for now, till we meet again.