Ever since I became aware of what video games were, I've been drawn to them. My first experiences were with arcade machines at the places where my parents tended bar. Over the years, those machines proved to be instrumental in fighting the boredom of waiting for dad to finish one more "last one" before we could go home. Normally that wait ended right around midnight or last call.....

In any event, I became a master at gambling for quarters with the bar patrons. The match game, Horse (Dice not basketball), three card monty, even just flipping a coin for heads or tails. It wasn't really gambling, since I didn't lose any money if lost, but it fueled my video game addiction which, in turn, was fueled my need to get away from the fucking bar. Even if that escape was actually IN the bar.

After my grandmother died when I was twelve, she left us enough money that I could get a computer and my parents bought me a Tandy Color Computer 2. We also got a subscription to Family Computing which had programs in each issue that you could type into your computer and run. Since there weren't a lot of games for the CoCo 2, this was how I got most of the games that I played on it. Although I did get the Dungeons of Daggorath cartridge. I never finished DoD, but I still  played it quite a bit.

When I was 14, I bought an Atari 7800 with money I had made detasseling corn over the summer. I had a choice between a Nintendo with no games for $100, or the 7800 for $50 plus $50 of games. Two years later we got an NES and the 7800 started to collect dust. As high school graduation present, my grandfather bought me a Nintendo Gameboy.

During the next two years I was in the Navy and went through three Gameboys (one stolen, one broke, and I think I still have the last one somewhere) and bought, a Sega Game Gear, an Atari Lynx (got stolen), a TuboGraphix 16 with CD-Rom and 40 games (got left in Philidelphia), an SNES, and a Sega Genesis with CD-ROM (stolen one week from the expiration of my contract ). I also had about two lockers (not mine) full of Genesis games and a portable black and white TV. In hindsight, I probably could have put that money to better use....

I decided that College was the perfect excuse to buy a cheap computer and purchased a Tandy 486 / 33Mhz. The thing that really drew me to computer games was the fact that most of the games on the platform were aimed at an adult audience. There we TONS of strategy games, wargames, and military sims that were just not available on consoles and, for the most part, still aren't. I totally got into Civilization, Harpoon, Mechwarrior 2, Doom (of course), and Red Baron.

After I flunked out of college (computer science was not a good major for me), I had to get a job. With gainful employment came the ability to continue my PC gaming hobby. During the five years between 1995 and 2000, I had a blast. There were so many great games that came out at the time. There was Quake and Quake 2 (of course), Half-Life, Rainbow Six, THE ENTIRE JANE'S SIMULATION SERIES, Starcraft, Diablo (1&2), !!!!*****STARSIEGE TRIBES*****!!!!, Baldur's gate..... The list just goes on and on.....

Then, after 2000, something changed. The stoner teenage mentality that had fueled the Playstation's rise to power in the console wars came knocking at the PC platform's door.... The very thing I was trying to get away from by becoming a PC gamer, was now hounding me into a section of the hobby I felt was completely suited to my needs. Military sims died, wargames died, turn based strategy was driven so far into the margins as to be almost non-existent.....

Which brings me to today. Oddly enough, the thing that drew me into PC gaming is a contributing factor to what draws me to play portable games. BTW, when I say the DS has more games geared toward adults, I mean 25 and over. It takes more than dark brooding atmosphere and gobs unnecessary gore laced with sexual innuendo to make a game "mature." You can call the DS a kiddie system all you want but somehow I can't see too many preteens lining up to play Brain Age, Age of Empires, Hotel Dusk, or Trauma Center: Under the Knife. The diagnosis of these games, that I've heard from a bonafide 10 year old, in order is: "God it's just like school!", "boring", "too much reading", and "this game is too hard!!" It's only a matter of time before everyone jumps on the portable bandwagon, but hopefully the video game industry will have matured enough to make games for all sectors of the market and not just whiney, stoner, emo brats that are trying to look "adult."