My Computer Wants More Attention

Oh shit, it's that time again. I can feel the primordial urges swelling up inside me, tearing away at my civil, organized, and laid-back nature. No, it's not a full moon and I'm not transforming into a werewolf or some other shape-shifting beast. It's time to dive back into PC gaming.

It's a vicious cycle; my PC gaming history dates all the way back to Myst and Doom 95. If you were to plot my PC gaming with a fancy graphing calculator or just scribbles on a white board, it would look like your average sinusoidal wave. Complete with crests and troughs; large, wide troughs representing valleys of console gaming and sharp, peak-like crests representing my periodic ascension to WASD greatness.

So, maybe it's not as sequential as I'm imagining it, but there is a clear pattern here: new computer. Our first family computer, my first personal computer, my first laptop (for college). Those are the three peaks, right there. The odd thing about each peak is that I carry games from new machine to new machine. Myst kind of died with Windows 95, but I've installed Doom on every PC of mine that I can. I picked up Diablo 2 and The Sims with my first personal computer. That machine was also where I first played Fallout (such a special place in my heart). The Dell XPS that traveled with me to college was my first high-end gaming machine. Unreal Tournament 2004, Far Cry, Dungeon Siege 1 and 2, and Paraworld spawned from that dorm room desk.



Yes, I said Paraworld. I like my RTS games with dinosaurs. Hell, everything is better with dinosaurs. Take Jurassic Park, for example, if not for the dinosaurs that movie would have sucked. I've added an iMac to that computer collection, but it's not for gaming. That's for all the multimedia editing that I do for work and freelance. I also picked up an Acer netbook sometime in graduate school. Guess what the first program I installed on that baby was? The Doom Collector's Edition. All the Doom you can handle in one neat little package. Then I installed all the crap I needed for class.

So far, there are five PC games to which I'm constantly returning: Doom, Diablo 2, The Sims, Dungeon Siege, and Paraworld. Being able to play these again will be a plus, but it's games like The Old Republic and Diablo 3 that are spurring me to contemplate a new gaming machine. Maybe I'll even build my own PC this time.