So.
Blogging eh?
I'm kind of new to this kind of thing, so forgive any faux pas that are made in the coming ramblings but like a puppy pissing on the rug, I don’t know any better.
Ok, to begin with a little about me, my names Tom, I'm 24 in a few weeks, I've just bought my first house in Slough (shup up, its not that bad) and am just about to be made redundant which is a combination akin to tap dancing on a mine field at the moment. I mostly play FPS and RPG games, with the odd FIFA football games thrown in for good measure, but as long as something looks interesting and a bit different I’m not adverse to giving it a go. When I'm not playing games I'm usually listening to the devils music, reading old DC comics or (more commonly) asleep.

I've been playing video games since I was about 8 or 9 when I got given a NES with the first Mario game on a caravaning holiday with my parents. This was the catalyst that kicked off my love for gaming. The early days of my gaming revolved around the then supergiant of consoles, Nintendo. NES, SNES, N64 and the first black and green Gameboy all have special places in my heart and mind as they are the consoles that paved the way for me to end up the massive gaming nerd I am now. Although I did love Nintendo I was never truely happy with the N64 (too cutesy and stupidly expensive games) so when an opportunity to get hold a PS1 on the cheap, no questions asked came up, I jumped at the chance and ever since the Playstation has been my console of choice and I now own a PS2 (I still play SotC, Timesplitters and FFX & XII), a PSP (still haven’t got all the cards for Metal Gear Acid 2) and a PS3 so that the Sky box doesn't get lonely on the shelf on its own (I have yet to play a PS3 game that blew me away or even one I really enjoyed, sure they've all been pretty, but none have actually been any good!). I’m secretly hoping that FFXIII will rekindle my love for the PS3, but at the moment it’s just a big, ugly DVD player.

As much as I love my consoles most of my gaming takes place away from the, in the scary realm of video cards, physics engines and RAM that is home to the PC. All the time I was plinking away on my consoles, slowly simmering away in the background was the startings of a PC gamer; my old man was always working with/around computers so we always had a PC floating around. His games of choice were the old crappy Tomb Raider games as well as Wolfenstien and Doom 2 (which I can still remember being scared of the first time I saw him playing it!) which I then played when he wasn't around after “hacking” his password. After recovering from the viscious beating that insued after saving over his furthest Tomb Raider file I found that I prefered the format, being able to save whenever you want was a big thing when all you'd known previously was Mario’s harsh lesson of 3 lives, game over!
As I got older, I started spending less time on the consoles and more on the PC, spending my pocket money and any money I got from whatever menial, minimum wage job I was working at the time on the newest games that our somewhat crappy home PC could manage. I remember when the first Half Life game came out I actually forced my dad to upgrade our computer so that I could play it, and I'm still thanking him for it to this day! I played so many games during this period its hard to remember them all but FPS games where my genre of choice (Unreal and Quake being the ones that really stick out, as well as HL, my first true love!),
with the odd wild card like the amazing X-Com games thrown in for good measure. I think I used to play a couple of flight sims too, but don't hold that against me, I can't
even remember what they were called!

Until recently all my gaming had been offline for no real reason other then ignorance on my part; I believed bot matches and fragging friends locally was way more fun then jumping online and playing with a bunch of random people I’ve never met. Then I bought the Orange Box (easily the best purchase I’ve ever made, £20 and I’m still playing most of the games from it almost 2 years on!) and after loving Portal and HL2 and all its lovely expansions (I nearly cried when that hunter got Alyx) I had nothing left but to try TF2. Now, when I first got HL all those years ago, it came with a mod called Team Fortress that I didn't understand as it was just empty maps with nothing to kill (I didn't realise it was an online game) so I completely ignored it, probably missing out on one of the biggest online games ever and setting myself back a good few years in the online gaming world! So, a little older and a little wiser, I fired up TF2 and almost instantly became addicted to it! I can’t even say what it is that reeled me in, but I immediately knew that I was involved with something special. The different classes all had something that appealed to me, the look of the game was like nothing I’d ever seen, everything about it spoke to me and said "THIS IS THE COOLEST GAME YOU HAVE EVER PLAYED!" After wandering the wastelands of public servers in a somewhat nomadic and random fashion, I stumbled upon a gaming comunity that fit with what I wanted to get out of the game, my skill level and most importantly, sense of humor (www.wdgclan.co.uk) and racked up the hours, mainly as scout and medic but more recently as pyro or soldier. The majority of my gaming week revolves around what’s going on on our TF2 server; if theres people about, I’ll jump on, if not I’ll get some of my clanmates on for a L4D session or rock some single player action on one of the many, many (many) games in my back catalogue I’m trying to get through!
So this is where we stand now, literally years spent playing video games, a mortgage, impending unemployment and a desire to write a blog about my experiences with games and share it with you fine people. I’m still not 100% sure what the meat of this blog is going to be about, probably cynical reviews of the shite new releases I seem to get conned into buying (I’m looking at you, Dark Athena) and old classics that I’ve only just got around to playing (Deus Ex is probably next on the cards) with a light lampooning of current events (think the swine flu/pig villains thing elsewhere on this site but with moar lazars) and a sprinkling of cuss words, silly pictures and self deprecation.

This intro has taken a good few hours on and off and gone through various drafts and omissions before arriving at the most needlessly long winded “Hello” in the history of the world and will, hopefully, be the least interesting thing I’ll ever blog about. If you’ve got this far, I congratulate you and leave you in the knowledge that my next piece will be less ramble, more content.

……….

And boobs, I’ll try and get some boobs in there too.