Hello all!

What better way to start a blog with telling a bit about myself? I wanted to put this little story on the sidebar on the right, but it became a bit too long for it. So I decided to put it here. Hope you don't mind :)

A little bit about me:
I cannot remember my exact age when I started playing games, but I remember fiddling with the Commodore 64. Putting huge black square discs in the disc drive and playing crappy games. I also remember games on tapes, but I don't think I was able to play them.

My parents owned a really old PC where you could play Prince of Persia in black and white at it's best. That was when I also owned my first console, or actually a handheld: The Nintendo Gameboy. My first two games on the Gameboy were Super Mario Land and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! I totally loved it. Not much later my dad got me the Nintendo 8-bit system, The NES. Together with the one billion in one games cartridge, I could play forever on it. Unfortunately I was only allowed to play during the weekends.

During a vacation somewhere in Spain I saw and played on an arcade machine called Street Fighter II. It owned so bad, that I really wanted to play it home as well. This didn't happened for a while until the Super Nintendo got released with Street Fighter II! Good times! But I didn't got the SNES at release. Instead on my birthday when my father asked me if I wanted to buy the SNES or two games for the NES, i choose for two games for the NES: Super Mario World 3 and some chipmunks game from Disney. What was I thinking?!

After a while, my father finally decided to buy a new PC. It was a Pentium something MX. I, of course, immediately looked into my game magazines to check for a game to play on the new thing. After some research I asked my dad to buy Duke Nukem 3D for me (at the same time he bought the new computer). I had no regrets. In fact, it's probably one of the best games I've ever played. I had a lot of time invested in that game. I even had my first multiplayer experience with it. Dialing in with our super duper modems to each other and start blasting each other away. I also made a lot of maps for the game.

When Quake got released, we also replaced our dial-up modem for ISDN. The phone bills were way up because of me. This was the best multiplayer experience I ever had. Everything was new for me. I joined some clans and had much fun (but still only during weekends). QW CTF was the best mod for Quake IMHO.

My next new game experience was when the Nintendo 64 got released. Super Mario 64 was such an awesome game, that I can't describe how I felt. But that wasn't the only game that amazed me; Lylat Wars (Star Fox 64) and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time are also one of the best (console) games I have ever played and I still haven't played a game to date that gives me that experience again.

Obviously, my next console was the Nintendo Gamecube. Why? Simple; I was a Nintendo fanboy. I didn't liked the Sega Megadrive or the Sony Playstation. Though I couldn't help myself playing on my uncle's Megadrive/Playstation every time I visited him. The only games I played on the Megadrive was the Streets of Rage trilogy. Those were one of the coolest beat-em-up games I've ever played (sorry Double Dragon). I also played Tomb Raider on his Playstation, but it didn't do much for me at that time. When (I believe) my sister bought a Playstation I was thinking about getting try out a game on that system as well, just like how I got Duke Nukem 3D. So I bought Metal Gear Solid. Again, I was lucky to pick such a great game. This is probably the best Playstation game I have ever played. The movie-like feeling the game gave me was new for me and I couldn't believe how I missed out on this.

Even though the Gamecube had some fun games on it, most of them were released on the Playstation 2 and the Xbox as well. I felt like the Gamecube was more of a multiplayer console, but I really wanted to play J-RPG and wrestling games. This was when I decided to drop the fanboy act and traded my Gamecube for a PS2 with Final Fantasy X and a WWE Smackdown! game. I really enjoyed it and I realized (but I already knew that) how much mature games were on the PS2. My hunger for games didn't stopped there though. I bought a really huge black box called: The Xbox. One of the advantages the Xbox had was how you could easily mod it and play pirated games on it and stream video from your PC. I didn't cared much for XBL at that time.

During the PS2/Xbox era I also played my first real MMORPG: World of Warcraft. I played many many hours and even made it in a guild that completed all content from Molten Core up to The Dark Temple (with Naxxramas along the way). In the end, the guild disbanded before the content patch that was before Wrath of the Lich King got released. So that was a good wake up call, which made me decide to quit WoW altogether. I am currently playing a bit of Warhammer: Online now.

I am currently owning a Xbox 360, which I got since Launch including the Red Rings of Death, a Nintendo Wii and a Playstation 3. I didn't got the PS3 at launch, because I wanted to skip it since the PR at Sony was so ridiculously bad. Eventually I still got it when the price went down. To date, I don't know why I got the PS3. Right now I only use it as a DVD-player (because it's silent) and playing sport games like FIFA09 and Top Spin 3. Except for WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2009 which I got on my 360, because I've bought the last 3 SvR games on that console and it's an US game on a US console. But hey, some people don't even call it a sport, so... At the moment, I play most of my games on the 360 while my Wii is collecting more dust than my PS3!

So there you have it! This is a summary of how I started gaming! But next to gaming and wrestling, I have more interests; like reading graphic novels, reading books (by Neil Gaiman), watching tv series, watching movies and playing tennis IRL. This is all next to studying Computer Science at a University of Applied Sciences (sounds much better than in my own language) and I'm currently in the middle of an internship.

On the right you can see what my blogs will be about. I hope to post more soon when I got the time. Comments are always welcome, I'm new here so if you feel like I need to put up some pictures between the wall of text just let me know :) Other comments are welcome too of course.