Well, I've been wanting to stop lurking and write an introductory post for a while, and what better time to start now, when there will be a flood of new blogs, so if I embarrass myself it'll probably just be whisked away by the internets!

So, a little about myself. I started gaming back on a 386 and, aside from a very sensual fling with the SNES, I've pretty much been a PC loyalist ever since. Consoles are fun, but I've always liked being hands-on and spending more time with my games than is par the norm for consoles. As well, I've always been a big fan of first person shooters, and I'm not too keen on playing them with an analog stick (remember that whiny kid during the N64 007 games who would say "if only I had a mouse" - yeah, that was me). I'm also big into fighters, though, and of course you can only do that genre on arcade machines and consoles. Tekken, Soul Calibur and Guilty Gear mark my favorites (although it seems the GG series is crashing and burning, sadly).

I mentioned the appeal of being "hands-on", and by that I mean modifications. I've been experimenting with making stuff for games since Doom - with applications such as doomED and DEhacked, but only recently have I really turned it into a passion. Lately, I think I'd consider myself more of a developer than a gamer, especially so considering I spent the better portion of '06 working on a Half-Life 2 mod called Dystopia. I eagerly await the next generation of engines to become available to start playing with - CryEngine 2 and idTech5 look very juicy in particular, although I must admit the Irrational boys have done an absolutely superb job with UnrealEngine 3.0 with regards to Bioshock. It looks much, much better than Gears (although, Gears PC seems to remedy a lot of the 360 version's problems).

As well with mods, I'm pretty huge into independent games and indie communities in general, so you could understand my attraction to the D. It's about as "professionally independent" as you can get (if by "professional" you mean robots and "independent" you mean cocks, anyway).

So, now that I've started, you can probably expect me to start yapping about obscure stuff no one really cares about: that zany Carmack and his new shader tech, how Bleszinsky can develop games by simply staring suavely at a monitor - that sort of thing.