My Road to WOW

Jaded Alt did a post last week about what their road to WOW was and I thought I would give it a whirl myself.

I can remember the first video game I ever remember seeing, it had a plumber and he kept running to his right to try to save a princess. Yes Super Mario Bros. was the first video game I remember ever seeing when Nintendo first came out my cousin got one for Christmas which was at our house that year and we hooked it up and the whole family squished goombas and picked flowers for a couple hours. I myself didn't get a Nintendo until I bought one myself which by that time my cousin had gotten his genesis and they had gotten the Sega channel but thats neither here nor there. My first video game machine was a Commodore 64. It had a place to stick cartridges in the back and a disk drive. I had like 7-8 games I think but the ones that got the most play were Centipede because my Mom was good at it and I played a very deep RPG called Mars Saga. You could create all kinds of characters and you walked around maps exploring areas and you would combat random groups of bad guys, It also used a casino as a way to help you make money in game (I think that's why I don't like slot machines because I used to play the slots in that game all the time) If all of your group died you basically had to start over and begin from scratch it was kind of hardcore You had all kinds of skills and equipment and weapons. It was a really entertaining game and I understand now why I have always liked RPG's so much after getting into that game so much. Eventually between my cousin's my own and the neighbor I played a bunch of Nintendo games Castlevania, Legend of Zelda, Metal Gear, Super Mario Bros 3 being the most memorable, and I played a ton of Tetris, don't know why just really liked it.

When we got a PC I played a couple of strategy games I think came from the same company Masters of Orion and Masters of Magic which were very similar to original Warcraft in that they were build up groups of troops and buildings and go clear the map of everyone else type of games. They did have alot more race options and there was even diplomatic options, but it usually came down to destruction. I don't really remember too much about them actually, although I did play them quite a bit. A couple of my friends had Warcraft 2 and Starcraft so I played them a little bit but mostly just custom modes. When I moved out to go to college I really wasn't playing any video games, my roommate had Warcraft 2 and would make custom maps as hard as he could and see how long it took me to beat them but that was really rare. But my other roommate had a friend who needed a place to crash for a couple weeks and he brought his PlayStation over with him and had Final Fantasy 7. Now this was a totally new experince for me. I saw that first cutscene in FF7 and I was blown away. Well I was officially turned back into a video game junky at that point. I bought a used PlayStation and started accumulating games as I could afford them. I must have put in over 300 some hours on FF7 that game was on so much at my house that even still a bunch of my friends know the music you hear after winning a battle (dunna duh na dun dun-na, either you know what I mean or you now think I'm a crazy person). I was also a huge fan of Resident Evil 2, Castlevania Symphony of the Night and Gran Turismo. I ended up playing a ton of FF8 through FF10. I was a huge Final Fantasy geek. Moving up the video game food chain I had preordered my PS2 and got it right away although I ended up going through 2 of them before it was all said and done (I never thought of it before but that means I had more of those break than Xbox 360's which I've only had one Red Ring Of Death on). I actually ended up having an Xbox, a PS2 and a Gamecube (hey mariokart and super smash bros were awesome party games and were 4 player right out of the box, and well everybody I knew had Halo so if I wanted to join in the fun I had to get it, I think I had 3 Xbox games total compared to the 30-40 games on PS2) like I said junky. I think I tried almost every RPG that came out on PS2, but I gave up on Final Fantasy when 11 came out. I just didn't think it was right to pay a monthly fee to play a video game (hahaha that sure changed) Well when it was time to decide what was next I sold all three of those systems on Ebay to pay for my Xbox 360 and although now all I have it for is to watch instant Netflix I still think I made the right call (I sure am glad I didn't buy one of those HD-DVD addons though, lol, I was waiting that out to see who won). Well I guess that about gets me to my WOW story.

I had known a few of my friends who played WOW over the years and I had watched them play a bit and I never really thought I would like it the graphics didn't impress and I had become such a console fanatic that all those buttons and keyboard shortcuts just looked like too much work. Well my neighbor (who coincidentally was my also my roommate back when I was introduced to the PS) had gotten talked into doing the free trial by one of our friends and was having fun and a bunch of our friends were all playing together leveling up and stuff so he was like just do the free trial if you don't like it just quit. Well I thought alright I can handle a free trial so I loaded it up and this was about a month after TBC came out and I started an alliance pally (which was probably a good thing looking back as they have so few buttons to push as you level up) on the server they were all on and well of course got really into it, the on rails design of the quests and the constant reinforcement you get from leveling up was really fun and having people to hang out with and talk to on vent while we played was really cool. What got me into the WOW bloggosphere actually was looking something up on Thottbot and not finding it so I googled it and found WowInsider (WOW.com now) All of the sudden I was hooked and started reading it everyday and when BRK said he had his own blog I started reading it too well then I started reading a ton of different blogs and now I have people who actually read my little blog about WOW. It seems so weird and I never could have predicted it but here I am and I don't see the end in sight anytime soon.
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K Out!