Self Similar is one of my current online aliases, and what I’ll be posting to this site under. A tiny bit more about me: I’m from the southeast of the USA, though I’ve lived in the more notable city of Seattle, WA for several years now. I work in corporate information technology and have spent most of my career as a jack of all trades “generalist” sysadmin, with a brief stint as a programmer, and currently work as an enterprise network engineer. Computers are a big part of my life, having spent a massive chunk of my younger years hanging on BBSes and IRC, gaming, programming, and often up to no good.
My first computer (and gaming console, if you will) was a Commodore Vic-20 followed soon enough after by the immortal Nintendo Entertainment System. I was obsessed, literally obsessed, with PC gaming of all types for a long time and eventually wound up getting a sweet, top o’ the line 486SX/33 PC. While disappointed that I didn’t get an Amiga, I soon immersed myself in all PC gaming had to offer. Here I fell in love with point and click adventure games, text based games including BBS door games, and some of the first exalted FPS games such as Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. Of course I also played my fair share of sims, strategy games, and RPGs as well.
I somehow almost completely missed the legendary fourth generation of consoles around this time but I caught back up with a Nintendo 64 when the next generation hit. I pretty much lost touch with PC gaming for a while, making only occasional excursions into new games while also sometimes replaying my old ones. Sometime in 2002 I built a new PC with gaming in mind and have been back on the wagon ever since.
I’ll go into a lot more detail about my gaming past in the “Ancient History” section of this blog. Speaking of which…
Posts should be divided into one or more of the following topical categories:
Ancient History – This is where I stash the numerous stories about my gaming history that I’m inspired to relay for one reason or another. My favorite games and biggest influences, tales of long dead gaming clans and communities, crazy online encounters, that kind of thing. I’ll also dual post reviews of vintage games that I have some history with to this area. Sort of a biographical area in some respects.
Game Logs – This mostly consists of impressions, though not full reviews, of games I’m playing at the moment, particularly newly released games. These were originally intended to be written in the form of frequent “what I played last night and what went on” journal style posts, though they quickly devolved into much less regular posts summarizing entire games, sometimes multiple games, at a time. Somewhat of a catch-all, which I suppose makes it barely an upgrade from the dreaded Rambling category.
Gaming News – Every now and then I might be inspired to jump on my soapbox and give my opinion on a gaming news piece that catches my eye. It goes here. You won’t see a ton here though, there are plenty of news sites out there for that kind of thing.
Rambling – General thoughts, impressions, observations, and opinions that are too broad to throw in one of these other categories. Rambling posts also sometimes wander aimlessly through multiple subjects. This is also something of an “unsorted” category, where I share share interesting links, videos, memes, etc. I even posted some book reviews here recently. *shrug*
Retro Reviews – No silly name for this one. Reviews and retrospectives of games, expansion packs, patches, hardware, whatever. My long form reviews tend to be more informative overviews with a bit of opinion thrown in than simple judgments. I’m a big retro gamer, so I’ve mostly dedicated this section to vintage games, which is where the “retro” part comes in.
Speculation – A more accurate term for previews, no? I doubt I’ll post too much in here as I try not to pass judgment about games too much until they’ve been released, that, and there’s relatively little in the way of new games that I get excited over in advance these days. Still, occasionally I get caught up in the hype.
Story Time – Hamming it up with ridiculous in character game journals, both serious and not so serious, and other more entertaining content.
Now, before anyone feels the need to point it out, yes, I do suck at writing, with a big goal of this site being to simply get some practice in. I actually love to write and am constantly trying to improve, developing bad habits into good ones, and experiment with different styles. Although I’ll try to keep typos to a minimum, my ADHD pretty much guarantees I’ll make some pretty egregious ones. More importantly, please excuse all of the heinously offensive grammatical errors I constantly make. That said, I fully appreciate corrections and other pointers in the comments!
Around the time I started this blog I’d noticed that it was sometimes hard to find actual gameplay screenshots with the GUI and all of that good stuff around the web and I wanted to do my bit to help others looking for them out, so one of my only other goals with this site is to post a lot of pictures. More specifically I’ll attempt to post self-created full size, unedited gameplay screenshots whenever appropriate. Hello to anyone who found me using Google Images!