Welcome to My Blog!

My name's Abe.

I like video games.

I enjoy a lot of other stuff, too. Cake (screw you, GLaDOS), chocolate, movies, music, daily news and events. But mostly games. Sometimes I'll post a lot. Sometimes I might let weeks lapse between posts. I expect I'll post a little bit of everything here.

But still, games. I guess it's best to give my gaming history.

I loved hanging out in arcades when I was a kid. No surprise that I play a lot of video games now, I guess. Though it's taken me a while to get here (I'm over 30). My first game was Quake 2, which I first played in 2002. Then I tried out Age of Empires II (with the Conqueror's Expansion), and played nothing else for a while. Next up was the Total War series. The first Medieval Total War was a great companion; I have no estimate of the number of hours I whiled away while dealing with yet another resurgent Papacy. Then Rome Total War launched, and I played a bit of that. Probably my most-played title was Medieval II Total War. I really got into the whole mod scene. I tried out one mod after another, never really playing them much, but awed at the amount of variety.

And that takes me to 2013. I had a lot of events happening in my life, and contracted pneumonia in February of that year. A lot of things changed. I decided to explore more things that I might enjoy, instead of constantly trying to please other people. I discovered YouTube "let's play" videos of people playing video games. One of the first games I started to observe was a play-through of an old game called Assassin's Creed. The game plus its sequel was cheap on Amazon, so I bought it.

So it began.

Playing games started as a distraction. It was still a new experience to me, so every time Al-tair made a jump I was slightly elated. Every time he lost a little bit of sync, my hands would scrabble around my keyboard, desperately trying to do better. Still a distraction. Then I played Alan Wake. Now, Alan Wake has its limitations, as anyone who has played it will know. But I never knew that games could be like that. That they could have gripping stories, beautiful scenes, and moving characters. Even now that I have played many more games and realized that Alan Wake has a linear story-line and repetitive combat, it still holds a special place for me.

From there, it was a hop and a skip to more games of even greater caliber. The Assassin's Creed franchise has some superb moments (Black Flag is one of my favorite games). The Batman Arkham series is forever installed on whatever computer I am currently using. So is the Mass Effect trilogy (almost have a maxed manifest in Mass Effect 3 multiplayer). Dragon Age Origins, The Witcher, Tomb Raider (2013), Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Red Faction: Guerrilla, Saints Row. The list goes on and on.

Point is, I was late to gaming. Nearly two years on, there are still so many games I haven't played, and so many games that I want to revisit. For video gaming, I think we live in a great time. Games can be better than ever, with better graphics than ever, with better voice actors than ever. Hardware companies are making new strides in all phases of computers - more processing power for less electricity, great value-for-money computers that are easy to build yourself. Even as duplicity, corruption and strife run rampant in the societies of the world, there has never been a better time to play video games.

I'm starting this blog because there is more that I want to say than can be fit into a single game review. And though video games and the tech required to play them remain primary, I expect to be sharing and commenting on a number of issues and events that happen in the world as well.

So, welcome to Abe's Mission Control! Glad to have you aboard.