A few weeks ago, I did a post (found here) on my gaming roots, covering
the period of my childhood through the end of high school. Today I am following
up that post with one on my early college years, focusing on my transition from
being a predominantly PC gamer to a predominantly console gamer. During this
period my experience as a PC gamer reached its climax in the form of two
particular games, but also saw PC gaming fade away as the PlayStation 2 came
into my life.
The first game was Battlefield 1942, referred to hereafter as
Battlefield. I had played a few first-person shooters prior to Battlefield, but
Battlefield was the one that finally turned me into an enthusiast for the genre.
Battlefield was a World War 2 era shooter that came out back when World War 2
games were still very popular and completely changed the way I thought about
shooters. It gave you big maps, lots of vehicles and the freedom to go nuts and
see what kind of craziness you could pull off. You could play the game very
tactically and coordinate with your team to dominate the map, or you could
forget all that, load a jeep full of explosives and drive around looking for a
hapless opponent to blow up. The game rewarded experimentation and even had a
few hilarious glitches in it. I can still remember the thrill of discovering
that if you drove a tank or another large vehicle on top of an antiaircraft
gun, it would suddenly be launch high into the sky. Even though I’m not that
good at multiplayer shooters, Battlefield kept me coming back for more and I even
put in some time on the fantastic Desert Combat mod. Battlefield was the main
PC game I played during the first half of my freshman year of college, and it would
be followed by an even bigger game that brought me to the apex of my PC gaming
career.
That game was Total War Rome, referred to hereafter as just
Rome. Strategy games have long been a favorite of mine, and that combined with
my love of history came together in a perfect storm of obsession over this
game. Rome did something that I absolutely loved in that it was split into what
were effectively two games. You had the big campaign map, in which you would
manage your cities, conduct diplomacy and move your armies around, but when you
engaged in battle you would transition to a battle map. On the battle map you
would directly control your army’s individual units and fight a real-time
battle against the opposing forces. You could position and maneuver your forces
as you pleased and the game would teach you about actual battle tactics from
the era. This, combined with other subtle history lessons meant that after
awhile you found yourself strangely knowledgeable about this period of history.
I played Rome consistently for over a year, until my laptop started to have
trouble maintaining both the game and everything else on it. Even at the peak
of my time playing Rome, however, the winds of change were already blowing in
my gaming life. A new power had risen, and its name was the PlayStation 2.
Up until college I had never had a game console. What little
experience I had with console gaming came from visits to friends houses where I
got to experience a few games on the Super Nintendo and the Nintendo 64.
Console games had my interest, but with limited access to them I was never able
to develop a history with them up until my college years. When freshman year of
college came and I moved into the dorms, one of my roommates brought with him a
Nintendo 64 and a PlayStation 2. While we played the classic N64 games like
Mario Kart and GoldenEye, it was the PlayStation 2 games that really grabbed
me. Games like Medal of Honor Frontline, Tekken 5, Red Faction 2, Shadow of the
Colossus and X-Men Legends gave me a taste of what console gaming could be, and
by the end of my freshman year I knew I would be getting a PS2 of my own. As college
progressed and I began my sophomore year, I was still playing Rome on a regular
basis but I found myself more and more going to the PlayStation 2 first. It
wasn’t that I had acquired a distaste for PC gaming, I just found console
gaming worked better for me. The PlayStation 2 was easy to use, the controller
felt more natural in my hands than a keyboard, and it had its own sizable
collection of games to choose from. Console gaming also had the advantage of
being more time and cost-effective than PC gaming, as it didn’t require regular
hardware and software upgrades to play the latest and greatest games. That last
advantage was particularly big for me, as I was a college student who wanted to
play a lot of games but also needed to minimize the cost of my pastime. Little
by little, the PlayStation 2 became my gaming machine of choice, and with that,
my era of PC gaming came to a close.
Though it is now long gone, my time in college as a
predominantly PC gamer was a glorious era, one that I still remember fondly. I
still have the game boxes and CDs for Battlefield and Rome sitting at my desk,
and from time to time I’ll pick them up and reminisce over the college days and
how much I enjoyed playing those games. To give you an idea of their lasting
influence, the Battlefield series of games are still my favorite first person
shooter games and Rome remains my favorite strategy videogame of all time. I
might one day get a nice desktop PC and go back to PC gaming, but even if I do,
I’m not sure my experience could ever surpass those heady college days when I
felt like I was playing the best games ever.