Crendowing
I've lost my unbanned status....I couldn't be happier :P
Posts: 2722
Registered: 01-01 |
Here goes one of my really long posts:
The first time I played DOOM was when I was in 4th grade, about a year after it came out. I went every week to this psychologist (yeah, I had some mental problems) who had the shareware version on the computer in her office which ran off of good ole' Win3.1 :) Believe me, I was lucky to get past E1M2 alive in one shot. Those few times I played it I thought it was just another cheesy shooter type game. That was also the computer I happened to first play Wolfenstein and Blake Stone on. Sadly (though I didn't think so at the time), after a couple of months I stopped seeing her and did not see it again for about 3 years.
Christmas 1997 comes along and my mom, sister, and I go to Michigan to see the family up there. Let me just say that in terms of gifts it was the worst Christmas of my life! Anyway, of the presents my Uncle Todd was a joystick for the computer which ran Win95 on it. Lo and behold, it also came with the DOOM shareware disks on it! I ended up playing it more than he did those last few days before I left.
Only about 2 days or so after we all came back to Texas (around Jan. 2 1998), my dad decided to give me a late Christmas present. He bought me 3 video games, 2 of them for regular Nintendo. The third one would uknowingly at the time make an impact on me later in life. You guessed it; it was the 32X version of DOOM. For the the first time in my life I had played the game beyond Knee-Deep in the Dead. In between that time and the next part below my friend got the SNES version, though I wasn't too impressed with it. I thought 32X version was kick ass enough, then.....
After playing that version for a few months, my dad finally got remarried and in the summer of '98 we moved out of the old mobile home. My stepmom had a computer with Win95 on it (my dad has and never will understand the importance of computers in this world; had it not been for him, my mom would have gotten a Win3.1 computer when it came out and I just might be a DOS programming wizard by now), but the DOOM significance of that one wouldn't come until later. During that summer, I discovered that my mom's newfound roomate had "something called The Ultimate DOOM" on her Mac. The week after I spent some time at the private lake she had, I finally got to play it over at her house. I almost literally creamed my jeans =) I discovered then that the 32X version was incomplete, and the music to it just swept me away (it was before I became somewhat computer literate though, so I had no idea better MIDI cards out there existed).
Though I don't remember the exact time, I do know that at some point in my 8th grade year (August 1998 - May 1999) I finally found Doomworld (I, of course, didn't become a forum goer until the summer between my freshman and sophomore years). What I was searching for was just the music to the game while killing the free time that I had in the computer class I was taking. That page came up, and those MIDIs were awesome!!!! (those computers must have had damn good sound cards on them) Other than the Roland MP2s, I have not heard any better sounding Doom MIDIs ever since!
Middle of 8th grade rolls around and I finally get DOOM 2. Now is when my stepmom's computer becomes significant. I could not stop playing it for weeks! Believe me, it upset everyone in the house except my sister (she actually played a little bit of it too). I could understand why...the computer was in my older stepsister's room! Believe it or not, that became part of the basis for me moving out of my stepmom's place and into my mom's place (sounds retarded, I know). My stepmom, bitch as she is, claimed it was not healthy for me to play that. She went ballistic over it! I just could not stand her attitude, not just about computer games, but about EVERYTHING! If you've lived with her long enough, you'll understand.
I'll conclude with this: had it not been for my discovering of DW, I might still not be as computer literate as I am today. This community opened to the doors to me discovering what really goes on the computer world and helped me understand what all the jargon meant. I bewilder a lot of people at my school today beacause of my higher knowledge (compared to their knowledge, at least). I know it sounds dumb to say a "stupid game" made a significant impact on my life, but in this case it actually did! Please don't think I'm crazy, but it actually has improved my knowledge of computers altogether! God, I feel like writing an article like the one BigD worte =)
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I've lost my mod status....I couldn't be happier :P
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03-21-02 03:44 
