NoXion

Greetings fellow Doomers!

I'm a 27 year old Brit who's been playing computer games since I was a nipper. The very first computer I used was my Mum's Amiga, on which I used to play New Zealand Story and Lemmings (although I remember that I kind of sucked at both games and often asked my Mum to play them for me), and some other games which escape my memory. Skip forward a few years and I get a Windows 95 machine for Crimbo. On that machine an older friend of mine introduced me to Duke Nukem 3D and with it, the first-person shooter genre. I was hooked! DN3D became my obsession, along with Dungeon Keeper and Lemmings Paintball (anyone remember that?).

Then came my second computer, an XP machine. A friend of my parents gave me a disk for a game called Half-Life. My computer could barely run it in software rendering mode, but it became my new obsession in spite of this. It was with this game that I first learned to play with a mouse and keyboard; on Duke Nukem I had just used the keyboard. It was tricky at first, but it set me on the road to becoming a truly skilled player of the FPS genre. At some point I scraped together the money to buy a new graphics card rather than using the crappy chipset that came with the motherboard, which greatly enhanced my gaming experience. Half-Life introduced me to game modding and thus my HL obsession became manifested in the form of me spending as many of my spare hours as possible playing Sven-Coop online. With my improved graphics capability I could play a much wider range of games, enabling me to discover and experience such gems as Quake II and Unreal Tournament.

For years I happily tooled around with HL+mods and UT99+mutators, then Half-Life 2 came out and turned out to be a worthy addition to my personal gaming canon. I'd certainly heard of DooM and its reputation, and had even played it on occasion, but having got used to a mouse and keyboard the control system felt awkward and also having advanced onto my third and current computer, compatibility issues were an obstacle.

Then I discovered source ports like ZDoom and gzDoom.

And just like that, the scales fell from my eyes. HD resolution! 360 degree mouse aiming! Easy to use and a vast repository of custom levels and mods! I now consider myself well and truly DooMed. It took me long enough!

So here is my situation at present: aside from classic Doom, the first Doom mod to catch my eye was Aeons of Death, followed by Brutal Doom and then Russian Overkill. I also found a Wolfenstein 3D total conversion which made me wonder why I didn't discover the game earlier, like with Doom. I also enjoy playing Synergy, a HL2 coop mod.

That's a little story about how I came to this forum. There's a lot of stuff I've left out, like my experiences with handhelds (mainly Pokemon Red+Blue on the Gameboy Colour) and consoles (many evenings spent playing splitscreen games with friends and flatmates), and the times I spent playing strategy games until stupid o'clock, but I think this post is long enough already!