This is what the Internet used to look like when I first came here. It was a very different landscape back then. Everything was text based, even the graphics were created using only ASCII text characters.

I used to run my own Bulletin Board Service (BBS) back in those days. It was connected to a network of other computers called FidoNet. My netmail (the old word for email) address was something like augur@3:774/195.1 and I had a program called a "mail tosser" that sorted out which messages were for me, from those that were for everybody else in the network. Netmail was public back then, and everybody could read everybody else's messages, and polite manners and trust were the only things preventing it. As I say, the Internet of today is a very different landscape.

I spent a lot of time playing computer games when I was young, and some particular favorites were TradeWars, The Pit, and Falcon's Eye to name a few. These were collectively known as "door games" and were the forerunners to MMOG's. I also played a lot of D&D type adventure games, partularly the Ultima series, and Alternate Reality, which I spent many hours on mapping the levels in my school maths book. Being ruled grid pages, it was ideal for this task.

I'm not going to go back over all of the various games I have played since then, as I mentioned most of them in my first post on the NZGamer forums, and you can read them there. I just wanted to further establish my history with computer games and online gaming. My blog here on NZGamer is going to take a look at many games, old and new. I'll be looking at the current best-sellers, and some overlooked and underrated games that I feel should have done better in the reviews than they have.

I'm on my way to the Armageddon Expo in Auckland this weekend. I hope to find out more about some of the latest games out there. I saw a preview of Fallout: New Vegas the other day, and I'd love to try it out. The graphics look great. While I'm at Armageddon, I'll be taking a lot of photos and video, and maybe even some audio recordings. I'm bringing my digital camera, my MP3 voice recorder, about 5GB worth of SD cards for storage, and plenty of spare batteries, so I hope to be able to capture as much of the expo as I can digitally. I'll share lots of that content here on my new blog, so keep an eye out for me.