RAM OK, ROM OK

Videogames are great. I started, like a lot of kids of my generation, with 8 bit games and then graduated to pc games. I have never really owned a console, first because I couldn't afford it and later because I became a proponent of pc master race. Games like all media have impact on you. One of my favourite games of all time is Half-life. The protagonist of this game is a PhD in Physics. It was one of the small reasons I wanted to do PhD. When the time came I wanted to a PhD in Medical Physiology, but then later as my life circumstances changed, I switched to Hospital Administration. There are countless games that people are nostalgic about and you can find your tribe by shared passion of those games. Like Quake 3 Arena, Tribes 2 and Unreal Tournament. I like freestyle motocross and my first exposure to motocross was Motocross Madness the game. Videogames too are a form of storytelling, just an interactive form of storytelling. You play games like Call of Duty and you get exposed to war and espionage and their technical intricacies. I remember back in 2004 I used to play Age of Empires 2 with my friends on a dialup LAN. Age of Empires is my favourite strategy franchise, though I'm thinking of giving Civilization a try too. My favourite games? Half-life, Age of Empires, Motocross Madness, multiplayers like Tribes 2, Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament 2004 and bunch of small games like Neighbours From Hell and Monekey Brains. Oh and how can one forget DOS games like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and countless others. I still remember the disappointment went BioMenace won't run on my PC. I'm a big fan of Max Payne series and it was my exposure to the noir genre. When I stopped playing I was regularly playing San Andreas. It was back in 2008 and then there was radio silence as far as gaming was concerned in my life while my engineering college friends got exposed to the drug called Counter Strike. I never really played Counter Strike in a way they played so couldn't really develop the taste for it though Counter Strike itself evolved from Half-life. It was in 2016 that I decided to see what was going on in gaming world and downloaded Steam, played some old games on my not capable laptop and later got myself a gaming laptop for the shame of building a gaming rig being a grown up. The first thing I did is buying all the games I missed during my hiatus from gaming. I don't play much still, but I have all the games that I wanted to own since childhood and the ones I missed out on from 2008-2016. Games, like comics, expose you to new worlds and that's why they are important. I find it funny that I, when I was in 12th used to click centerfolds for models in Playboy The Mansion, I spent a lot of time in that game and it was based on The Sims. I like peaceful games like The Sims and have spent countless hours during my childhood playing Zoo Tycoon, building my Zoo. Games like Assasin's Creed take you to historical settings, you can explore feudal Japan in Ghost of Tsushima, you can explore countless historical as well as futuristic worlds through games and I find that it's great for me if I want to continue writing. I'm not as excited about gaming as I was in my childhood and teens but I collect games and see them as an opportunity for exploring and accessing new worlds. Games allow you to do things that you wouldn't do in real life, I mean you won't run over pedestrians and beat up prostitutes in real life like you do in GTA.