About Doug

This is shamelessly copied from 85isnotaverage.co.uk simply because I couldn’t be bothered to write a seperate one. Enjoy.

I began my gaming on a ZX Spectrum, which remained my only window into the world of computers about 1994. The speccy and I spent a long time together. It introduced me to games, programming, electric shocks and fire. Good time, but they couldn’t last forever. It was the transitional period between primary school and secondary school, and after a lot of nagging at my parents, it was time to get a cheap Miggy and double my bits.

Around 1996, having used PCs for programming and some gaming (network Doom over IPX) at school, I manged to scroung a 386 off my uncle. This then turned into a 486, then a P60 (which died, thanks to Escom), a P90, and then a P133, P200. All of which were using unaccelerated 3D graphics. Many hours were spent with these faithful workhorses, coding, listening to mp3’s I’d downloaded at school, and spanned across 3 floppies, and playing Quakeworld on Wireplay, when it was good, and 5p a minute.

This brings us up to about 2000. From here on I was a grown up and used the majority of my newly obtained student loan to buy an AMD Athlon 700, and Voodoo 3. Now I was cooking with gas, or rather on a hotplate in the shitty kitchen in the Elliot student halls at UKC. Many late nights of Counter-Strike later, it occured to me that CS was actually quite boring, even though I was pretty good at it.

During this whole time I had only really played on other peoples consoles, but now, living with some drunk mates in a house in town, it was time I got my console-ing on. Over the following 5 years, brining us up to now, I have ammased a fair amount of kit, and played a fair amount of console games. Now I am a professional, in the industry which I hoped I would end up in, and have discovered that I both love and hate it, and am in the possition I always wanted to be in, way back in the early nineties, and able to buy pretty much any game system and game I want. Yet, I still go back and play a few ‘old’ games, on ancient systems.

Why? A lot of recent stuff is shit.

Computer/Game systems I own:

8 bit micros:

ZX81
ZX Spectrum (all varieties)
Commodore 128

16 bit micros:

Amiga 500+ (wb2)
Sinclair QL

8 bit consoles:

SEGA Game Gear
SEGA Master System (all varieties)
Nintendo Gameboy (original)

16 bit (and above) consoles:

SEGA Megadrive/Genesis (all varieties/regions)
SEGA Dreamcast
Nintendo SNES
Nintendo 64
Sony PStwo
Sony PSP (JAP 1.5)
Microsoft XBox
Microsoft XBox360 Premium

Current PC tub specs:

Athlon XP2600+@3200
2gb Crucial ddr333
ATI 9800
600gb sata ncq storage

The games I own number too large to count, however I will just name a few that I consider in my top 20, but in no real order:

  • SSX - PS2 (launch title)
  • Geometry Wars Evolved - 360 (live arcade)
  • Chaos: Battle of the Wizards - Speccy
  • God of War - PS2
  • Battlefield 2 - PC
  • Transport Tycoon - PC
  • Road Rash - Megadrive
  • PGR2 - XBox
  • GT4 - PS2
  • 18 Wheeler - DC
  • Super Monkey Ball - GC
  • Streets of Rage - Megadrive
  • Starfox - SNES
  • Metal Gear Acid - PSP
  • Shadow of Colossus - PS2
  • Rick Dangerous 1/2 - Speccy
  • Unreal Tournament 1/2k3/2k4 - PC
  • Stunt GP - DC
  • Katamari Damacy - PS2
  • Pilot Wings 64 - N64
  • Call of Duty 2 - 360
  • Flashback - Megadrive/Miggy/PC (all incarnations are equally good)
  • Titan Quest - PC

Alright so more than 20.