## 01 ...and My Own history of Gamer

Last time I told you about what I'm doing as a contributor to UVList. But it's also a journey into my own memories as a gamer and the different periods of my life when I played with a computer or a console. I'm still adding new lines to my own database, and now with a new date: When I started playing this or that game. Sometimes it's the same year the game was released, but often it's very different. I now see three different periods!

The first period is from the end of the 70's to the beginning of the 90's. I was young, a teenager or a very young adult and I played at home or at a friend's house, everything that was released on Amstrad CPC, PC EGA, Amiga and sometimes Arcade. It's hundreds of games, and although I still loved racing games, it was the golden era of platformers, run and gun and beat'em up games. The RPGs were often dungeon crawlers and I spent hours on Bard's Tale or Dungeon Master... or Bloodwych. And in my early gaming years it was Game and Watch. So obviously they were very different games. I was not very interested in those arcade classics like Pong, Pacman, Space Invaders... But sometimes there were clones on my beloved CPC 6128. I was not a retro gamer at all, more interested in beautiful graphics and performance, great 8bit music and the tracker music of the Amiga demos.

After that, I was without my own computer for a while, but with my friends... But I didn't see the same friends for a few years. It was at the end of the 90's that I became a console gamer with one of my friends with the 1st Playstation. It was the beginning of "3D" and polygons. I became a fan of Japanese RPGs, especially the Final Fantasy licence. But now the racing games were really realistic with the Gran Turismo saga. It was now my favourite genre of games and I was bored with platformers and everything like my previous years. Not my friends... so I was able to see the evolution of these genres of games without buying and playing a lot.

Shortly after that I bought my first PC and soon after that my first 3D graphics card. The revolution of the time was the first-person shooter, with Doom, Descent, Hexen and soon after Quake. I had one of my first summer jobs in a computer service and they were playing the Quake demo. The internet came soon after and a few years later with ADSL the world was open to gamers. My PC years as a multiplayer gamer were ON! Very focused on FPS like Unreal Tournament, Battlefield 42 and soon with colleagues and friends during the nights. I didn't play many games because I played the most played games. And the racing games and console games were sometimes abandoned. Except for Colin McRae Rally 2.0 with a time challenge with colleagues.

It was during this time that I discovered my PC's ability to emulate games and old consoles. There were no arcade games in my town, so I could finally play the games I'd read about in magazines. I played a lot of MAME games and also NeoGeo games, because the NeoGeo was called "the Rolls of consoles" during my teenage years. It was a time of run and gun again, platformers, fighting and beat em up games like Street Fighter, Samurai Showdown, Metal Slug, Final Fight, ... I was now a retrogamer in the 2000s. And soon after that, I started playing SNES games that I hadn't been able to play before.

But the revolution was the arrival of the Game Boy Advance. I got one and my wife got hers. With the SP and the cable, you could play one against the other. All the SNES hits were back in my pocket and in my hand. Advance Wars, Final Fantasy Tactics and all the JRPGs were back, but it wasn't retrogaming. I went to the Paris Games Show several times with my wife to play all the games, all the consoles. We had everything at home: PS2 and then PS3, XBox and Xbox 360, Gamecube, Wii... And then I became a boring adult. I was tired when I came home from work and I didn't play with the consoles. I didn't play multiplayer and FPS... The dust gradually settled on these consoles, but not on handheld consoles.

I was more of a casual gamer with the Nintendo DS. I was able to hack some games and I played and tested a lot of games on the DSLite, but it was a fragile console (I had 3 of them...and still have my Japanese import). And it was the same with smartphones, I always had a game in my pocket on the train to work.

And now I'm back to retrogaming with smartphones, my computer and a handheld console. Looking at the statistics, I've played a lot of games from the 80s, but the period I've played the most is the 2000s. And now, after more than 500 different games and 50 completed ones, I'm still curious, but not about the same things as when I was a teenager. I don't care about technical parts, performance, etc. Gameplay and enjoyment are more important to me than scores and records. Maybe that's why I've never liked the game where stress is the main thing, like infiltration games for example. But I don't want to know what kind of gamer I'll be when I'm 70...

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