Welcome

Hello, and welcome to my blog.  This being the first entry into my journal, I figure I should probably begin with a little bit about me, followed by a summary of what I intend to put into this blog series.

My name is Sarah, I'm a 41-year-old transgender woman living in Ontario, Canada, just East of Toronto.  I currently work seasonally for H&R Block during tax season and teach with their Tax Academy in the Fall, so I'm busy from September through to the end of April.  During the rest of the Spring and Summer I've been trying to upgrade my high school math and science credits because I want to go back to University to get an Engineering degree in Software Engineering.  This is not the same as a Computer Science degree with a specialization in programming because it will have all the same requirements as any other Engineering discipline and I would be able to join the Ontario and Canadian Engineering professional communities once I graduate.  This may be semantics to many, but my dad was a nuclear engineer and I'd like to be able to wear the iron ring on my little finger like my father before me.

My first experience with computers and video games was when I was about 5 years old and my dad brought home a Commodore VIC-20.  I seem to remember that we may have gotten it second-hand from a friend of his, which would make sense as this would have been around 1985 or so and by that time the Commodore 64 was the hot new computer on the market, so my dad's friend probably upgraded and we got the cast-offs.  But we didn't care.  We had a computer that you could program, we had a datasette, several game cartridges, a joystick (not Commodore brand, so this backs up the idea that it was probably second-hand), and several programs on cassette (mostly educational).  Our games were Avenger (a very good Space Invaders clone), Trashman (a Pac-Man clone where you're a garbage truck and the ghosts are flies, but otherwise faithful to the original), Omega Race (similar to Asteroids, but with several differences and I believe it had an arcade release of its own), Rat Hotel (you're a rat running around several floors of a hotel, eating cheese and avoiding the security guard while trying to take the elevators down one floor at a time down to the garage to make your escape), and Sargon II Chess (a chess game).  We also had a compilation cassette tape which included a depth charge game, a snake game, and several others.

I learned how to program in BASIC on that little VIC and tried out many type-in games from library books and a Bible Games type-in book that had versions for 4 different BASICs, although Commodore BASIC wasn't one of them and so I had to make some adjustments to get them to work properly.

We were slow to upgrade to new computers and consoles as we had a fairly large family, but my dad did eventually get permission to bring home an IBM XT computer with an amber monochrome monitor and a mouse from work when I was in grade 7, which would have been around 1992, perhaps.  So everyone else had a SNES or Genesis console and a Windows 3.0 PC compatible or a Macintosh, Amiga, Atari, or Apple IIGS, while I had monochrome DOS sub-286 computer with no printer.  My did did bring home a dot-matrix printer for me when I asked for one in grade 10 though.  And I got pretty good with Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS.  I upgraded my programming to GW-BASIC with more books from the library (particularly the Usborne books and the Micro-Adventure series as well as my favourite, "The Programmer's Guide To The Galaxy," which had a full text-adventure type-in game that was simple enough for me to completely understand.  It was also around this time that I started getting interested in Dungeons and Dragons, Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and computer roleplaying games that I could play on my friends' consoles or computers and rent from video stores.

I think my parents were a little extra wary of getting a dedicated video game console because we pretty much all had ADHD and my youngest brother in particular would get obsessively addicted to playing video games whenever we borrowed friends' NES systems.

My favourite console games at the time were the Final Fantasy series on NES and SNES, Arcana on SNES, Super Mario Bros. 1-3 as well as Super Mario World, Sonic the Hedgehog, Streets of Rage, Double Dragon, and pretty much whatever we could borrow from friends or rent from the video store.  We generally preferred Nintendo over Sega thanks to Final Fantasy and Mario, but we definitely preferred the Genesis for Sonic, fighting games, and brawler games as it tended to have better graphics.

We finally started to get up-to-date computers when Windows 95 came out and dial-up internet was starting to become affordable.  I was super excited about Windows 95 because I was one of the few computer geeks at my high school that was given the task during a lunch-hour and spare period I had following lunch, to install Windows 95 into the 4 Pentium computers in our computer lab that had a CD-ROM drive.  It was like an entirely new world of computing! So shortly after that, we were able to convince my parents to purchase a mid-range computer with a CD-ROM and 3.5" floppy drive and Windows 95.  We also got a cheap-ish Cannon bubble-jet printer for school projects.

So of course, we installed every game we could get our hands on.  A few years later, one of my siblings was able to purchase a Sony Playstation and we discovered games like Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid.  I eventually got myself a Nintendo 64 with the Donkey Kong 64 pack-in game and graphics jumper pack (in translucent Jungle Green).  I've owned a first-generation X-Box, but a later model, and a Nintendo Gamecube; I had a Gameboy Color and a Gameboy Advance SP.  But I was never an avid gamer and never kept up with the times.  I've never owned any console past the 6th generation and wished that I had chosen a Playstation 2 instead of the X-Box because I never got to play any Final Fantasy games beyond 9.

I learned to program in Visual Basic 4 (before they switched to .Net) and had a job as a programmer of Access 97 databases and simple VB4 Windows applications for a small company when I graduated from high school in the late 90s, but didn't have a strong enough work ethic and had trouble getting to work on time, with no help from my ADHD and undiagnosed autism, so I left that job before it got too problematic and transitioned to working at a church for a while, at a childcare centre for a few years, went to University for a year but ran into money problems, and eventually started doing taxes, which is what I do now.

I have a fascination with the history and development of technology as well as the evolution of video games.  My favourite games to play are Roleplaying games, Point-and-click Adventure games, some 3D Platformers, Strategy and Tactics games, and certain others that for some reason stand out to me as fun.

My goal with this blog is to begin to survey computers, consoles, and arcades chronologically through the years, playing games from each year, focusing on my preferred types of games, but also including many of the popular games or even some obscure games that I find in my lists.  My primary rule is to try to not be too OCD about it to the point that it derails the fun by trying to find an obscure title or emulate an obscure system and getting too tied up in completing the list.  As I mentioned before, I have undiagnosed autism, meaning that I've done several of the pre-diagnostic tests and quizzes multiple times and always come up with "You are very likely autistic and may benefit from seeking a professional assessment."  This conclusion is also born out by my several autistic friends who all think I display many of the characteristics of someone on the spectrum as well.  So my greatest struggle in all of this is likely to be getting too caught up in the minutiae of trying to completely cover every single game and system in the world, ever, in each variation that was ever made, etc.

Obviously, that would be impossible for me to accomplish in my lifetime even if it were my full-time job.  So I'm going to set some boundaries to try to prevent myself from spiraling out of control down the rabbit hole that is my brain:

** RULES TO PREVENT ME FROM GETTING TOO OBSESSED **

1.  The only games I NEED to play are the ones of the Roleplaying or Adventure genres, plus turn-based or real-time strategy wargames. Beyond that, I only need to play a reasonable sampling of the games available at the time with the option to always play more if I'm having fun.

2.  In all cases, if I'm having difficulty finding an emulator, game image, instructions, or other necessary supporting documentation or file, I should skip the game and can come back to it in the future if I find the needed files.

3.  For each game in the primary categories, I should attempt to beat or complete the game, if possible, before resorting to walkthroughs or guides.  If I am unable to beat the game or find it tedious after at least 6 hours of gameplay, I can decide to abandon the game and move on.  For games with a shorter gameplay, 1 hour will suffice, or 3-5 playthroughs for very short games.  The point of this rule is to give each game an honest attempt to play all the way through, while recognizing that I'm not necessarily that skilled in many areas and some games I just won't find very fun, so this gives me a minimum mark to shoot for that I consider to be reasonable, even for terrible or very difficult games, but I won't have to suffer through endless torment playing things I don't like just so I can check it off my list when I really just want to move on.

4.  For each game that I spend a significant time on, I'll write a journal entry dedicated to that game, more if warranted.  For shorter games, I can combine multiple games into a single entry.  If there are multiple games that are clones or variants of a single theme or style, I can combine them together and compare them with each other.

5.  If there are multiple versions of a game on different platforms with very little difference between versions, such as for text adventures, I don't need to play through the entire game, just enough to experience the differences in that port.

6.  I don't currently have a rating system of my own, but I feel that it would be a good idea to put my personal rating of each game I play at the end of its post.  So for now I'll use the rating system on Moby Games.  If I feel creative later on, or feel that the rating system is missing something, I can alter my rating system.

I think 6 rules are a nice number for now.  Hopefully they'll help keep me in mind of the bigger picture and enjoy myself as I go through the years of technology and video game history.