MrCHUPON

Hello ladies. I’m the “Editor in Chief” of this here little site. For a short time, I also freelanced for Gamespot.com, where I was better known as the off-site whipping boy.

My first videogame experience is too far back to remember, so I guess I’ll start with the first system my family owned — the Commodore 64 computer. Ms. Pac-Man ruled my day, since I could never get to the end of the first level in PaperBoy. My sister’s addiction to Arkanoid in the arcades (I wasn’t a junkie because I sucked at it compared to her) prompted us to get this Break-Out clone called Block Buster. It kicked much a$$ and I miss it oh so much.

All of my friends, of course, were playing Nintendo. I had only caught glimpses of it at friends’ houses, but Super Mario Bros. and — believe it or not — 3-D Worldrunner were the games that made me wish for the gray box. I guess it was one random morning in second grade (1988), before school, when I saw that huge black cardboard box with the Nintendo label on the outside and the goodies on the inside sitting in front of our TV, thanks to a generous family friend. Thanks, David Chang!

The NES was all my world required for sustenance… for a while. In the middle of my enjoying Super Mario Bros. 3, an undisputable classic, Sega debuted the Genesis, and with all the Nintendon’t marketing came the hatred against this who-the-hell-do-they-think-they-are “poseur”. (I was nine, and I knew no better!) So when I realized that the arcade bliss known only as Golden Axe was made by Sega and wouldn’t be a NES game, I panicked. Fortunately, Sega had this deal where they made PC games, so my uncle … um … gave me a “copy” of the MS-DOS version. Oh the merriment… and the subsequent rekindling of my affection for the computer game.

It was maybe two years later, about the same time I started on my unhealthy SNES addiction streak, when Wolfenstein 3D hit me. It hit me hard. I was in a stationery store, when I saw a bin littered with $5 games. Wolfenstein or Duke Nukem? Both sounded good, but my underdeveloped brain went for the 3D in the title. Looking back, I think I made the better of the two choices. Here it was, the next generation of gaming. The ascension of Doom only caused my drool to thicken.

Even with the 3D generation rapidly approaching, I clung to my SNES until my own paychecks during college afforded me my own Playstation. Heh, great, only two and a half years late. But at $100, it was a bargain. The swath of RPGs would come… and go. So late in the 32-bit game, already the Dreamcast was launching, the PS2 was in the works, and the Gamecube and Xbox had been announced. Eventually, I would come to own all four, casting off the fanboy shackles that limited my gaming experience. Four years later, I suckered myself into owning all consoles–and portables–from the major gaming powerhouses…again.

And that’s where I stand today. My backlog is unbelievably long, with titles that now reach as far back as the NES days thanks to downloadble services such as Nintendo’s Virtual Console on Wii. Meanwhile, current-generation titles on Xbox 360, Wii and Playstation 3 all order me to pay them attention. It’s the sad truth of getting older, fatter, and balder.