A not-so-brief introduction...

An interest in playing Halo online with mature (most of the time ) people.  But that's hardly the entire story.

I've always played video games.  In high school the addiction was Gran Turismo.  Before that I was the typical gaming kid, playing whatever I could get my hands on and whatever my friends were playing.  I never had a 64, and thus never really played or got good at goldeneye.  But I loved it.  I've been drawn to console FPS's since, but my college situation never resulted in more than the occaisional extended gaming match of halo.  But those were unfortunately few and far between, a couple hours here and there throughout the years never resulted in any level of skill I guess.  At the time I was playing things like Tony Hawk, grand theft auto, etc., basically single-player games.  I've always wanted to do online games, but never had the PC or console to achieve it.

My current situation, 2 years out of college, in my hometown with no friends within at least a 100 mile radius, working full time +, and having a steady 3 year + girlfriend, basically begs for online gaming as my only way for multiplayer gaming.  And while I work a lot of weekends, I can always come up with time throughout the week to play games.  I've set this as a time to return to gaming as a regular part of my schedule.

I don't regret the schedule I held to in college, not one bit.  I played games, sure, but I spent the vast majority of my time with friends, drinking heavily the first two years, working a part-time job, studying and exercising (but not in that order).  I've never stopped following gaming news, reviews, and the like, and I've always been excited about this or that.  As it went I only had time to play through one or two games a year, like Wind Waker, or GTA 3 or Vice City.  I have such an embarassing backlog of AAA games from the last generation that I need to play through, Metroid Prime, Jak 1-3, San Andreas (I'm a short way through but haven't picked it up in ages), Burnout Takedown, Timesplitters 2, Zelda OoT/MM, and plenty more that I can't recall at the moment... 

I've owned NES, Genesis, SNES, Playstation, Dreamcast, PS2 & Cube in that order.  Within the last year I've picked up everything I missed, including Sega CD, 32x (but it's missing a cord), Saturn, and Nintendo 64.  No I didn't go broke, I found some sweet garage sale deals over the summer.  Christmas 05 the girlfriend got me a DS - thanks to short game times, I actually get some action in on that baby.  I picked up a Wii on launch day, and aside from being pretty interested in it for the first month or two, I haven't turned it on for more than 5 minutes since around January.  For shame, I know, but Zelda takes setting aside a large chunk of time just to get anywhere, and the girlfriend isn't as interested in wii sports/play as I'd hoped she'd be.  I was then absorbed into Guitar Hero, which my girlfriend got me for Christmas 06.  Picked up the sequel, but have only played a few songs on medium, and I can finally say I'm comfortable with all 5 frets now, although I have to practice regularly to keep it up, and I haven't played in a while.

Last time I played Halo was at a bachelor party in September (at the end of the night, so I was pretty useless as we definitely tried to relive our college barhopping), and before that it was easily 2004.  I picked up a 360 for my birthday, just now a month ago.  I picked up Halo on my first day of the 360, but still haven't played it.  I had planned on getting a 360 for a while, so I bought games in advance when i found a good deal, and had stacked up Gears, Pinata, Crackdown, and Halo.  I haven't played Halo yet, but have had much fun with all the others, even some coop Gears.  I stumbled upon another good deal, and picked up Halo 2 and PGR3 last week.  Since then I've played a total of 51 Halo 2 matches online.  Since yesterday, I've played 21 games of the Halo 3 Beta.  It would've been much more but I was having major internet connection issues, which I later discovered to be my router's NAT.  While it's been fine for Gears coop (it can be a little rough connecting at first, but once you get it setup it stays on) and Live Arcade downloads, that doesn't involve a lot of new inbound connections, which is what drove me nuts yesterday because I though my Live connection "used to work just fine."  Guess I'm still cutting my online gaming teeth.

I plan on playing the absolute hell out of the Beta until June 10.  My goal is to have fun and  suck just a little bit less at the end.  I'm sure I'll return to Halo 2 immediately afterward to try and stem the withdrawal symptoms.

All I can say is I'm blown away by what I was missing.  When you find the right people (I was playing with some Art of War members last night) online is such a completely satisfying experience.  I feel bad for being a noob because it's like "how could I have waited to participate in this?" 

Hope to see you all online in the coming weeks & months, thanks for reading.