Latest weekly Insing column is "mrbrown and the hadoken"
Excerpt:
I am the oldest person in my office. With the average age of my colleagues at 25, I am an old fart by their standards. This also means that when we play computer games, I am not as good as they are.That's right. I am hiding behind my age when it comes to computer and console games. How else am I going to explain my level of ‘suckage’ when I play with them?
When I say we game in the office, I mean that the office is a working place by day, and is like a LAN Gaming shop by night. The computers are networked for a reason, and that reason is DOTA and Battlefield.
We also have a PS3, PS2, Xbox, Xbox360 hooked up to a big-screen TV, and pretty much everyone else (except me) has a PSP and/or Nintendo DS Lite (or newer).
It is like a giant toy store, this office of ours. Hey, we have writers, artists and a photographer/videographer under one roof, and creative people need to play, ok?
Every day, someone will either buy a new game or we'd be gathering around someone's computer to watch some HD trailer of an upcoming title. If a game looks promising for LAN-based play, the gang will run out and buy a few copies so that we can kill each other on the network.
Sometimes we get lemons. I still have a pristine original copy of Hellgate: London sitting on my shelf. The company that developed this multiplayer role-playing game went under and it is now only played in Korea where a Korean company continues to develop for it. Without game servers, if you installed the game on your PC, it will be in gaming purgatory, floating in some limbo, I am sure. (cont'd)