Hey 
I'm post-midlife (as usually understood…), so I hope you don't mind me gatecrashing.
I started gaming in the local pub back in the '70s on the Space Invaders machine, and then went on to go halves with my mate on a PET computer which we paid £600 for (before most of you were born, I guess!) in order to save on the 10ps we were shoving into the machine (which shows how much we were playing… oh, and we had to keep our place on the machine by buying pints, a sacrifice that we had to endure somehow…)
My career is in recording studios (and eventually, we persuaded t'management that we needed a Space Invaders machine in the Lounge in order to keep those short-attention-span beat combos to keep focussed 
), but through that I was introduced to the editor of a Computing magazine, and then managed to get a gig writing articles, and reviewing software (aka getting loadsa free stuff, nice). Eventually, I was given a weekly column which I somehow managed to spin out for about ten years. Along the way, I also was asked to write three books on programming games for the ZX-81 (which sold about 40k copies, even nicer), the Atari ST and the Sinclair QL (what a great machine, pity it only lasted about 6 months…)
I'm still as keen on gaming, even though I collected my buss pass a coupla years ago. While most guys my age are pottering in the garden (well, I do that sometimes myself) I'm usually showing 14-year-old Hawaiians how to look at their own asses 
Well, to be honest, even with a 40Gig connection, I still only rarely get above the middle of the kill-list, but I'm happy with that.
I'm a PC owner, don't own a console except for the iPod, on which I have several dozen games (ANgry Birds of course and PlantsvZombies: Infinity Blade is impressive but ultimately boring, there's no progression) – this week, the new PC games I'm playing include Homefront, Witcher 2, Dungeon Seige 3 and D&D: Daggerdale (which got terrible reviews, but which I'm really enjoying, despite it having the worst Save feature I've ever seen: when you Save, there is no Load Game option… rather, when you Die, you get returned to the start of the level with all your Quest progress re-set to Zero, but with all the gold and loot that you had at the Save point… huh?? If you that way inclined, you just go round and round collecting stuff, dying, collecting more stuff etc.
)
At the same time, I have a core list which I return to between all the new stuff, which is heavy on the FPS side and includes the Battlefield series, Planetside (prob the best game I've played as far as the social side is concerned but sadly very underpopulated now..) Medal of Honour and Call of Duty (MoH more than CoD) – but Rift is also in there, as are several racing games like Dirt 3 and Trackmania. I persevered with WoW for a couple of years, but while I remained at Lvl 20-ish, all the people I started playing with got to 70 very quickly and left me behind boo-hoo you bastards. I finished when I realised they were talking in Martian 
I downloaded the latest podcast this morning onto the iPod, and listened while I walked into town – got a few odd looks when I burst out laughing every few yards, thanks guys it was hilarious!
So, thanks for having me, hope to catch up with you in-game somewhere…
Silvakilla
Forum
