Up Up Down Down

I have a confession: I’m a closet FPS player. When people ask me what games I play, it’s always “oh you know, RPGs, RTS’, MMOs, stuff like that.” But they don’t know the truth. From age 15 to 17 I played Quake 2 online, everyday, while listening to Crystal Method, I Mother Earth and Prodigy. I put those CDs in my CD-ROM, put the earphones in there, in my ears, and destroyed opponents online. When Quake 3 came out, I switched to that.

In university, I played Counter Strike. One of my most memorable experiences was a floor battle: two floors in my dormitory played against each other, culminating in a knife battle between me, as a top scorer for my floor, and the top scorer for the opponent’s floor. I won, to a loud ruckus of drunken amazement.

After that there’s a bit of a dark era. I dabbled, I tried Splinter Cell, fell in love with Mirror’s Edge for a year, but mainly didn’t like what I saw. I got Modern Warfare 3 when it came out, but it was boring.

That all changed with Battlefield 3. It’s the FPS that I didn’t even know I wanted. It has an achievement system, leveling, upgrades, and a Facebook-style page so you can mock your friends about their shitty upgrades. The built-in voice chat works great. I mainly play with my brother and a friend, and it has resulted in many hilarious situations, including head-on collisions between jeeps, landing helicopters on top of people, and driving boats into buildings. So I guess this is me, coming out of the closet about my FPS playing. Loud and proud.