Feel free to pick and choose where you want to read - I aspire to have every article be optional, including this one.
Who am I?
Hello. I'm Birdhouse Bryan. I like videogames.
... I can't help but feel like this is such a reductionist statement to who I am, but it's about as true as you can get. I'd argue it's an understatement, personally. I am an autistic adult in his late 20s who was self-diagnosed just within the last couple of years. And as it turns out, I didn't get the trains autism or the trucks autism. I got the videogames autism.
And birds. I really like birds too.
Anyways, videogames have always fascinated me my whole life, ever since I was a toddler. My siblings are 80s babies, and so I inherited a lot of their stuff, including the videogames. In my childhood household, I was lucky enough to grow up familiar with the NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, N64, PS1, GameCube and PS2. My PC gaming experience was limited to what my dad would allow on the family computer, which wasn't much. The coolest videogames I played were either Fate on WildTangent (a 2005 Diablo clone that I'd love to revisit one day) and the emulators my brother showed me how to set up.
In High School, I inherited a laptop from my late Aunt whom I had a very close relationship with. That laptop opened me to more PC gaming options. I remember playing DOOM for the first time on it, as well as Ghost Recon, STALKER, and Half Life.
I met the coolest woman on Earth in highschool and married her as soon as possible. She has supported me and my hobby for so many years, and I do my best to support her myself where I can. In my writings here, I'd like it to be known that she comes first, priority one over all else. I spend a majority of my free time in her company, and my videogame addiction largely takes a backseat.
I wouldn't have it any other way.
A few years after we graduated, she helped me build my own home PC and a large majority of my game time has been on it, with some minor exceptions.
So, yeah, that's a large chunk of my background videogame experience.
Why is this important?
See, I'm just like the bad guy in Ratatouille - I don't like games. I LOVE them. I love everything about them - the design, the creativity, the history. And I have spent a VERY large portion of my adult life so far "catching up" to the games I missed - either from lack of resources, knowledge, or equipment, or perhaps the fact I hadn't been born yet.
As a result, I am MUCH more familiar with early games than later ones. And when a series hooks me or I get interested in a recent game, I get determined to experience the WHOLE of the content available. Often this results in burn-out before I even get to the game I actually wanted to play in the first place.
I tried to get more into JRPGs once - an illusive genre for me, who has trouble keeping my attention span focused on one game for over several dozens of hours. I started with Final Fantasy on NES (specifically, I "cheated" and played the remake on GBA) and got about halfway through Final Fantasy 3 before giving up. I've tried skipping to the later games, but always felt like I was "missing out" on the in-jokes and history the franchise has, and eventually would drop the game.
One of my close friends got me into the Yakuza series right as Yakuza 6 came out. Starting with Yakuza 0, I managed to get through the first act of Yakuza 5 before giving up. I love this series, but I played way too much of it at once.
I can become OBSESSIVE about a game. While playing something, I will hunt down every last tidbit of trivia about the game's development, the technology used to create it, the games the devs took inspiration from - a sort of view into the "genealogy" of a game. After all, most good ideas don't come from absolutely nothing.
You get it, I love videogames. So why the blog?
After soaking up this much information, I tend to spew everything all over my close friends. Some have taken interest in some of the games I play, and other rooms tend to have me dictating to a void. I don't blame em - I tend to talk A LOT about whatever particular game I'm playing.
So, by gathering all of my thoughts and ideas and observations in an organized blog, my friends can pick and choose what games to read about and I might find others who want to have a discussion about the game as well.
Feel free to pick and choose where you want to read - I aspire to have every article be optional, including this one. (Actually, that might be better to say at the top of this. There we go, nothing my good friends CTRL, C and P can't handle.)
I'm going to try to keep the place clean and organized - I'll properly label and tag each article based on the game played, the franchise it's a part of, or if the article is a part of a series I'm writing. Should I make any references to past articles, I'll hyperlink them appropriately in the current article.
Right now there is no dedicated schedule or format - this is basically me vomiting my thoughts into a readable format. I may upload more than once per day, or there may be weeks between updates. It depends on my mood and personal schedule.
Anyways, this is the end of the introduction. If you've read this far, why?
Also thanks.
But still why?
I promise I'll write about more interesting stuff next time.
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