Monday, 14 May 2012
Monday, 7 May 2012
Computers in my Life - Nerd from Birth - Part 5
About time I did the next one in this series.
University of course for me would be filled with computers and consoles. I remember that a room mate who was in the room next door on my floor of halls had bought with his first part of his student loan the PS2. I remember playing a lot of GTA3 on it and a few other games. I know the summer after my first year of uni was spent playing FFX as a friend back home also had the PS2.
In my second year of uni I of course got my own PC, which of course meant that I was now able to write stuff for roleplay on a more regular basis, plus be online a lot and take part gaming discussions.
But it was during my second year of uni that I got hold of a Xbox. Now this meant such games as Halo, and most importantly Silent Hill 2. Silent Hill 2 was an amazing game, that really put me on edge with it's horror and atmosphere. I did eventually complete the game to get the ultimate ending and to this day that game still freaks me out.
Another great game on the Xbox was Jet Set Radio Future. It was a stylish skater game, which blended elements of more serious skater type games with a more anime, cartoon, cell shaded look. Visually it was stunning. Gameplay wise it was so difficult. I did complete all of it but one challenge - echoing the issue I had with Treasure Island Dizzy on the Amiga (I completed the game all except for 1 gold coin).
The Xbox was a great bit of kit in the long run. I know many people who chipped it and turned it into a media centre. It was pretty cool to have it running and streaming movies off a pc. But I never did that with mine.
Of course the most important thing for me during university involving computers was my learning how to program. As part of my final thesis for my degree I was learning how to program in Fortran in order to modify computational chemistry programs. While I only had to spend 9 hours working on my thesis project I spent a lot more time on it learning to hack code, and learn other bits of programming languages. I was also generating data on large clusters and so really getting into the whole world of high performance computing. This is pretty much the start of my major geekdom into computers.
Next up Xbox 360, Android and Smart Phones.