VITAL STATISTICS Date of Birth The Glorious 8-bit Days RPGamer Hire Date 07/07/10 RPGamer Position Q&A Host/Newsie Location Parts Unknown Personal Homepage You're looking at it Hobbies 1) Video Games 2) Golf 3) Blogging Favorite Movies 1) Back to the Future 2) Futurama 3) Lord of the Rings Favorite RPGs 1) Final Fantasy VI 2) Persona 4 Golden 3) Chrono Trigger 4) Final Fantasy Legend 2 5) Dark Souls

I wish this was actually a game

I guess you could say my love of RPGs began with Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior at that point of course. While it wasn't really my favorite game at the time and I never beat it, it really introduced me to the mechanics of a "JRPG." From there I got Final Fantasy Legends for the gameboy, and never looked back. I suppose growing up playing a Kawazu RPG (creator of the SaGa series) left me with an odd taste in games, but there you have it. Once I moved into the SNES era, my love of RPGs was solidified. Great games like Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy VI, and Chrono Trigger ate away my weekends. Eventually I ended up getting a Genesis wherein the Shining Force and Phantasy games spent a long time glued in that system, especially Shining Force 2!

I should mention that during this time my parents decided not to let us play video games any more during the week. Even though this was only during the school year, I was not going to take this lying down. So since we were still allowed to use the computers, this is where I started to get into some computer games. We only had some older computers, so I mostly caught up on some old adventure games like King's Quest and Quest for Glory. I dabbled in some of the Ultima games, but the PC RPGs that really hooked me were the exile games from Spiderweb Software. Eventually this led to BioWare games starting with Baldur's Gate, along with other series like Diablo, and The Elder Scrolls. I'm not really an MMO guy, but you can find me exloring World of Warcraft at times like most of the rest of the world.

Back to console games. Final Fantasy VII of course ment we got a PS1. It was my brother's though, so I didn't really get too many games for it outside of Squaresoft's offerings (I've since been collecting many of the RPGs I missed). Through a little bit of luck and hard work (a summer filled mowing the lawn) I eventually got a system of my own: The Saturn. Here I played classic games like Albert Odyssey, Shining Force 3, Shining the Holy Ark, Dragon Force, Magic Knight Ray Earth, and of course Panzer Dragoon Saga. I never owned a copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga though. The game was just impossible to find. My friend had a copy, but his 4th disc was buggy and neither of us were able to finish the game. Overall though, my memories of the Saturn era are just about as good as those of the classic SNES era

Despite being a long time RPGamer reader (the classic Matt Q&As are the reason I wanted to do it!) I balked at all the love for Persona 3 and continued to avoid the Shin Megami Tensei series. The Etrian Odyssey series, ironically enough, is what eventually led me to give the series a shot. I heard about Strange Journey, which sounded like it would be as good of a dungeon crawler as Etrian was, and decided to get Persona PSP to get a feel for the series (and to have a first-person dungeon crawler on the PSP) and from there I've been hooked. My reasons for skipping the series are pretty stupid to be honest. I didn't think I'd like the modern setting or the elements of the occult, but I was wrong. When I finally did try the series, it really wasn't at all what I expected, and I am now hooked like many of the others here.

I formally wrote for Inside Mac Games, and thus am a huge Mac fan. My favortie non-RPG series include Unreal Tournament, Halo, Marathon, Warcraft, Assassin's Creed, Prince of Persia, and Super Mario Bros. I play a lot of games at once, take longer to finish them, but such is the life of an RPGamer! I wouldn't have it any other way.

   Last Updated: 08/01/2010