[An Ode to Rocket] Stopped playing PC games 6 years ago. Dayz brought me back.

[Nickisis 0]

I'm 36. I grew up in the age of Commodore 64s and 300 baud modems. Compuserve and AOL, Super NES and mall arcades. I played PC games almost exclusively in my youth, and this continued through my 20's.

However when I turned 30 I was on my way to getting married, had just purchased my first house, and the Xbox took up a lot of my gaming time. I had slowly transformed from someone that bought video cards to someone that bought "accessories". Monitors had been replaced by HDTVs and joysticks with controllers. Long story short, I had become a console gamer.

As time went by and consoles became mainstream and smart-phones arrived, I found myself barely even using my laptop. The desktop had long been stored in the back corner of one of my expanding families closets, hidden behind Woody, Buzz and Lego crates.

Diablo 3 release dates came and went every year, perhaps the last vestige that could possibly return me to PC gaming. Then a couple months ago they announced that the game would release on May 15th. I wasn't going to break out the desktop, those days had come and past. However, I might as well see how it ran on the laptop.

It ran, but at the lowest settings and with more choppiness than I could handle. I resigned myself to the fact that maybe I would purchase it, but I just wasn't feeling the old juice in the loins as I used to. Maybe PC gaming truly was dead to me. Forever.

And then I read a forum talking about some new zombie mod that had been released for Arma2. I knew about Arma, had read about it, seen video and screenshots, but had not been part of the PC scene when it arrived so didn't know much about it. I saw a link to a Youtube video, the infamous CHKilroy video most of us have probably seen.

I watched. I listened. I saw in front of me the perfect game unfolding. A game that did not attempt to replace reality, but instead mimic it. A game that I had dreamed of many times in my youth. Something that wasn't just run and gun, something that made you think, to have patience, to trust or run from your fellow man.

I had just been introduced to the world of Dayz.

Five days later I received a package via UPS. Inside I opened the new desktop I had purchased a couple days earlier. What Diablo 3 had not been able to convince me of, Dayz had.

I've returned to the world of PC gaming. I am about 20 hours back in. And I am excited. Very, very, excited.

Thank you Rocket, you did what no other game, not even the mighty Diablo 3 was able to. You brought me back to the world of PC gaming.

[Legacy (DayZ) 1091]

These are the kind of stories I look forward to, the ones that really bring people back to gaming and story telling.

[oilman 72]

Dude, you missed out on Civ IV?

[Nickisis 0]

Dude' date=' you missed out on Civ IV?

[/quote']

Yes, and I know how great it was. I missed quite a bit :D