James DeRosa: An Introduction and an Invite

As I sit at my computer desk, cursor bar blinking, I'm slowly realizing how hard it is to find the right words to make this introduction earnest and complete. James and I met through video games, in a small town, a lifetime ago. Our early encounters were filled with debates about who was who's bitch. Respect was metered out begrudgingly, in inches. The years have weathered such harsh sentimentalities which were more like France circa 1916 then a friendship. What broke this? More video games....and some non-Tekken hanging out.

Well, I'm proud to say The Sophist has found another voice. I hope you embrace him as you have me, dear readers. I give you James DeRosa.

~Aaron R

Here's a confession: I have never been a PC gamer. Some of my earliest memories involve video games. I remember being four years old, sitting in my living room, trying to make it as far to the left or to the right as I could in Pitfall - I always swore that the right path was harder. It was a console game. It was always a console game. From the Atari 2600, to the NES, SNES, PS1, PS2, and finally the Wii.

My mother always thought it was important that we had a computer, and our first was an IBM PC that ran DOS and had no hard drive. It's worth noting that around the time Doom was big, my mother bought an IBM Aptiva, running windows 95, with a Pentium, 16 MB of RAM and maybe a 1 gigabyte hard drive. I clearly remember standing in Circuit City, trying to get her to agree to buy the computer with the highest specs possible so that I could use it for games. She was insistent that the computer's primary purposes were the Internet and school work, and that the specs didn't matter. After a while, however, she relented and we took home the best computer on the floor.

She was right. I had an SNES - and in a year or so would have a PS1 - and while I purchased the Doom games, a few LucasArts titles like Sam and Max Hit the Road and Tie Fighter, and, unfortunately for me, Cyberia, I quickly abandoned the PC platform. It was mostly because of how much I liked platformers and the Final Fantasy series. For the next ten or eleven years, I never really touched PC games, outside of ones I would play on my friend's computers. I checked in every now and again making sure to play Half-Life and Counterstrike, but, by and large, I stuck mainly to console gaming, cultivating a palate informed mostly by Japanese developers.

PC games, and further, Americans games, have always seemed, to me, less refined than their Japanese counterparts. I couldn't wrap my head around why any gamer would want to deal with persistent glitches, endless patching, and constantly being forced to upgrade their systems to play the newest games. Eventually, it got so bad that I would disdain anyone who proudly proclaimed themselves a PC gamer, assuming their tastes to be less about refined programming and precise gameplay, and more about bleeding-edge-graphics-whoring and killing shit. This is a trend that I feel is almost, thought not wholly, gone on the PC scene.

With the advent of HD, I have been unable to move into the new generation of consoles because I simply cannot afford it. I refuse to buy an HD console until I have an HD TV to back it up. Granted, I have picked up a Wii – a decision largely attributed to the fact that the system often looks better on an SD TV – and have played one of the best games ever created (Super Mario Galaxy), I won't feel as though I have joined the next generation of console gaming until I move into HD gaming.

So I find myself in a strange place. I haven't owned a PC since I moved out of my mom's house 8 years ago. I haven't bought (or had bought for me) a PC that could play newer games for over ten years.

I recently went back to college, and I needed a computer. So there I was at Best Buy, standing in the same place I had over ten years earlier, convincing myself to break my budget to buy the best PC I could for games. But shouldn't it be for school work and Internet? The answer is still the same.

Fuck no.

Not when I haven't played Bioshock yet. So I purchased a AMD triple core with 4 gigabytes of RAM and instantly modified it with a new power supply and an expensive graphics card. I also bought a pretty sick 22” screen panel to go with it. To be fair, I could have done a lot more; getting a quad core, a 10000 rpm hard drive, or hell, building the thing from the ground up would all have yielded something a bit stronger, but as it is, I can play every game I have bought so far at full spec.

And it's strange. This is where I am now... for the first time in my life, I'm a PC gamer.

I NEVER thought I'd say that.

Which leads me to why I am here explaining this to you. With the imminent release of Fallout 3, I have taken it as my charge to do The Sophist's first retro review. Fallout. I am about halfway through it currently, and I thought I'd introduce myself, mostly for the purpose of making it clear that there is now someone contributing to Aaron's brainchild.

So, it should be up within the week, and I invite you to check it out.

~James D