Joe Gamer

Real Name: Joe Little
Aliases: JoeGamer, Niassne, Geezerjoe
Age: Getting Older
Race: Mixed bread human (this is starting to get personal)
Sex: Male (SO tempted to play Austin Powers and say “Yes please”)
Hair: Dark brown, almost black (except the growing number of white ones)
Favorite Food: Solid Gold (it’s really hard to eat, isn’t nutritious at all, but you poop solid gold!)
Favorite Drink: Diet Coke
Favorite TV Show Current: Burn Notice
Favorite TV Show EVAR!: Firefly
Favorite Authors/Book Series: Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp books (conservative porn / CIA anti-terrorism agent thrillers), Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files (very fun mix of fantasy and modern noir style detective stories), Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn (exceptionally good fantasy)
Favorite Music: I don’t really have a specific genre or band I love. I do know I hate rap and that I’m now obviously out of touch with the younger crowd. I have a whole rant on the subject that I may one day put on my Niassne site.
Favorite Movies: Several but I can always watch Serenity, Sahara, or The Princess Bride

Wait … aren’t we here to talk about games? So lets get to it!

Gamer Bio

I love pen and paper RPGs. I started playing Dungeons and Dragons when it came in a pink/red box with the dice which you had to “ink” yourself with a crayon (also supplied). Over the course of time I moved from the basic sets to the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons books, to Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition, and currently the 4th edition of the game (which I own books for but have never played). Some of my fondest memories as a child include the times every month or two that my mom would order one of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rule books out of the Sears catalog for me, and the occasions, about two or three times a year, that we would go to the Tupelo (Mississippi) Mall where I would buy a module from the only DnD friendly bookstore in North Mississippi to which I had access. I can still fondly remember sitting in the mall waiting on my mother to return from shopping for *gasp* clothes, and opening my original Pharaoh (I3) module (one of the later ones – still recent enough that I actually remember opening the cover. Check wikipedia for a good list of the modules from back then.). I can still, sometimes, remember the smell of those modules when opened for the first time. It generates some of the fondest sensations.

I’ve DM’d a LOT. Strangely I’m not one for planning things out though. My best sessions are those that are more off the cuff, but not completely. Often I would lie in bed the night before a planned game and come up with some interesting twist or encounter and just wing it. These don’t always go as planned so generally I like to wing it in advance and have a few things planned out. That said I. LOVE. TO. PLAY. I think I may have made a good actor in another life if I were so naturally conservative, shy, and fat. Don’t laugh, those are all negative qualities in theater circles. *Shrug* Alls well and all that.

An article in Dragon magazine led me to another passion, collectible card games. I picked up playing Magic: The Gathering back when it was transitioning between their Unlimited and Revised cycles. My first booster packs were from Antiquities, and I didn’t have enough cards there to play. I barely remember stopping by some hole in the wall store in Starkville, MS where I purchased a deck someone had constructed out of commons and uncommons for twenty dollars – twice the cost of a regular starter deck at the time. It used black and green cards such as Bog Hag and Thicket Basillisk. It was fun. In a hat. With a stick. On fire. To the pwow pwow! Squared. I was hooked. I played Magic for several! years. I dropped out partly due to loosing about 2 boxes worth of new cards to inclement weather and a leaky trunk, and partly due to growing up and not having enough money to continue to support all the gaming habits I had a the time. I think we lost our gaming store at the time as well so that didn’t help I’m sure.

Magic:The Gathering led me to many other very nice CCGs including Legend of the Five Rings which to this day continues to be my favorite CCG EVAR! Wait … is that true? I must say that the now gone Deadlands CCG was incredibly fun too. So that makes Magic my 3rd favorite CCG. Wow. That says a lot because I LLLLLOOOOOVVVVVEEEEE M:TG. So much I’d pull a PeeWee Herman and marry it. And it’s my third best girl? Wow. Thankfully CCGs don’t leave you if you cheat. Needless to say I’m not a purist. I like new things and the world of CCGs has a great many new things. Not as many as in the heyday just after Magic was release, but still going.

Over time I’ve learned to love many a good board game as well. My original love was Dungeon! a DnD like board game put out by TSR the same folks that originally published Dungeons and Dragons. Next came Deathmaze by SPI. I have SO many good memories of Deathmaze mostly because it was so hard that even cheating to keep a character alive wasn’t always enough. Sometimes you just had to admit you were dead. The next great boardgame I remember was Talisman, the King of All Board Games. I was introduced early and I go back to it as often as I can. Following Talisman came Cosmic Encounter, the game that inspired Richard Garfield to create Magic: The Gathering the way he did. It is the original “the rules are defined by the cards” game. Bruce Nesmith introduced this game to my friends and I at CoastCon in 1989 or 1990. He was a great guy and spent a lot of time gaming with us kids. Thank you Mr Nesmith (who’s currently with Bethesda Game Studios it seems – WTG!). There was then quite the dry spell with board games for me until a little shop called Fantasy Flight Games started producing some very high end, complex board games like Descent and Runebound both of which are very nice. FFG also now publishes Cosmic Encounter and Talisman as well. I highly recommend that you check out FFG for your gaming pleasure.

Finally I’m going to mention video games, mostly because I have a segue that I’ve not butchered. FFG produces the StarCraft and World of Warcraft board games which both started out as video games. I’m not much for computer based video games. WASZ <> Up Down Left Right to me. Just can’t do it. Give me a joy stick, or better yet, 2 and invert my vertical axis and I’m game! I think the first modern game to grab me was Halo. I love my wife, and I love her even more for buying me the Halo themed X-Box for our anniversary one year while we were on our way to enjoy some sun in Pensacola, FL. And yes I played while she slept. I was probably not as well rested as I could have been while we were all vacationy and all, but I WAS happy. This event led to many other games including Halo2 (but never 3 – strange), X-Men, Marvel Ultimate Alliance, and perhaps my all time favorite (and you may not see this coming) Red Dead Revolver. I am MAD for the original RDR. The story was pretty good but it shined for me in multiplayer. The maps were TINY, each character had a kewl special ability, and the chaos factor was through the roof. If someone said “Red Dead. Old School. 4 player. Now” I’d leave work. I’d kiss my family good bye for a few hours. I might skip church. I. LOVE. RED DEAD REVOLVER! Of course now I have an X-Box 360 and a slew of games for it including: Boarderlands, Fallout 3 (thanks again Bruce), and now Red Dead Redemption the sequel to Red Dead Revolver. Here I LOVE the single player but my internet connection is such that I can not partake of the multiplayer action. I cry a little inside.

There are so many good games I have yet to mention like: Three Dragon Ante, Settlers of Catan, Dominion, and oh so many more. But then again that is why this is a blog. As I feel the desire to add to my list of games that entertain me, maybe I’ll get a bit closer to getting to all of them.

So that’s me. Please comment on anything you happen to see that catches your interest.

~Joe

© 2009 – 2010, admin. All rights reserved.