Gaming

My biggest communal/competitive gaming projects were

SMS Speedrunning (Jan 2020 – Dec 2023)
Pokémon Go (Dec 2016 – Sept 2018)

I played Pokémon Go casually until the covid pandemic started (Mar 2020), but wound back my involvement in the community after Sept 2018. Other communities:

Super Smash Bros

At the start of my (only) job (Oct 2018 – Oct 2019), I picked up Melee, and quickly found I was shit at it. Ultimate was just about to be released, so I picked up a Nintendo Switch and decided to get right on the competitive scene at the start of the meta. But realistically, I didn’t know how to learn Smash and couldn’t manage my anxiety, so… this was my competitive record

This is missing Front Runners #0 (18th Jan 2019), which was a cowboy tourney run in-house (rather than by DAT Team) and legalised 8-min matches on Big Battlefield haha. I went out 0-2 to Ramboss and Hahex, to complete my 0-20 record 💀

You won’t be surprised to find PG | Stimpy is now Liquid | Stimpy after that ship sank lmao

I gave myself a hard task by maining Mario, tho I later picked up Wolf and did better despite putting much less time in (I had bad fundamentals, basically). I almost beat a couple of casual players who projectile-camped me but somehow still failed > _ <. I had fun with it tho, and I remember Asa doing a “whoop” after my successful reversed up-smash as Mario, and Triz Savage complimenting me on my random mix-up as Mario, which was doing a full-hop descending fair in neutral xD. AIV made me more aware of my intense anxiety, and made me realise maybe I couldn’t make this work mentally

I couldn’t make friends as a result of being so bad, but had a good relationship with then-future head TO of DAT Team, Burning, who worked for Red Bull and I ran into at the Quickcade II speedrunning marathon (7/3/2020) which Red Bull provided a camera for

Zelda Speedrunning

See my Reddit articles documenting TWW/TWWHD/SS discoveries/records/lore, as well as this website’s Pause Storage article

I had the idea to speedrun SM64 back in 2006, but got bored doing 120 stars in about 4 hours. I used to read about OoT glitches back then, but didn’t become aware of speedrunning until I first heard of Twitch in 2014 (cos of Twitch Plays Pokémon and my uni frens), and then caught Cosmo Wright (now Narcissa) streaming a couple of weeks before the legendary 18:10 OoT Any%. Watching her passed the time while I was summoning the courage to wash my hands after the toilet during the peak of my OCD

I first seriously got into speedrunning thanks to SummoningSalt in 2017, motivating me to check out AGDQ 2018, whose highlight was rewatching the whole of my childhood fave SMS be speedrun in 3 hours, with a comfy commentary by my future SMS speedrunning peers. I then found The Legend of the Barrier Skip, which became my fave speedrunning video, and so started watching Linkus7 speedrun Zelda: The Wind Waker HD. From there, I got into the actual TWWHD community (rather than stanning the streamer as most viewers did), and followed Ian_Miles in his usurping Linkus to become the greatest, and later MrAlberto23 becoming the GOAT. Even as a viewer, I spent a lot of time with them all from mid 2018 until starting SMS runs in Jan 2020, playing chess and all sorts

This means I lived thru the year of intensive Zelda discoveries (starting May 2019 with RBM in Skyward Sword (SS), culminating in SRM in OoT), joined the SS community and became quite proficient in its glitch theory, later getting into reverse engineering to create practice cheat codes released on Christmas Day 2019

Mid 2019, I was also around in the SMS community, remembering the day on which serious ILing was founded (with a slew of 42s in Bianco 4), and watching Weegee usurp nindiddeh’s 2-year-old Any% WR. I got involved helping them settle their intro skip dispute in the autumn, then started running the game myself in Jan 2020

Buziol Games Software

As a kid, I was socially isolated and so had to put in the effort myself to transition from flash games and clones to real (mostly Nintendo) games. A key step was Mario Forever, an SMW-style clone made by Polish dev Buziol. His community (forum in Internet Explorer 6 days) gave me a reprieve from being bullied in school (year 7) as I joined just before new year’s day 2006/7, and stuck around the community even as Buziol himself disappeared and his forums shut down, talking my online friends thru my journey of installing Project 64 (1.6 was current back then) to play SM64 for the first time, a huge broadening horizons moment, right down to late 2007 as I talked an Aussie mate thru how cool Pianta 3’s underground maze was. I remember the Canadian 10y/o I met in the chatbox (I was 12), explaining to me what “windchill” meant :)

You can find our exclave here (the original spinoff site was here, tho you have to fight being redirected). The original forum that Buziol ran is of course long gone. I made a tribute thread to this community shortly after being ostracised from SMS

Casual Games

I feel like I’ve already told most of my story of how I got into games, and what kinds, so I’ll just list some. Starting age 8 with the Daytona Game Pack, which had PC games spanning the 90s (e.g. PLBM Games for MS-DOS, Softgame for Win 3.1–95), I then switched to Absolutist Games around age 10 – Matthew in year 5 told me I was obsessed with the PacDoom series and he was right lol. My faves were those and some others like Robotanks and Breakout Casino, and I remember my aunt loving Butterflight; 2P Volley Balley was my most common activity with my friend Jelena. Then all sorts of light Windows games, among which some of my most loved were Brickman!, Granny In Paradise and Ricochet Lost Worlds. I was hugely into the two Lego Racers games as well, especially the second with its sandbox style, golden-brick collectathon and true underdog story from Sandy Beach to Xalax

After playing (and struggling with) Buziol’s Mario Forever after I turned 12 in early 2007, I started reading about the history of video games, and picked up NES, SNES and N64 emulators, with Nintendo titles. The ones I clicked with best were SM64, Paper Mario (whose ending was one of my most emotional experiences ever at that age), and SMW. Then, I bought a Wii. I ended up with 26 games, which I’ll list in the order I bought them. The bold ones were my favourites

Wii Sports (Jul 2007)
Sonic And The Secret Rings
Kororinpa
Super Mario Sunshine (GC)
Super Mario Galaxy
Wii Play (Jan 2008)
Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games 2008
Mario Kart Wii (EU release day, Apr 2008)
Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door (GC, GOAT game)
Super Smash Bros Brawl (EU release day, Jun 2008)
Mario Strikers Charged
Wario World (GC)
Boom Blox
Zack & Wiki
Excite Truck
Super Paper Mario (Dec 2008)
de Blob
WarioWare: Smooth Moves
Ōkami
Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat (GC; I remember fetching the bongos from a Post Office warehouse lmao)
Wii Sports Resort
Sega Superstars Tennis
Wario Land: The Shake Dimension
New Super Mario Bros Wii
Super Mario Galaxy 2
The Legend Of Zelda: Skyward Sword

I played Ocarina Of Time on Wii Virtual Console early-2009 too – the perfect age for its coming-of-age story, and a big blunder to then not play Majora’s Mask right after

Viewtiful Joe (GC) should’ve been #27 but it’s still in its Christmas wrapping :(. I started suffering from psychological trouble in 2009, starting with FOMO but effectively incapacitating me from being motivated to do any kind of casual hobby, including video games. My friends will remember I never finished Breaking Bad despite it having been my favourite ever TV drama, nor Undertale despite its shortness. Part of being friends with SDLL for me was to try to bring this love back, drawing on our shared experience of having grown up on Nintendo games, to then motivate me to play some of their favourite games like Luigi’s Mansion and Metroid Prime

I bought a DSi mid-2009 and had a few games there too

Professor Layton and the Curious Village
New Super Mario Bros
Big Bang Mini
Elite Beat Agents
The Legend Of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training
Mario Kart DS
Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box

I played a lot of OG Pyoro (from the OG WarioWare) on DSiWare, as well as Paper Plane, trying to submit to the ONM magazine leaderboard haha. Art Style: Kubos was great too, and I was ofc a shitty Flipnote Studio merchant :)

Getting older, owing to my psychology, I really struggled to make playing games stick. In 2018, I played Braid and Super Metroid, and finished SMW2: Yoshi’s Island in 2020. Brief excursions into Portal and Undertale but yeah…

I am most proud of the beautiful artful games I played that weren’t huge names at the time, especially Zack & Wiki and Braid, which you see often represented in my online avatars. Ōkami should’ve been another but my disc started crashing just past the half-way point iirc (I was about to proceed to North Ryoshima Coast) and, as a sensitive 14y/o, I didn’t figure out how to fix this situation, and have since repressed the memory out of sadness. My favourite games were the first two Paper Marios, followed by the first 3 3D Super Marios, and Ocarina Of Time had the most profound impact on my growing up

My music taste originated in 2006–8 in the Paper Mario OST (for which I installed 64th Note on WinAmp to listen), and then the SMG OST and SSBB music vault. Then Elite Beat Agents (2009) with Jumpin’ Jack Flash was my link into picking up classic rock, and we were on our way…