Gamer Andy: News by gamers, for gamers.

Me.
Staff Bios

Contact Me:

AIM: HXN Morteo
MSN: morteo[at]nyc[dot]rr[dot]com
Email: mike[at]gamerandy[dot]com

Hey everyone, I'm Michael DePasquale, but as you might have guessed, everyone mainly calls me Mike. Some of you may also know me as Morteo, a name I started to roll with when Huxley-Nexus was being created. Ah yes, Huxley-Nexus. So yeah there's this game called Huxley coming to the PC and Xbox 360 sometime next year and I thought it looked so damn cool I invited a close friend of mine to start up a fan site for it. A couple of random chat sessions later and Huxley-Nexus was born. Over a year ago now, it was the first ever fan site for the game (and I know that's not all too exciting, but hey, when there's no community and no attention to the game, something has to keep the drive.) Anyhow, a couple of months passed and HXN really started to take off, being that it was the sole source for information on the game, millions flocked over to read the juicy coverage we had (so what if some of those numbers are slightly inflated.)

After a year and a month, HXN had provided to almost a thousand registered members all of the lucious information that Webzen, the developers, were willing to give us. That pretty much equates down to being handed the key to a treasure chest, only to find out there's a freggin' IOU inside. Needless to say, Webzen wasn't all that gracious with the information they shared. A freakin' exclusive screenshot wouldn't have hurt.

Yeah, so after this year and a month period things weren't looking too good for the game, so the other co-founder and myself decided to pull the plug on our creation. It wasn't a total loss however, since I was able to make a few contacts, one of them being Gamer Andy. We really didn't share anything more than an AIM conversation here and there, but I knew deep down inside my soul that he was the one I saw in my dreams, the one that held the key to living, to life its self; to existence... or maybe that was the plot of the movie I watched the other day. Long story short he asked me to do the PC section of the site, I said yes. With that, he said he'd send out a copy of a certain game for me to review... and I still haven't seen it.

Well that was quite the tangent. Heading back to more about me. I'm a hardcore PC gamer and I have been since I first sat infront of one and enjoyed the simple pleasures of Castle Wolfenstein, Heretic, and Commander Keen. Windows 3.1 brought the whole "interface and mouse" thing, it was alright, but arguably my favorite feature was that you could minimize the desktop, and choose "Quit Windows" from the menu. Ah, if only there was a Quit Windows button today. With that, I've never really been a console gamer, urh, at all. I mean I've played all the classic NES and SNES games, along with those Genesis ones, but I was always drawn back to the glowing green screen of the PC.

I plan to someday be a programmer and game developer, hopefully working my way to game designer and eventually to my own game company, which will eventually sell out to a much bigger one, and I can sleep easy at night knowing that SOE is no where near me.

Alrighty.

All Time Favorite Game:
Deus Ex, followed by System Shock 2 pulling a close second, and Age of Empires II third. I must have played Deus Ex over a hundred times now, in every single way shape and form possible. From not killing a single person, to killing everyone, to running through as fast as possible, to exploring every inch of the game world. System Shock 2 is a close second because it generated an amazing atmosphere; you know what I'm talking about, the kind that just isn't seen in todays games. Even today, if you loaded and played Doom 3, then played System Shock 2, I guarantee SS2 will startle and captivate you a thousands times better than Doom 3. Age of Empires II lands third because from the second I had it in my hands, I said the hell with the actual game, time to make some awesome scenarios. It was the first game I had encountered that allowed the common player to go into an editor with a semi-decent interface and craft from nothing their own multiplayer scenario games. I remember spending hours in front of the editor just trying to see what crazy concepts I could come up with for people to play. Then came the Warcraft III editor, and I fell in love all over again, but that's another story.

First Gaming Memory:
Sitting in front of a blank black screen and not having a clue as to what to do. My mother told me something about how she had got this great new thing and wanted to see how I liked it. I flipped the little red switch and the huge box started to rumble. I was presented with a modest C:\> prompt and was instructed to somehow navigate to a directory... or something. [A:\], I'd always forget the backslash, and the screen would always insult me with and error about how it didn't understand me. After a while I'd installed and navigated to C:\JAZZ, where the simple entry of "jazz" instantly morphed black pixels in a fury of colors everywhere. That was when I first met Jazz Jackrabbit.

Favorite Genre:
Hmm, close call. Well we can rule out sports and simulation driving games; yuck. I do enjoy a good RTS every now and again, but I usually suck at them. The only exception to that is Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War (and its expansions). I totally kick ass at that. But hmm, I suppose my favorite genre would be FPS. The fast paced action just gets the aggression going and the adrenaline flowing (I totally apologize for the rhyme that just occurred.) If anyone remembers back to the days of Tribes; anyone you saw with a male model instead of a female one you just laughed off as a total freggin' noob who knew nothing, and Tribes players will recognize why. But man, skiing had to have been the greatest creation in an FPS ever. I also played UT2k4 quite a bit and landed 12th in the world in Unreal Tournament 2004 Assault mode. Funny thing is as soon as I got there, the stats for the game froze for about two months, so there I was at number twelve riding easy street since the stats were frozen.

Pet Peeve:
Morons; or at least those who won't listen to reason. More importantly, those, who when faced with real facts and evidence, consciously choose to stay ignorant, or ignore all of the truth that lies in front of them simply because they don't want to deal with that fact that what's presented is real. Yay comma splices!

Reason for Writing for GamerAndy.com:
I've always really loved to write (when it's a topic that interests me, damn you accursed school and your fiendish ways!) and when Andy asked me if I'd be willing to be the PC guy over at Gamer Andy, I excitedly accepted. I also really liked the scene here; the whole "by gamers for gamers" theme really struck me as a place I knew I could go to and read something that as a gamer I understood and agreed with. Keeping with that motif, I wanted to come over and give my opinions and reviews on everything PC.

So that's me, I'm the PC dude. I very recently purchased an Xbox 360 and have been playing Chromehounds online with the Gamer Andy squad nonstop -- the game is amazing... and this is coming from someone who owns Steel Battalion.

PSW is coming.

Posted by Mike - Jul 27 00 12:15AM

0 Comments

Comments