Stevie B Says: ‘Hey!’

The think I like about posting greetings on websites is that I don’t have to point to a specific crowd. If you’re reading this, the greeting is meant for you.

So, hi. They call me Stevie B (actually, no one’s ever called me that, but the habit of internet usernames is one that’s ridiculously hard to break), although the byline of my posts will probably read ‘stevieb.’ You can call me ‘Steve’, if we ever find ourselves on a first-name basis.

I think this post can best be summed up with a small anecdote, so here goes: when you’re making up posts for this site, you have to choose where you want them categorized. The two I picked for this greeting of mine were ‘Off Topic’ and ‘Uncategorized,’ which is funny because it actually sums me up quite well. You’ll hopefully see what I mean in a minute.

I don’t know that having a knowledge of my background will be helpful to you in any way, or make you hate me less if I post something you strongly disagree with, but it’s sort of the nature of the beast that I give a little of myself to what I write, so I may as well start somewhere.

Well, first and foremost, I’m Canadian-born, which puts me at the tail-end of another harsh, bitter northern winter. Although, truthfully, this year was quite mild. I’m currently in university, majoring in history.

Teaching would be the logical field to take with a major like that, but I’m still not one hundred percent sure – I hope you’ll forgive me for not being any more specific than that, but I’m used to writing for a blog, and there, I was totally anonymous. I even hid behind a moniker that had absolutely nothing to do with my real name, so sharing specifics is something I’ll have to ease my way into. Instead, I’m just going to talk a bit about my experiences with games.

That’s why you’re here anyway, right?

I started playing games when I was roughly two-and-a-half years old. My dad pulled an old Atari 2600 out of the closet, and let me play to my heart’s content. The characters (and everything else) were nothing more than giant pixel blocks, and the games were overly simplistic, but I was instantly hooked.

Not long after that, my parents bought our first computer: it was old, even when we bought it, and it ran on DOS. If you don’t know what DOS is, and you’re running Windows right now, click on the ‘Start’ menu, point to ‘All Programs,’ then ‘Accessories,’ and click on ‘Command Prompt.’ Now picture that black background and white text in full-screen, without Windows running behind it, and that was DOS. You had to type to get anything.

As a result, I was actually a remarkably good speller growing up, because I had to know how to spell if I wanted to play any games. After the computer came a Sega Genesis, and it was with that, coupled with my obsession with Sonic the Hedgehog that my lifelong (so far) passion for gaming would truly be born. Since then, I’ve seen every major console come and go, not owning them all necessarily, but certainly having contact with each of them, and learning for myself which I liked and disliked.

I was a Nintendo 64 man, my first game for that being Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which still ranks pretty high on my ‘all-time favourite games’ list. After that came the Playstation 2, my favourite game for which was Final Fantasy X, which was actually my introduction into that venerable JRPG series.

I had a brief stint with an Xbox 360, but it suffered a fatal hardware malfunction, and instead of buying a new one, I opted to jump ship for the Playstation 3, just because I had loved my PS2 so much. That’s about where I am, now. Oh, and I also have a Vita. That’s pretty fun, too.

To be completely honest, the entire point of this post was just to introduce myself (which I did near the beginning), and to let you know that you’ll be seeing me around the website from now on.

I guess I haven’t done that second part yet, so: I’ll be writing for Non-fiction Gaming  from now on. That’s really all. Hopefully knowing my background with video games will in some way alleviate any suspicions I might garner about being biased toward one console or another, since at one point I’ve owned a console by all three of the (current) major players. I’m just here to have a good time: to write about what I love, and to maybe educate you one some aspect of the industry you weren’t aware of.

Hopefully we can have a good time, and I look forward to seeing your comments on the things I write. Just be nice.

And, once again: hey!