Greetings! I’d like to start of by saying that I should probably have done this much sooner. Time for a History Lesson! I’ve been playing games since childhood in the 90s but those games were often educational PC games provided by my parents such as Freddy Fish, Spy Fox, and eventually Age of Empires. I would later get a Gameboy Color with Pokemon Silver, a Gameboy Advance SP with Pokemon Ruby, and eventually a GameCube with Super Mario Sunshine. That’s right, I started off as a fan of Nintendo’s consoles, handhelds, and games. My parents weren’t exactly supportive of me watching too much TV or playing video games and I got most of these systems late into their life cycles.
Super Mario Sunshine was my first 3D game and I was wowed by it. However, shortly after getting my GameCube my cousin got a PS2. I had never even heard of PlayStation until then but as a 90s kid I was a HUGE Disney fan and purchased KINGDOM HEARTS. From the opening song to the credits, the game was simply magical in a way that no game was ever before. I became a huge fan of the series and went on to play the FINAL FANTASY games after, but I wouldn’t consider myself a gamer just yet. Gaming at the time was mostly playing licensed nonsense and replaying the KINGDOM HEARTS games to escape from the hostile environment that was my parents’ divorce. It wasn’t until my 10th year of High School that I would awaken and become thoroughly invested in video games in a more broad sense than ever, when I purchased a PS3 for FINAL FANTASY XIII.
I don’t know why it happened then, but the PS3 era changed everything for me. After beating FFXIII I started expanding my genre choices and played games like Batman: Arkham Asylum, Metal Gear Solid 4, LittleBigPlanet, and UNCHARTED. I started to notice that of the games I played, SONY’s were synonymous with quality. I started visiting video game websites like IGN and keeping up with news as well as understanding the business divisions within SONY and especially PlayStation World Wide Studios. The PS3 era also gave a me chance to catch up on all the PS2 exclusives I missed with HD remasters. Since then I’ve been engaged in conversations about the industry with fellow friends online and am honored that people come to me for recommendations and opinions offline. I’ve probably spent so much time informally talking about games that I figured I should probably just start a blog. I never did before because of school, but my current time off after college graduation has given me much time to reflect.
Really, I should have started a long time ago, but here I am now. I intend to use this space primarily to share my thoughts on current video game news and occasionally some other things as well.
Well that was longer than I thought! Happy blogging to me and I hope you all enjoy incoming content!
-Uzair Muhammad Syed (MakoSOLDIER, @MakoSOLIDER)
MakoSOLDIER 