Mikey's Debut

Tonight's my first live cast for a tournament where people will be making money as a result. That's pretty exciting to me. I'll be casting the first match from my twitch.tv stream at 5pm Mountain Time (7pm Eastern) and again on Saturday afternoon at 1pm Mountain. Should be a whole lot of fun! The regular English casts will be on BaseTradeTV. Be sure to mark those calendars. Again, the tournament is sponsered by SixPoolGaming, a premium Starcraft training site, featuring training videos made by proven professional players. I haven't used it myself, but I understand it's some pretty good stuff.

I went ahead and bought a Latin America license of the game so I'll be able to be 100% legitimate with my casting. And so now I have two copies of Starcraft. Not yet 100% sure how I feel about that. At one time I wanted to have three copies so I could have one for each race. But, now I'm not afraid of just playing random if I feel like shaking things up. But hey, maybe this Spanish casting will go somewhere and it will keep on being useful. It's certainly good language practice, that's for sure.

My schedule's a little off today because my lady stayed home sick from work. Not 100% sure if I'll be casting more ReHacked today or not. Also, I need to make a decision on how much I'm going to do in Spanish as opposed to good old English. Either way, if I do something, I'll edit this post and link it here.

MLGSCE is Official!

I've finally done it! I've cast six professional level game and uploaded the videos to my YouTube page. I'll embed the one I think is best here. I was super nervous doing this at first but I felt like I was just getting better and better as I went. Not that hard after all!

Book Review: Ultimate History of Video Games

The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon - The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World, by Steven L. Kent, is more than just a book with a really long name. It's still the best book I've ever read about video games.

This fantastic book covers video games from its inception until the release of the Playstation II. Kent shows his extensive research with very detailed accounts and descriptions of all major (and minor) events in the industry during this time, generally with direct quotes from the people who took part in the them. The more modern part of this history (late 90's and beyond) begins to feel a bit rushed, but this is 100% worth to read to see how our favorite addiction began to be. Despite being nonfiction, which I admit I sometimes struggle with, Kent's work is not only readable, but enjoyable to read.

My favorite anecdote from The Ultimate History is about one of the guys who would pull the coins out of Atari arcade games each week. One of his stops was in a bar at a college campus. Once the game really took off and he was pulling hundreds of dollars of quarters of the machine, he started started to panic that one night he would get mugged. So he decided to bringing his wife along, who would carry a baseball bat just in case.

It was here that I learned about the very first video game, why video games suddenly had ratings, and that the people at Atari were a very colorful bunch. Whether you think you know everything about video games or not even one thing, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy of this wonderful book and get to know an industry that has changed the world!

I give The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon - The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World a very solid 5 stars out of 5 for being the book to which I compare all other books about video games.



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