I’m Yoshi, and I am a gamer, student, musician, etc.

From my first post:

I started playing MMORPGs with a well-known, frequently-mocked game called RuneScape, by Jagex.  It’s a pretty low-tech game made by a couple guys on one of their private computers, written in Java.  Sometime after I started playing (like, well after I’d started playing) they upgraded to “RuneScape 2”, or the current version of RuneScape, in 3d but with less clear graphics.  The game’s changed a lot, but it’s still filled with a lot of things you can do, especially non-combat related.  It’s a free-to-play with an optional subscription that opens more skills, the remaining 80% of the world, tons of mini-games, etc.  I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone nowadays, but it was a cool place to start.

Sometime after I played that, the same friend who introduced me to RuneScape introduced me to Diablo II, a more hack-and-slash RPG.  It’s a popular game that’s still being played extensively after almost 12 years.  It was the first game I was introduced to with real-time combat where things you do affect things then rather than on a server-side clock.  It was the first time I played a game with the concept of a “build”, or set of skills/talents/other points that separated your character from others.  Heck, it was the first time I played a game with the concept of “classes”.

Even later after this, that same friend got me into Guild Wars.  The game had only just come out when he showed me, and I was blown away.  I immediately fell in love with the art style, the play style, and especially their version of “builds”.  I got into a guild, became a PvPer and did GvG several times a day mostly from then until the first expasion, Factions, came out.  Our guild was ranked as high as in the 60s, back before the game was much of what it is today.  Nowadays, they have titles, observer modes, and all of these other things.  Back then, they just had a ranking system.  I’ve since played off-and-on, and have now become a PvEer, and altoholic.

Sometime after Factions was released, I stopped playing GW and another friend got me into World of Warcraft (I then got the other friend into WoW).  Like everyone else, I was hooked.  There’s a reason it’s become the standard among MMORPGs.  Much like GW, it was also very different back then.  But, it was still a cool game.  I never really liked WoW’s PvP system after having played GW (GW was originally billed as a PvP game, afterall), but I did enjoy dungeons, leveling, and raiding.  I’ve quite and restarted WoW probably more times than any other game, including GW.  I did a little bit of raiding in the original and first expasion, a fair bit in the second expansion, and most of my raiding in the current expansion.  During my last stint, I even co-led a raiding guild.

Throughout my life, between these games, I’ve also played other minor MMORPGs like Maple Story (ew, I blame my cousin for getting me into that), Silk Road Online (a girl I knew in high school is responsible for this one), Dungeons & Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited (a surprisingly good game from a company I’d never heard of), and I think a few more that I don’t actually remember.  On top of this, I’ve always been an avid Nintendo fan and have played most major titles from that company.