My second gaming epoch: The Pentium 3 Era

The Pentium 3 era was one of the best computing experiences I ever had. The machine had 256MB of RAM, a 64MB nVidia GPU, and some sort of soundblaster video card. I had a 933MHz Pentium 3, and it was glorious. The case was a simple midi tower, white steel with a blue flourish; lacking the turbo button of my original case.

The game of this generation for me, even when I had no Internet Access was Unreal Tournament. I played this game so much due to the offline stats engine, showing how much I could kick the ass of the bots. I had so much fun with those reports, designing achievements for myself, and eagerly obtaining mods and mutators from PC magazine CD-ROMs (and later, DVD-ROMs).

This PC also heralded the arrival of Deus Ex, Half-Life, and something that I could competently run the Baldur's Gate Series on. Planescape: Torment confused my adolescent mind with its incredible plot and deep themes, which Age of Empires II ensured that I could turtle my way to success every-single time.

The other, surprising gameplay experience I had on this machine was one which completely awed me. Need for Speed: Porsche Unlimited looked absolutely incredible; in comparison to all the titles I had played on my older PC. Deus Ex and Half Life stole the show, with the reply-ability and depth of their worlds completely and totally engrossing me.

This PC ran so many video games in my home; and was my golden era of gaming. I had a wardrobe full of big-box games, with sagging shelves, heavy manuals making the MDF shelves struggle. This era represented the rise of the Role Playing Gaming in my development as a consumer of entertainment; and has definitely impacted my current, and future expectations of gaming.

This was also the time where I began to take a large interest in the industry of video games, starting to learn rudimentary 3D modelling skills, and start to want to develop mods. I never did at this stage in my life, but this was the time where I wrote my first reviews; some of them for my English classes at school.

For the first time in my life, I eventually came to own two computers at the same time, which was a terrifying concept for my parents. I had been collecting and trading Pokemon cards, and when it came time to sell, without a full understanding of what 'consitutded' a proper gaming PC, I brought a new Celeron, with a very shitty motherboard, and another 256MB of RAM. It wasn't long before I canibalised the RAM from the Celeron, and moved it into the Pentium 3 board.

That was the first time I actually worked on the internals of a computer; and it reminded me of the days as a very young child playing with Lego. It made the same 'click' sound; and fit in only one way. It was so amazingly simple, and so liberating. This was before the time of YouTube, so I had to convince two very concerned parents that I wasn't going to electrocute myself, and that the magazines I had been reading had all the instructions.

The extra memory made my Pentium 3 feel like an entirely new computer, and it endured for quite some time, never running out of a back catalog of entertainment. I would love to relive this era once again. It saw me through up until grade nine at school, where I would build my first PC from scratch, learning all about patience, and admitting failure.