Introduction

Hello all.

I joined the 2O2P site yesterday and have already started developing friendships.  I thought that I would take a second introduce myself to the 2O2P community at large.

I am a 36 years old Staff Attorney working for the Amarillo, Texas Court of Appeals.  I am married and have a two year old son (guess what his name is.  LOL). 

I have been playing video games since Pong.  Video games have always been a huge part of my life.  My childhood best friend had an Intellivision and I had an Atari.  I spent countless hours in high school playing Madden tournaments with friends.  I got away from video games in college because I had too much partying to do.  However, prior to deciding to attend law school, I rediscovered the joy of video gaming.  Video games (specifically a PSOne co-op game called Defcon 5, if I recall the name correctly) got me through my first year at law school.  The first year of law school is like torture as your brain is being retrained to "think like a lawyer."  My roommate in law school shared my love of video games and we used to come home from school every day and play Defcon 5 as a way to relieve the pent up frustration that we were both feeling.  I was a late convert into the last next-gen cycle and, after doing substantial research, I bought an XBox.  I LOVED it.  My biggest complaint about the PSOne was the ridiculous memory cards that I would wind up losing just as I was about to finish a particular game.  The XBox solved that problem by having the built-in hard drive.  The first game that I bought was, of course, Halo and it was my favorite game for years to come.  I still prefer Halo to Halo 2 mainly because I'm not a huge fan of the Arbiter, but also because I never played the multi-player.  When XBL launched, my wife got me a membership and I played a couple of games of that terrible football game that MS released for XBL's launch.  Between that and the demos, I decided that XBL was not for me and, after about 3 days, I never connected to XBL again.  A couple of months before last Christmas, I finally gave in to all of the great things that I had heard about XBL and I broke down and got the wireless network bridge (I already had a wireless internet connection for my wife's laptop and the bridge was necessitated because she was not going to let me run cables all around the house) and was prepared to give XBL another try.  Funny thing is that I didn't.  I looked around some, but was disappointed that I couldn't access the marketplace through my XBox.  That, combined with the fact that I was playing a bunch of one player games at the time (Max Payne 2, The Suffering), just took away the enthusiasm that I had when I decided to give it another try.  Then, for Christmas, my wife bought me a 360 and Gears of War.  Like I had always done before, I dove into the Gears campaign and played it every chance that I got.  I loved the gameplay and the graphics literally blew me away.  I had read a couple of people discussing how great the multiplayer was for Gears, so I decided to see what all the fuss was about.  Suffice it to say that now, whenever I get a new game, I am always reluctant to play a "couple of quick games of Gears" because once Gears goes back into the 360, it pretty well takes a new release to pry it back out.  I have logged a massive amount of time playing Gears (based on my skill level, that would be a large quantity of time rather than quality time).  I played the Halo 3 beta and throughly enjoyed it, but even that fell victim to my Gears addiction.  About the mid-point of the beta, I decided to play a few "quick games of Gears" and I completely missed the last two weeks of the Halo 3 beta as a result.  Sad, but true.  I am currently playing through Bioshock a second time to see the other ending, but I am about to join a Gears clan (if they will have me) and I am concerned about the "couple of quick games of Gears" problem resurfacing.  It would be a shame not to experience Bioshock a second time (it is a truly great game that has enough depth to be played through at least twice).

Anyway, that is an introduction to me as it relates to my video gaming.  I have already gotten to know a few of the 2O2P community in just over 24 hours.  I hope to get to know a lot more of you in the coming months.