Part 2 YO #HYPE

I honestly forgot about this blog lol so here I am!

Alright so after playing CS 1.6, I decided to move to Counter Strike:Source because my best friend had been playing it and asked if I wanted to join him. At that point, my friends who had introduced me to cs 1.6 had either stopped playing or only played casually. I still had online friends to play with in 1.6 so I played both Source and 1.6 competitively for around half a year. As time progressed, I started playing more and more Source and eventually I was playing Source basically full time with 1.6 on the side. The final part that pretty much stopped me from playing 1.6 completely was when my competitive 1.6 team died halfway through the CAL season because we found out one of our starters had gotten banned for cheating. No one wanted to stick with it and try to salvage the team for next season.

In Source, I first started out joining my friend's team that was essentially a clan of pubbers that was beginning to dabble into competitive play. When I joined, they were known as Op-Pro and were actually undergoing some drama in that the two co-leaders were having disputes on where the community was going to go and ultimately there was a split. The section that split off and that I joined was called Masters in Arms(<MIA>). Thinking back, this was a pretty shitty name cause you can just imagine the puns we got from other people. So we decided to sign up for CAL-Open to see how well we could do. We first started off by using our pub server and throwing on a password so we could play scrims on it. We literally still had the pub plugin Mani Mod on it so we always got shit for it(so many times the bet commands were used lol). As for our team, we didn't really have a set 5. Instead, every week our leader would make a post on our forums and ppl from the clan would sign up to play so we always had a variety of players from the 9 that were on the roster. Obviously, this setup is less than ideal in competitive play since you want the best 5 ppl that can win you the match and having a set 5 can build chemistry and consistency. I think that season we went 4-4 and I played maybe 2 matches. After that season, a number of players from MIA decided to leave and form their own team and I decided to join them because I felt that MA wasn't going in the right direction for competitive play. This new team was called No Name Necessary(another team name just ripe for puns). After nothing spectacular with this team, the team died and I was asked by one of my friends to join his new team. After playing with his team and trying out for 2 weeks, they decided that I was a good fit. We competed in CAL-Main and CEVO-Main(both divisions are the 2nd highest for each league. The top divisions being Invite in CAL and Professional in CEVO) that season and did pretty well. Because of how well we were doing in CAL-main, we got moved up into CAL-Invite in the middle of the season. We didn't do quite as well after moving up into Invite division but we were all satisfied with the experience.

During that time, we got sponsored by various organizations and started to attend LANs(gaming events that are played over a Local Area Network as opposed to online play. You got a bunch of dudes sitting at computers in a building. BASICALLY LOTS OF B.O.). However, I was only around 16 at the time and all the lans that my team were attending were out of state(I lived in California). The fact that I was a 16 year old high school student and I had Asian parents mean that I couldn't really tell my parents that I'm going to be traveling to another state to play video games with people they've never met before. Yea....kinda hard to persuade them on that one so I just sat out of these events. Eventually, my team asked me if I was ever going to be able to attend any of these offline events as opposed to solely playing competitively online. After a hard decision, my team decided that I needed to be replaced as a starter for someone that could also play at the LANs. I remained on the roster as a backup and there was no hard feelings since I didn't want to be the one to hold them back. Later on, I entered college and I decided to give up competitive CS because of it. In my opinion, there was money(and I had won money through tournaments) to be made in Source, but it wasn't enough to justify forgoing college.

Looking back, I honestly believe that I made the right decision because college has been an experience that has been life-changing. Sometimes I do look back and wonder what would've happened if I stayed with competitive CS, but I don't regret the decision I made. College has been amazing ^.^. After playing casually for a couple of years, I picked up the latest Counter Strike: Global Offensive and it's what I've been playing lately along with League of Legends.

My next post will be a little guide into the game Counter Strike: Global Offensive along with some things about computer peripherals(does it really make a difference or is it just marketing?).

How I got introduced to PC Gaming

Hello Everyone!

For starters, my name is Michael and I first got into PC Gaming playing the original CounterStrike. My very first computer was an eMachines desktop(yes, the picture above is what it looked like with the big CRT and everything) that was bought by my parents to be used by my brother and I. At first, I just used the computer to go onto www.gamefaqs.com to look up guides and cheat codes for the Playstation 1 games I had been playing. I remember when I was in 7th grade, I went over to my friends house with a couple of my other friends. When we got there, my friends would take turns playing CounterStrike and I had no idea what this game was. Even though I was just watching, I could feel the excitement playing the game and I asked my friends how I could get the game. After I bought the game and installed it on my desktop, I started to spend hours and hours each day playing CounterStrike with my friends online. Luckily, no one else in my family was interested in using the computer so essentially it had become mine to use.