sp1nz

1. Sonic the Hedgehog - First game I remember playing, I think it was year 1992 and I was 4 years old. My current nickname and some previous ones have subconscious inspiration from it. Who can deny the charm of the blue blur and the game during that era? 2. Super Mario Land - During my early gaming years I played my sister's Game Boy a lot but this game just sticks out, since I could actually beat it and it was among the early titles that I played on the system. 3. Shining Force II - Lent it from a friend and probably had it for at least a year or two. One of my absolute favorite games and a must play strategy rpg. Great accessibility, fantastical storyline filled with mythological races and magical places. Top notch soundtrack by one of my favorite composers: Motoaki Takenouchi. 4. DOOM II - I loved our IBM PC with random DOS games like Mortal Kombat, Creature Shock, Chip's Challenge etc. but most important ones we owned were DOOM and DOOM II, while both are iconic I like DOOM II more and I beat it on 2nd hardest difficulty when I was 8 years old. 5. Tomb Raider - I got PlayStation 1 for my 9th birthday in 1997; It was a complete surprise when I came home from school with a friend that day. The console was hooked up in the living room with Lara Croft proudly standing in the starting cave on the TV screen. Over the following week or two my friend visited me daily and we beat the game. 6. Pokémon Blue - I was addicted to this game, Blastoise was great but Pinsir became my favorite Pokémon. I remember beating the game and leveling some of my Pokémon to 100 even but then I heard about the ominous MissingNo. I can still remember encountering and capturing it and the game getting bugged forever on my save. I wasn't happy with the glitching Hall of Masters and things, so I got another copy on top of the haunted one. 7. Final Fantasy VII - I lent this from a friend of a friend but he wanted it back quite fast; at the time I was stuck in the part where Yuffie does some shenanigans. Fast forward to me being a teenager and having bought a copy of FF VII and FF IX from another friend: I had my niece visiting and I started playing FF VII again and she started watching me play, so we made a deal that I would only play when she was visiting. We beat the game over a long period of time. Good times. 8. Diablo II - I had played Diablo before but Diablo II took my interest to a higher plane. I was 12 at this point in time in the year 2000. I had 90+ LVL characters in softcore, I had 60+ LVL characters in hardcore that succumbed to my PC getting long-ass lagspikes that would conveniently end when my character had died in the game. I had a shared 88 LVL PvP necromancer with a friend. I lost my first account for downloading some sketchy program and it being a keylogger (lesson well learned), and with that account I lost the legendary name "Executioner" that I had gotten reserved in the early days on my barbarian. This game made me get into online socializing, I was friends with 20-36 year old guys and we played HC together and stuff, one of them was the one I shared the PvP necro with, he had 99 LVL HC Assassin too. 9. Medal of Honor: Allied Assault: Spearhead - that's a mouthful, after my Diablo II craze I proceeded to play this first person shooter and got really good at it. My first nickname in there was Viper. One day while playing on a public server I got to chatting with this Danish guy and we decided to make a clan together - I think I invented the name for it: "the Hollow Company". We recruited some friends and some randoms, we just dicked around at first but then got into some competitive playing too but there was clear divide between skill with some of the older Danish guys and some of us younger Finnish guys etc. so at some point it was time for me and some others to move on. Over the years I was in the roster of multiple top clans for a little while; I was in the british fc:uk clan as in fight club uk with the nickname CronoSS, then I was in the dutch KoD clan as in Kill or Die and then I settled with Spinus nickname and joined a stable Finnish clan for a long time (later known as D^Zero as in Damage Zero). Eventually my nick got taken on IRC and I quickly made something more unique called sp1nzoK, it lasted me a long time and while unique still, it felt bit off in the recent years, so I shortened it for my steam few years ago and try to get it in new places now instead of my old version albeit being non-unique. Anyway back to my "career" in MoH:AA:SH - the friend I played through Tomb Raider with was one of the members in the Hollow Company that left with me and eventually we joined 2 of the strongest Finnish clans with kind of a rivalry, he joined GreBer as in Green Berets and I joined D^Zero but it was around a time when the clan had an older name that escapes me. Me and that friend also made a clan that would host a lot of our school friends from the same municipality, we're talking like 10-20 players in the clan. We called it Clan OwlaSala, an antiquated version of our municipality Oulunsalo's name. We were great team in 2v2 with that guy, we let lower skilled members play 2v2 too but still were high rank with the clan in 2v2 ladder. (check uploaded image). I also was member of Team Finland on ClanBase for a while in the game. When I was still playing in D^Zero my "career" highlight was winning bronze in ClanBase Medal of Honor: Allied Assault: Spearhead 5v5 Objective Realism Europe 2004 Summer Cup. Our bronze match was against KoD and we had to play on their strongest map/our weakest map Bridge in that match too but we pulled it off. 10. World of Warcraft - I think I accumulated over 10k hours in the game: Vanilla: My first character was a human rogue called Aurelia on Sunstrider realm. I joined some MC raiding guild, name of which escapes me and from there upgraded to a guild named Unknown Entity (still around but nowadays on Sylvanas realm). I was one of the top dps due to my +5 swords human racial the rogue officer at 16~ years of age and was even a raid leader once in Naxxramas 40. Our guild got to 4 Horsemen with other wings cleared before the Burning Crusade was upon us, so we ran out of time to clear vanilla raid content. The Burning Crusade: I rerolled to freshly expansion acquired alliance Shaman for the guild, a draenei called Crescenda. I started doing PvP with one guildie (our battlegroup was Blackout in Europe) and we got some good results (check uploaded image). Our 2v2 team was Resto Shaman+Arms Warrior, 3v3 was Resto Shaman+Arms Warrior+Rogue (can't remember specc), 5v5 team comp I can't really remember, I think same 3 as in our 3v3 + priest and hunter or something. I got 2 PvP Season 1 Gladiator mounts as in Swift Nether Drake, 1 from 2v2 and 1 from 3v3, so I had to delete the other one from my mail box. I raided until Kaelthas Sunstrider and then took a long break from the frustration with not being able to clear that fight. Unknown Entity proceeded to clear stuff without me naturally. Wrath of the Lich King: A friend of mine brought me a copy of the new expansion, so my break ended here. I started on Horde this time and joined his guild. I played Tauren Death Knight but not sure what my name was. I took even bigger break than last time quite early on in the expansion. When I came back I migrated the Death Knight to alliance and joined another friend's guild, it was called In Omnia Paratus, here I can remember my nickname was Ascarian and I picked the human race for my DK. We beat the 10 man raid contents and that was pretty fun. Cataclysm: Played a tiny bit at start with my Death Knight, then got bored and took yet a longer break than before. After that break I joined Unknown Entity again with bad blue gear from 5 man dungeons. They were doing some Heroic 25 Blackwing Descent's, so I joined a couple of raids despite my lacking gear, since I would get upgrades so fast and was "trusted good player" and wasn't doing bad but I noticed instantly how stressful I found hardcore raiding, so I quit shortly after and haven't touched WoW since. That's a decent timeline starting from me playing my first game and up to me being drafted to Finnish army.

Some of my favorites:

Definitely Vectrex for me. I have had bad experiences with people shipping heavier hardware, so not really keen on searching for a Vextrex unit online. Maybe someday.

Depends on the rarity, price and where/what the damage is. I got an uncommon SNES CIB for free that had flap torn off with some of the side on top of a deal, I might upgrade it in future but I can tolerate the damage. Extreme sunfade, large chunks of box torn scraped or torn off are very off-putting. I don't really like a flap being ripped off either but I can usually live with it, if the box is generally good shape otherwise. Generally I go for at least good condition CIBs but I'm not unhappy to own a couple of more beat up games when the price is right.

Damn. I own many Super Fighter Team products and was thinking about getting the licensed Vixen 357 eventually. All the best on their dev efforts in any case.

Howdy. Only had a handful of posts on NA (under the alias sp1nzoK) but was browsing the forum quite often. Started gaming with Sonic the Hedgehog at 4 years old in 1992, if my memory server me right. The collecting bug hit me around early 2012 after buying some nostalgic Mega Drive and PS2 games on a whim. I have no clue what happened to my childhood Mega Drive collection but most of my other stuff, mostly consisting of PlayStation 1 & 2, I offloaded on my sister's family at one point - some of which I bought back after starting collecting. I went way over my head with collecting but it's more relaxed these days with money tied up in other areas of life. Not really into the speculative/investing side of things, I usually plan to keep what I buy for life and to have an extensive gaming library. Some of my favorite systems are Mega Drive, Super Nintendo, Game Boy, Master System, PlayStation 1, PlayStation 2, DOS and 3DS. I love obscure region variants, such as Korean market Nintendo and SEGA items. -Ville