rcher
(pronounced Archer)
Archer is my gamertag.
As a kid, I used to play a game called HeroFighter - DAY AND NIGHT, in which my favourite character, Shawn, has archery abilities. This has stayed with me ever since.
The blue ring
This is the logo for God of War, a legendary voyage through the worlds of Norse gods and monsters in which you play as Kratos, a Spartan warrior. This game deserves its own blog post. For the time being, let’s concentrate on the symbol.
The symbol itself is the Greek letter Ω which represents war. It’s modelled after Jörmungandr, the world serpent. The letters on it spell “RAGNAROK” and represent the 9 realms.
Personally, I see this as a representation of ruthless pragmatism, which is one of my work ethics. It is a method of problem-solving or decision-making that prioritises practicality and efficiency over moral or ethical considerations, and is frequently associated with a concentration on reaching goals and success at whatever cost.
What has gaming been like for me?
As you can see, gaming has always been a part of my life. I enjoy it and am proficient at it. I’ll dedicate the rest of this page to write about that.
- Early introduction - PS1
My first experience was probably the Snakes and Space Invaders on the black and white Nokia phone but I was properly introduced to this life when my grandfather gifted me a Sony PS1. My two top games were - Crash Bash and T’ai Fu. While Crash Bash was set in a colorful world, cute characters - an actually fun to play environment, T’ai Fu would literally give me the chills. I would have NIGHTMARES about it. An early realization that gaming isn’t necessarily stress busting. - PS2
Fast forward to 8th standard I got the Sony Playstation 2. I remember playing Prince of Persia - Sands of time. This was my first introduction to Ubisoft and I didn’t know at the time but this would be the first of many many RPGs I would get my hands dirty with. - I get a good Graphics card on my PC
I always had a standard computer at my home and had played the basics - Mario, Road Rash, Dave… you know the rest. After 12th, my laptop had a decent graphics card upgrade and I could run some heavier stuff. RPGs were my thing then and my friend pirated the Assasin’s Creed franchise. Ubisoft really knocked it out of the park this time with everything - the storyline, graphics, textures, gameplay, combat. I was mesmerized to such an extent that I would go on to play each game in this franchise for the next 5 years or so. And when my system’s GPU started to give in, I sneaked my way into IITD’s vision lab - which had systems with the most powerful graphic cards - and spent my second year summer gaming there.
One thing I knew by this time was multiplayer games would fascinate me. We would play Mini Militia on our phones throughout our first year. In 2019, I got hooked into this concept of Battle Royale - where multple squads spawn on different parts of the map and tried to defeat enemy squads. I downloaded Fortnite and Apex Legends - both free to play games - a blessing for broke college undergrads. They were good but between high latency internet and ever throttling GPU of my system, I gave up getting a win at these. - COVID-19 era
A group of 10 was budding. We were friends of friends of friends of friends (yes I really had 5th degree connections here). We would get together EVERY NIGHT from September 2020 to January 2021 and play Among Us for HOURS! I would go as far as to call this my coping mechanism during the pandemic. Some of these 5th degree connections are very close friends now (it’s 2023 and I believe we will continue to be). Here is our group picture <3:
- PS5
You know about the curse of adulthood, right? As you grow up, you’ll have the means to do all your favourite things, but you won’t find them as exciting as you used to. Something like this happened to my gaming life as well.
I bought a Sony Playstation 5 for myself in early 2022 to indulge my passion for RPGs and multiplayer games. With an excellent graphics processor and decent internet connection, I would play competitive Apex Legends - reached Platinum tier in one of the ranked seasons. A squad in Apex is 3 players and I had found my squad in Covid (not the Among Us group). This was another game I’d play each night.
As pandemic ended and life happened this got lesser and lesser. It’s not very bad though. We still sit together some Fridays and it does get as intense as it used to. Other times when I just want the day for myself, I’d sit with some RPG like God of War and immerse myself in it. Don’t get me wrong. It still feels amazing, but there is something to say about the feeling of having really conquered something when the broke undergrad me would torrent a game, cross his fingers as he tries to launch the game and the game would actually run (after having seen 100 failures of this cycle). Now I just pay for the damn thing.