Hello fellow HG admins, members and recruits!
I'm a new very old player, hoping to become an official member; I'm currently a draft player [-hg-].
I say "old player" because I first started with Half-Life Counter Strike, back in 2000, when it was first released. By the end of 2003, we were playing CS 1.6 on the Steam network and having CS LAN parties at work. By early 2004, all gaming was banned at work (with good reason - we were all becoming too distracted by it). I abandoned gaming altogether for many years. A few years ago, I decided to see what the new FPS games were like. I tried Battlefield (not sure which version anymore), and wasn't very fond of it. In particular, the respawning of players changed the game dynamics - no longer could you "defeat" the other team by killing off its players, because they simply kept coming to life (I'm not much for zombie games). As a result, I dropped gaming altogether.
I'm also not someone who believes in spending money on a "gaming" computer - I use my computer for software development primarily, not for gaming. As a result, I neither need nor want a high-performance video card (or the fans associated with a high-performance "gaming" system). All I need is a computer capable of running my IDE tools, along with some basic web tools. Most of my development is offloaded to remote servers (dedicated customer-owned servers co-located at major data centers)... so the need for speed on my home system simply isn't there.
To give you an idea of my age, the first computer game I ever played was Adventure (by Scott Adams). It was an entirely text-based game (not even ASCII art... just sentences for output). I played it on a Digital Equipment Corporation TOPS-10 computer system that took up an entire room and required dedicated air conditioning. This was back in the late 70's/early 80's, while a college student at USC (University of Southern California). I was soon introduced to Space Wars running on a PDP-8 computer with a vector screen. If you click on the Space Wars (aka Star Trek) hyperlink, it will take you to a page showing the commands... I think you'll get a laugh of out if!
Around 1986, my wife back then agreed to support me in a three day (Fri-Sun) MegaWars marathon on CompuServe. She brought me breakfast, lunch and dinner during that time, where I stopped only for bathroom breaks and 8 hours/day of sleep. Back then, CompuServe was a dial-up timesharing network (not GUI-based... imagine that, if you can). I obtained the second highest score (still very distant from the highest score, held by "Uncle Megawars" - whomever he was). The weekend bill for this marathon (onlline charges) was somewhere in the $225 range! After that, I was "gamed out" - the marathon was what I needed to get gaming out of my system!
Moving on to the present, approximately three years ago I retired. I'm still involved in software and business development, at my own pace. Recently (Christmas 2013), some gaming friends convinced me to take advantage of some special offers, and purchase Battlefield 4 (64 bit). I did, and again didn't like the gameplay compared to what I was used to. As a result, after trying Team Fortress II, League of Legends and others, I decided to give Counter Strike Source a try. Well, since then, here I am!
I play almost exclusively on the HellsGamers CS:S Dust2 Deathmatch #2 server. I usually wait for human players, then join the game. I enjoy the fast pace of the deathmatch game, along with the familiarity of the dust2 map. I look forward to playing some regular (non-deathmatch) scrims, once I feel good enough. So far, my player game stats are coming along just fine!
I would enjoy having you join me on the above server... feel free to send me a "friend" request through Steam... I'm also "lewpayne" (click to friend me) on there.
PS - In case you're interested, my home (and gaming) computer consists of a Shuttle DS61 commercial system mounted on a ViewSonic VX2703MH-LED monitor (with HDMI input). I built the DS61 using an Intel Core i3-3225 (which has an integrated HD4000 graphics engine), 16GB (8GB x 2) of Crucial DDR3 DRAM, a MyDigitalSSD BP4 256GB mSATA solid state boot drive, and an HGST 1TB 7200 RPM TravelStar secondary HDD. No graphics card is needed, thanks to the Core i3 HD4000 graphics engine. It runs all the games I play just fine, especially when optimized using Ben's CS:S config file. I run Windows 7 (64 bit), FreeBSD 10.0-REL, and Ubuntu Desktop Edition. For normal work, I use the Logitech MK520 low-power wireless combo keyboard/mouse. For gaming, I turn off the mouse and plug in my Zalman FG-1000 FPSgun, so watch out!