I blame it on broadband. Signing up to the service about three years ago I was promised ‘ultra-fast speeds’, ‘blazing connectivity’ and ‘online gaming like you’ve never experienced’. All three were true I guess. Broadband changed the way I played and enjoyed games in a way I could never have imagined.

I’m a gamer at heart and have been for as long as I can remember. I guess it kicked off with the Atari 2600 – endless hours of fun playing on it against my Dad or my sister; River Raid, Seaquest & Pitfall were by far my favourites. Over the course of the next fifteen years or so technology and gaming changed in ways which no one could ever have imagined. As a gamer I excitedly embraced these changes as I saw the wonderful experiences unfolding before me.

It was 1994 when I first started gaming on the PC and between then and 2002 I built up an enviable catalogue of games. 2002 marked the installation of my first broadband connection and the start of a gradual, but very real, downhill slope on which my enthusiasm for games took a real battering.

Even on dialup I’d been aware of the warez scene and knew how easily obtainable pretty much everything was. I’d downloaded a few of the smaller apps but never really bothered with games, even a small CD’s worth was just too painful. Once on broadband everything changed of course. I discovered P2P, Usenet and in later years bitTorrent – suddenly every piece of software I ever wanted could be mine within a few hours. I was never a contributor to the scene, purely a leecher. Combine this with the fact that I was just leaving University with a mountain of debt and you can see where I’m going.

All of a sudden games were not featuring high in my monthly budget. Why would they, I can get them for free after all? Sure, I’d still buy the odd game which I just HAD to play online, but 99% of my stuff was ripped off. I even sold my back catalogue – partly because I needed the money but mainly because I didn’t play the games anymore and I knew if the urge struck me I could just download them again. Before I knew it I had CDs and custom DVDs piling up on my shelves – I never took count of how many games I got but I guess it was a lot. Unfortunately, I could easily count how many I’d completed without running out of fingers. I was spending more time downloading and organising my collection than actually playing them and herein lay the problem.

I knew I was losing my interest in gaming and attributed it to various things. I worked in the IT industry at the time and thought that spending my working life on computers was leaving me less inclined to want to play in my spare time. In fact, only now when writing this article I realise how ridiculous that reasoning was – after all I was still spending time on my PC, just not gaming. Maybe it was because I was entering a new relationship then and wanted to concentrate on that? This argument was valid at first but when I was one, then two years into that relationship, why was I still using it as an excuse?

The whereabouts of my gaming mojo was actually shown to me by a small, glossy black piece of hardware made by Sony. When the PSP was first released in the UK there were major shortages. This annoyed me, as I hadn’t pre-ordered one but as a self confessed hardware whore and still under the illusion that I was a hardcore gamer, I wanted one. I bought a couple of games for it, Ridge Racer and Lumines but couldn’t place my hands on the hardware. After a couple of weeks of searching and working myself up into an excitable frenzy, I finally decided to import one from LikSang.

I was in love. With the PSP and with gaming again. Ridge Racer was ok, but I spend hours and hours playing Lumines – the tingle down the back of my neck was my mojo returning. Sadly, it wasn’t to last long. I was trawling one of my regular sites on my PC and came across PSP games. It hadn’t even occurred to me that you could download PSP games, how would you put them on a UMD after all? What’s that… you can run ISOs off the memory stick? Oh…

The Japanese PSP I had was shipped with v1.51 firmware. Within a week of owning it I’d flashed it to v1.5 and had pretty much every game ever released. I barely touched the PSP again. I’d try a game for ten minutes, get bored then try the next one. I couldn’t settle on a game I liked as there was always a new one to try instead. In the end, I got so frustrated with this that the PSP was relegated to a drawer in my study. I’d still download games for it though, just like I’d download games for the PC and not play them. My girlfriend asked me why I wasn’t using my PSP anymore - she’d seen how exciting I was about getting it, how much money and spent on it and couldn’t quite grasp how I’d gotten bored so quickly. Having a short attention span isn’t in my nature. I’m a dedicated person and when I set my mind on something, I tend to get it done. This applies to most everything in my life, except playing games it seemed. Why the difference here?

I thought about it while I was trying to sleep that night. When the answer hit me, well, I can’t describe the feeling I got next. It was like someone had just unlocked a door, a door I’d always been aware of in the periphery of my vision. A door I could’ve unlocked myself had I just turned and tried it. I hadn’t though, I needed someone to do it for me, to let whatever was on the other side of the door grab my attention and force me to look at it. The annoying thing was that it was all so bloody obvious now I look back on it.

It’s the old adage about having ‘too much of a good thing’. I was spoiled basically, simple as that. I could have any game I wanted, at any time and because of this I was attaching absolutely no value to any game I downloaded. I’m not just talking financial value either; it’s so much more than that. It’s the research before you buy a game. Looking at the screenshots and videos, reading previews, reviews, getting your pre-order in then waiting for it to land on the doormat. Tearing open the parcel and gettting greeted with the waft of plastic from the cellophane. Rip it open, struggle to get the DVD out of the box without snapping it, stick it in your DVD drive then curse when it doesn’t work. Calm down a bit then put it back in your DVD drive the right way up and wait for it to install. It’s all about the build up baby.

Once I knew where my mojo had gone, I swore to get it back. I knew the only way to do that was to operate a strict ‘anti-warez’ policy with no exception. My PSP was flashed to v2.5. Sure, this did me out of homebrew software but it also did me out of rips. Its usage has multiplied infinitely now. On the PC front all my games were uninstalled and I decided any game I wanted to revisit I would have to buy, no exceptions. Any game I had a pre-order for, I couldn’t download if it was released on the scene early – that would defeat the point of the build up. The wait for a game is agonising, but it’s also an important part of the experience.

I know there’re plenty of people out there who won’t understand what I’m going on about. They’re plenty of gamers who buy the majority of their software but will download the odd title to ‘trial’ it, then purchase it if they like it. If I want to trial a game, I’ll get a demo. If there’s no demo but it looks like my sort of thing then maybe I’ll take risk, or maybe I’ll wait for a bit. Whatever happens, I won’t download it.

So how’s my gaming life at the moment? Well, I’m now playing games through until the end and I’m enjoying them every bit as much as I did when I was sat down in front of my 2600. I’ve just bought Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 on Steam, there’s 28 minutes to go until it’s downloaded and I’ve got the slight sensation of butterflies in my tummy. I’d say it’s good.