PS2

I have been an avid gamer since my parents first bought us a PS2 for Xmas in 2005, bundled with that PS2 was a copy of Ratchet & Clank 2: Locked & Loaded.

This game series would become my childhood, but early on, our copies of Ratchet & Clank 1/3 stopped working on oiur console, number 2 was the only disc that worked.

As a result of this, I smashed out Ratchet & Clank 2's story 13 times, once with a 7 repeat medal and then with an 8 repeat medal, on account of my younger brother accidentally deleting my save while trying to copy it, but we got back eventually.

Coming into high school I was introduced to Steam, and the many games available on its marketplace.

At the time I only had the school issued Macbook, so I was VERY limited to which games I could play.

Eventually I got my first Steam game, Garry's Mod. The sandbox nature of the game changed my life, and my friends showed me more Valve games:

Counter-Strike: Source, Portal and Half Life 2, of those 3, Portal and Counter-Strike clicked with me the most, the puzzle aspect of Portal, and the competitive shooter that was CS:S was my first FPS game.

PC

In Q3 2012, Mum allowed me an entry-level budget to purchase a gaming rig for the house, I went nuts specing out different machines but I struggled to keep it under budget.

I also had a very poor understanding of PC's in that early stage, and despite watching a fair few informational videos about part picking, I put together a rather unbalanced rig, with a bit of an under-powered CPU paired with a very entry-level GPU.

My first MAJOR upgrade was a simple one, but you could probably guess what it was based on the specs of my first rig below, but I eventually replaced the G630 with an i5 3570.

Going from dual core to quad core, to this day potentially stands as the most significant performance difference from a SINGLE PART upgrade. At the time my games were Skyrim and Battlefield 3, which even though I was using a 550 Ti, showed a massive change in performance after this upgrade.