Hi,
My story is kind of a weird one, actually.
For the longest time I hated, absolutely hated the idea of needing headphones to play games. Consider I grew up around sighted people who were always playing games on their DS's, or their nintendo wii's or whatever else, always with the, often quite unique, music blaring perfectly loud and clear. I wanted more than anything to be like them, to share my gaming experiences and be able to talk with them about them like they always did to me. I was told in, I think it must have been the summer of 2014, about what could only have been audio defence, though it's name was never stated at the time, by a human from my county council who used to always come into my primary school and help me learn braille and things. I just remember hearing about this new zombie shooter that was in beta, getting all excited, then finding out that you needed headphones to play. That, was enough to turn me off completely, a fact I still regret to this day considering what happened to all of the somethin else games.
Fast forward to the middle of 2015, I was introduced to the blindfold games by a fellow student at my school, I had started at NCW by this point. I still had a hatred of playing games with headphones, but I was at least willing to give the concept a try now, this was after I'd failed repeatedly to get into various mainstream games. I remember playing blindfold racer, being generally turned off by it's annoying voiceover, lack of actual car sounds and general dullness. After that I didn't really bother to investigate further, I figured that all audiogames must be like this.
Fast forward again to around September / October 2015, I was told about this site by another small human at my school, potterspotter13 on here. I remember looking at it, I was really curious at this point. I don't remember much, but I do remember seeing a lot of stuff about the passing of Jim Kitchen, and when I looked briefly through the database, I never bothered to look at the forum much, literally all of the games I saw were for PC, which instantly meant they were a no go for me, the only computer I had at this point was a laptop for school use, which was also a non admin system, because of course. Also we were restricted from accessing, like, anything on it's internal HDD, we were still using HDD's in 2015, don't ask, meaning we were almost entirely restricted to using network folders for storage only, which, well, laaaaaaaaaag. So again, I decided audiogames just weren't for me.
Several things happened after this.
First, I received my first laptop, an 11 inch, early 2015 macbook air with a dual core, hyperthreaded, thank god, 1.6 GHz Intel Core i5-5250U, 4 GB ram, and a 128 GB SSD. I didn't actually understand most of this at the time, but I knew that this was a far cry from my old school machine. For the record, that laptop is still rocking! 1 of it's internal speakers broke somehow, still don't know how that happened, and the escape key died when some idiot thought it would be a good idea to spray disinfectant all over the keyboard, but aside from that, the machine runs just as well as it did when it was new, minus the battery, I really need to get that replaced. It's running ubuntu mate now, I don't use it as my primary any more, but it served me faithfully all the way until Christmas 2018 when I got this HP.
Second, somewhere in the middle of 2016, I was introduced to a blind swordsman by another friend of mine, tobias101 / zeus on here. I was listening to him play it on skype and remember being really interested, but y mac was running OS 10 as it was at this point, and I knew not the first thing about disk partitioning, bootcamping was certainly too complicated a process for my 12 year old brain. It wouldn't be until a few months later that I would manage to figure out VMWare fusion and get a windows 7 VM up and running.
Later, much later, in roughly late October / early November 2016, following at least 1 failed mac OS update, a complete reinstall of the OS, etc etc, me and Tobias discovered Chris Wright's youtube channel, or blindgamer95 as he was known then. At that point we were mostly interested in his TTS skits, which we thoroughly enjoyed at the time. This was also around the time we discovered team talk and started hanging around on, mostly, the US server, we spoke to so many different people then, most of which I haven't heard from since. In January 2017 however, we decided to do a lot more poking around. This was how we went on to discover a hole bunch of audiogames. My setup was less than optimal at that point, I was restricted to, mainly, shitty windows XP VM's, anything else just lagged too much for me, and of course VM's will always have issues with audio latency anyway. Tobias had a desktop however, and that was how I started playing so many different games, just borrowing his machine for small stretches of time. Those first few months were, extremely different, and thinking back on it, they were probably some of the happiest times of my life, this was following a quite serious bout of depression I'd been experiencing for the last couple years following my introduction into boarding school.
I don't remember exactly when this happened, but at some point during this period of audiogame experimentation I discovered BK3 It was completely unlike anything I'd ever played before, and after Tobias bought the translation dictionary, he shared it with me, we were naughty children, + I didn't actually get a bank account until June that year.
Later, a good few months later, we discovered redspot and TK. Originally we were obht less than infused, neither of us much liked the idea of playing against other humans online, not much caring for the competitive nature of such things However, a little bit later, Tobias did start playing Redspot, and I, tried, to follow suit.
Remember I mentioned my hatred of playing games with headphones at the beginning of this little essay? Yeah, that was still going strong, I would literally only use headphones if I absolutely had to. For the most part I used a bluetooth speaker, which, I'm pretty sure was actually mono, though in games like BK 3 I didn't actually need stereo for the most part anyway. Redspot though? Yeah, very different story. Also I kept being kicked off by the speedhack detection, and this was back when it used that horrible shrill sound. I was not impressed, and stayed far, far away from it for a long time after that. I had a similar experience with TK, just without the obnoxious sound, it'd already been replaced with a dialog at this point, though the sound it originally used wasn't actually half bad.
Then August 2017 happened. I'd heard a lot about BK3 chaos addition at this point, though I'd never actually been able to find it or get into it. This time, however, I set out to finally get the bloody thing working, and eventually I managed it, eventually finding it on some Japanese audiogame's wiki I'd stumbled across half accidentally and used google translate to translate. This would have been shortly before, or possibly after, I registered to this forum on August 12th. You can still find all of my original posts in the BK3 topic, at the time I literally just registered to ask BK 3 related questions, I never intended to interact with the wider community, not, to my mind at least, having much of a reason to. That kind of fell on it's face and died in September when I rediscovered TK and redspot, but that, + everything that happened there after, is pretty much history at this point.
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!