Thoughts from a Classic Gamer

I'll never forget the first time I saw the game Pong, it was the late 1970's and my aunt had one connected to her TV. The pixelated ball that you could "whack" with a pixelated paddle was sheer magic to my then 8 year old self. Never much of a T.V. watcher because passive entertainment was never really my thing ( I loved to make things, read and adventure) so this interactive television stuff was pretty cool.

A few years later I was begging my parents for coding lessons so I could make my own games using BASIC, and of course I dropped a lot of quarters in the arcade defeating centipedes and space invaders, and getting my Tetris on. When PCs became a more accessible thing in the late 1980's I was introduced to early RPG's on green screens which took no less than 30 floppy disks to play. In the 1990's I built my first tower, played simulators, RPGs and when the internet came along discovered the joy of creating websites in html.

This is the point in the story where most people say, "But you don't look like a computer nerd." And I roll my eyes... When I was asked to join the GIGABYTE Notebooks team in September, I was over the moon. After a 30 year career in sales and marketing, half of which has been spent helping people develop products and create online businesses, the idea of getting to work hands on with high performance computers that I didn't have to build was juicy. Even more exciting was that I have to use the laptops in order to help create content and yes, that means testing out all kinds of software on the AERO series (or finding other people to do it like our Creative Professionals) or play games on the Aorus series.

It's a tough job, but somebody has to do it. That's how I found myself spending my Thanksgiving break, gaming. That's right, I rolled up my sleeves, dusted off my Battlenet account and got down and dirty playing WoW. I played the current version, I run vanilla on my personal machine, but I wanted to experience the game play on the Aorus and that includes some pretty fantastic GPU action since the Aorus 15 X9 model I was playing on has the Nvidia RTX Studio 2070 cards. Holy ray tracing, Batman!

RTX Studio 2070 GPU offers amazing stutter free performance and real time ray tracing that is out of this world.

Now, I haven't been a hardcore gamer in about a decade, in fact I gave my original WoW account to my son about 7 years ago because I was having to focus on building a business and for the life of me couldn't figure out how to include being server ranked Resto Druid into my marketing campaigns. But, playing on the Aorus 15 X9 helped bring it all back, though this time I'm playing a Balance Druid, and I lost a long weekend in another world.

The shadows are incredible, it feels like something really is looming over you, the sound sharp, crisp and clear. The keyboard nimble and quick, super awesome button mashing happened. It was both nostalgic and inspiring to game with the latest gear. On one hand I got to relive some great gaming memories, on the other I marvel at how far technology has come in the past 42 years. Yeah, I play modern games, and I'm really glad I've gotten to watch the evolution of gaming ever since that funny little pixeled ball called Pong. Normally not one for cinematics (remember I'm not into TV) I found myself watching every cut scene with full attention because the clarity and realism of the graphics was almost 3D to the senses: Stunning, crisp and fascinating to watch.

Yeah, I could just talk specs, but that's boring. I wanted to play on the laptop, get a feel for the game play, test it spellcasting. Zero stutter, zero lag, zero slow down, just pure game time. It was a sweet return to the game, and now I'm not sure I can even try to play on my old gaming laptop. Like I said, it's a tough job, but somebody has to do it, after all, wouldn't you rather hear about how the machine plays?

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