On gaming names.

I renewed my credentials as a gamer yesterday. Got myself a brand spanking new PSP. That's Playstation Portable, for the uninitiated. While that automatically elevates me to levels of coolness you can only dream about, i decided to shed some light on gaming names, or handles, so that you can at least get a historical perspective into how all this coolness came to be.
Each gamer has a different policy. Some have the same handle for all the games the play. Some have a different handle for different games. And some run through names like toilet paper. Unless you were Sheryl Crow, in which case you would take much longer with a roll. I fall into the second category, I have a handle per game. And i'll tell you briefly about those.

The least dramatic of the lot is the one i'll start with. scarface. yeah, pretty normal, with allusions to violence and gore if you think hard enough. but the story behind that name starts in diu. where sonam kazi and i were trying our darnedest best to play real life NFS on two 50cc lunas. Of course, real life games, as i mentioned in the previous post, have no 'damage off' function, so i crashed and ended up with a cut on my temple (close enough to the eye to be sinister-ly cool). Of course, the game continued, even with one of my eyes swollen shut with blood in it. I started playing Medal of Honor Allied Assault right after that, and decided to honor my partially successful attempt at transcending the borders of gaming by adopting the handle 'scarface', as the scar from the wound was all i had to show for the effort.

Everyone remembers their first time. At multiplayer gaming that is. We had just started on the NFS Porsche version, and no one really knew who was playing with what handle. I decided to take advantage of that, and joined in with the name of mahajan, which was the name of a rather unpopular (then, at least) character on campus. And, well, not to boast, but in ten minutes time i was winning all the races. To add insult to injury, i never revealed my name as long as possible, and the rest kept thinking that it was the unsavoury mahajan that was rubbing their noses in the dust. Of course, soon as everyone came to know it was me, i quietly changed names. To what, i dont remember.

The one that stuck, as usual, is the one thats not really interesting. Unless ur into the same things as i am. 'Marshal Ustinov', the Age of Empires name, stuck. I was mentally protesting the lack of a russian civilisation on the conquerors expansion pack, and since i chose red for my color, i decided to choose a soviet name as well. i had been looking at pictures of russian ships for a model i was planning (eternally, unendingly) to build, and had looked at the marshal ustinov, which is a soviet slava class cruiser. This name somehow popped to my mind. I naturally assumed that the guy whom they named it after must be some great soviet hero named Ustinov, and therefore would be great for an aspiring AoE conqueror like me. Turns out that he never saw a battle, and was a political appointee to the grand post of 'Marshal of the Soviet Union'. My dismal progress with AoE (except as a member of the second floor team that ruled B-hostel) anyway meant that the name was apt. I fared about as well as Dmitry Ustinov would've done in battle. Some later victories in naval battles prompted me to think of changing to Admiral of the Soviet Fleet Kuznetsov, but turns out he was a politician as well, and would've done me no good.

And last, but not the least, was 'Chihuahua'. Those were the days when internet entertainment meant the Paris Hilton sex tape, and she carried a chihuahua... to my credit it got mistaken later for 'che guevara'. But really, thats not why i chose it. While i do admit that it was paris hilton who got me reading up on chihuahuas, i found out that these tiny dogs have no concept of their size. They dont know how small they are, and that doesnt stop them from taking on bigger dogs, and that is cool i thought. But i guess most of you never got past the sex tape comment and are probably googling it right now. Anyway, for the first few days at least, it was easy pickings for me as i could kill people when they were trying to spell my name on multiplayer chat :D

What am i trying to achieve with this post? tolerance. Like i said, i've gotten a PSP and have now transformed into an ultra snob at levels of coolness you can only dream about. While it may take anywhere from days to months for me to return to ground state, i would like you all to read this post and remember that i used to be a mildly amusing chap, and forget the current PSP fuelled asshole-ness.