Happy New Year!

Dear friends, I wish you a Happy New Year!

I'm glad that all of you are here to listen to my old farts about old games, to hear the opinion of one oldfag about new games. Thank you - I know that sometimes I am boring, that I have a strange way of looking at things - but I write everything from the heart and from the bottom of my heart, without changing the truth in order to please everyone.

In my gaming life there was one of the New Year holidays, which for some reason I remember for a long time - I celebrated these holidays in different ways, but almost never played games during them, but that year was special.

Unreal Tournament III came out and it was incredibly cool for me - I played all the previous games in the local computer club, where different people gathered, from cyberathletes to ordinary users and everyone played games, talked, and drank beer and vodka, smoked directly in the hall - at that time it was still allowed by the laws of our country. These were amazing, absolutely insane places, located in basements, with dirty walls, with the smell of tobacco that could be smelled from a kilometer away. They were nasty looking hangouts, but it was very, very cool - people loved games, talked about games, played games there. The gaming culture of Russia at that time was not developed - if an adult said that he loves games, they would look at him like a madman, because "only children play games" - these places were not like that. Everyone there understood each other. And it was in such a club that I managed to meet the new year in 2007, playing Unreal III - and it was just amazing. I gathered friends, there were still the same crazy gamers in the club, for whom the onset of the new year did not become an obstacle to visiting the club - we just played all night, had fun, smoked there.

It may seem strange to you, but I miss those dirty rooms where it all was - modern (few) gaming clubs are trying to show that they are cool with their whole appearance, to sell themselves - and those rooms did not need it. These rooms were the spirit of the time, the quintessence of the soul, the last stronghold of living communication of living communication.

Even now I would like to repeat that new year - but I'm afraid it will never happen again.