Troy Benedict, RetroVertigo

My name is Troy Benedict, and I currently reside in Western MD. I've been a resident of the Washington D.C. Metropolitan area since 1990, and was a Virginia resident until just before I married my wife in 2005. We bought our first home last July, so I expect to be a Maryland resident for the next 30 years. I also have 3 children: my stepson is 10 (going on 11 in Feb), a 2-year old (going on 3 in April), and a 4-month old. My wife is my best friend, and I wouldn't be writing about games and playing them if it wasn't for her support and understanding. We will be celebrating our 5th anniversary this May!

I work in IT doing web development, computer tech support, etc. for a small company. It's a lot of fun, and the people are pretty awesome! I've always loved taking computers apart and fixing them, even back in the DOS and Windows 3.11 days. (Hey - you had to have a lot of knowledge about expanded and extended memory to get those Origin games to play correctly!)

My love of gaming started during the very early 80's. I grew up with games on the Apple //c and the Atari 2600, back when games were sometimes entirely text-based, and "good graphics" was an acclaim given to one game when their pixels were grouped together in a more visually appealing way than another game's pixels. I consider myself a gaming enthusiast, as I love to read about games, specifically the technology behind them, but I don't always get to dedicate a lot of time to actually playing them for extended periods of time. With three kids, family life tends to get in the way until around 9pm, but I wouldn't change it for the world.

I've been a member of Goozex for about a year and a half, and I absolutely love it! I don't want to sound like a commercial, but it's easily the best value I get when trading new and old games. I believe I first heard about Goozex's service through CheapAssGamer.com's podcast "The CAGCast" (excellent podcast, by the way!), and I found out about the opportunity to write for The Goozex Report through Goozex's twitter account (@Goozex). It's a privilege to be writing amongst so many other friendly and talented people! I've definitely made some good friends while writing for the site! Back in the early 2000's, I was a freelance writer with GameSpy for a short time contributing to PlanetDreamcast.com and PlanetPS2.com. It's good to be writing again about my favorite hobby!

Picking my favorite game of all-time is pretty hard to do, so I thought I'd pick some significant ones that are sticking out to me right now:

The Secret of Monkey Island (PC) - LucasArts and Sierra's adventure games got me back into PC gaming during the early 90's, after a long stint with Nintendo and Sega. This was back when games were on the verge of going from 16-color EGA graphics to 256-color VGA, and sound cards like AdLib and SoundBlaster were still in their infancy. The difference in playing through adventure games like Monkey Island in 16-color EGA with the internal speaker, and then going back after a PC upgrade and playing it in 256 colors using a SoundBlaster to pump out real music and sound effects was a significant leap forward in technology and it was amazing at the time! Plus, Monkey Island was a hilarious game! I enjoyed playing through the Special Edition version of The Secret of Monkey Island, released last summer, but nothing beats the nostalgia of the original experience!

Dragon Warrior (NES) - Dragon Warrior was the first RPG game I ever played. I had gone out on a limb when I picked up this title from Toys R Us, and grew to absolutely love it! Dragon Warrior opened my eyes to a slower-paced style of gaming, as most of the other games in the NES library were action-oriented. If it wasn't for Dragon Warrior, my taste in games might be quite a bit different today.

Disgaea Series (Various) - For the longest time I've tried to get into the strategy RPGs, specifically the "tactics" titles, like Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, and Jeanne D'arc, but have found all of them to be overwhelming and extremely difficult. I'm not big into games that have a lot of Japanese pop-culture/anime, as I find some of the personalities and caricatures to be downright annoying and over-the-top, but Disgaea has had a certain level of accessibility, heart, and depth that I certainly wasn't expecting, and it hooked me in! Throughout the past year, I've been enjoying playing both the first and second games on my DS and PSP, respectively. It's an excellent pick-up-and-play game! I even gave Disgaea 2 my Goozex Report Game of the Year for 2009. Perhaps, I'll go back to FF Tactics or Jeanne D'arc after playing the Disgaea games and see if I still have the same issues. Contact Me