Brother’s Ballard
It was April 2017 when I got my brother into Warframe. It had been one of my few birthday wishes, that my siblings play video games with me (because I’m a boring, indecisive person) for a few hours. Out of the two of them, I expected neither of them to continue playing at all. Warframe, as far as I was concerned, was much more niche. More like asking someone to play Dota 2 over playing Overwatch. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea.
Well it turns out it totally was brother’s cup of tea.
To the point that he has nearly 1700 hours in Warframe despite starting at least 6 months after I did. To the point that he’s on his way to Mastery Rank 25. He isn’t one of those folks who get to MR25 in a couple of months but he certainly got a hang of Warframe and effortlessly plays through missions.
But that’s besides the point. Warframe is one of only a handful of games that I’ve introduced my brother to. Most games I’ve played are games that my brother suggested to me.
Left 4 Dead, my first game purchase and the game that made me create a Steam account? It was a suggestion from my brother. He thought it looked cool. I thought it looked good as well. So I got that and played it.
Garry’s Mod? I’d seen my brother play it. While it was me who chose the Team Fortress 2 and Garry’s Mod bundle over the Counter-Strike: Source and Garry’s Mod bundle, if I hadn’t seen brother building stuff, shooting hordes of NPCs with nigh infinite ammo and creating explosions in gm_Construct, I probably wouldn’t have ended up getting the game. Or Team Fortress 2, because back then Garry’s Mod required a game using the HL2 engine to work.
In fact, brother got me into Team Fortress 2 as well. I don’t even remember what I saw in particular that made me want to play, but I’d watch him play Goldrush or Badwater or something like that. Combined with a couple of other people also getting into TF2, how could I say no? I already owned the game, why was I not playing?
TF2 hooked me in. I got at least 1500 hours of fun from that game. Even if I don’t really play any more.
It’s strange, how we get to these places. If my brother hadn’t shown me a game of Badwater, I probably never would have gotten into TF2, I never would have found SPUF, I wouldn’t have started using the name Medic, I wouldn’t have become popular in any way on SPUF and this blog probably wouldn’t have lasted very long, as aabicus probably would have run out of steam and might not have been able to fix and maintain the blog after it went down several times.
In the mean time, brother turned into a mean multi-class player, playing everything from Soldier and Scout to Sniper and Spy, and having a pretty good game sense for every class. He also traded his way upwards, sporting a keen fashion sense and multiple unusual hats. To the point that he’s actually capable of cashing out one day. Sure it’s Dota-2-Unusual-Couriers levels of insane, but still. I ended up wasting all my TF2 money converting keys into Steam money to buy games and Tennogen with.
Basically my brother introduced me to gaming like a real person, while also being a pretty chill gamer guy himself.
Even if he is a massive smeghead.
Happy birthday, bro.