Personnel Files – Tony

Name: Tony Chandler

Age: 34

Current location: Hemel Hempstead

First gaming memory: My memories are mostly a confused mess, and I often can’t remember what happened yesterday. I do remember a really old game, though, called Radar Rat Race on Vic 20. For those of you too young to remember the Vic 20, it look exactly like a Commodore 64, but had even less memory. 5kb, instead of the later Commodore 64’s massive 64kb. The game was on a  cartridge which you had to slot into the back of the computer, and that added a giant 16kb of additional memory. It was a gloriously simple game where you had to race around a maze avoiding rats that tried to kill you. It was a bit like a very bad Pac-Man, now I think about it.

Least favourite genre: This is a toss up between sports games and role-playing games, but I’m going to come down on the side of sports games, just because practically everything is part RPG these days, and I guess it is growing on me a little.

Favourite gaming snack: I don’t tend to eat much in front of the console, but my wife quite often breaks out bars of 70% cocoa dark chocolate and leaves them in front of me, so if I’m nibbling on anything it’ll be something like that.

Reaction to dying in game: This ties in with my “rage face” picture – I’m not generally an angry gamer, so I tend to do the “controller facepalm” as in the picture if I’m getting frustrated with a game. In general, if a game has me doing that too much I’ll just stop playing it – I’ve got far too many games to play to put up with crap that makes me angry in a game.

Favourite game character: Nathan Drake. I just spent ages thinking about that, and realised that although loads of games have good or interesting characters, Nathan Drake is pretty much the only really likeable one I could think of. I could just imagine going for a pint with him and hearing him shout “Oh crap!” as his bar stool collapses.

Most hated game character: Bit of a cheat, this one, but the answer is any dickwad character that you have to babysit for a mission, while they do bloody idiotic things like run in front of gun wielding enemies, or stuff live grenades down their pants. You know the sort.

Favourite game ever: I’m very much hoping that this will be out of date very soon, but I’m going to have to say GTA IV. I know a lot of people thought it was too po-faced, or didn’t like the way the cars drove, etc. but to me it was, and still is, such a perfect game. I played this for hundreds and hundreds of hours, both playing and replaying the campaign and a boatload of multiplayer with Ready Uppers. I even have it on both PS3 and Xbox 360. That said, I virtually never play it now, preferring Battlefield 3 for my online shenanigans, but when GTA V is out, Monday nights will once again be dedicated to non-stop GTA action.

Tony: I spent a bit of time thinking about this, and sadly all the vehicles I really would like to own from video games are just real life vehicles. I’d love to the have the M1 Abrams main battle tank from Battlefield, as I could literally park it anywhere. Or a Lamborghini from any manner of racing games. If it has to be a made up one, I’ll go for the Infernus super car from the GTA games: low, mean and super fast. Or the Euro Classic LM from Burnout Revenge, which is sort of like a Le Mans car.

Tony: This is a tough one. I adore the Pixeljunk Eden soundtrack, which I bought from the PSN, it’s a cool chilled out bassy style of electronic music, I listen to it quite a lot on my iPhone. I also really like the Philip Glass classical piece of music that was on the very first trailer for GTA IV – even the awesome trailers for GTA V haven’t been as cool because they didn’t have that music.

Tony: Most of the places I like being in game would be awful to actually visit: Liberty City, the battle zones in Battlefield, all pretty much a no go. I think I’d go and pay a visit to the first Assassin’s Creed game world, so it would still be a real place, but I could effectively go back in time and see how different things were back then.