Hey all! Persephone here, known as Green Bug on the old forums. Stranded just north of Cincinnati, Ohio after our local game shop closed down. (I was away at college, it wasn’t my fault!) I am a gentle and sensitive person who loves playing games, both because I enjoy thinking through tricky strategies and because it gives me a socially acceptable way to brutally crush people.
I come from a family of board- and card- gamers. I’ve been taking games seriously in some capacity since I was 9, when I played chess competitively. (Never got past 1100~1200 elo, though.) I got into Magic after losing too much to my neighbors at Pokémon cards, which carried me through high school. I never actually got into the competitive Magic scene (first because I didn’t understand how Psychotog decks worked and their limitless supply of free counterspells scared me, then because of the Affinity metagame) but I did playtest with classmates who did, while devouring all of the game design articles published on the old WotC website.
I stayed away from fighting games after a bad experience with an arcade cabinet, which took my 50¢ and then blatantly cheated by grabbing, blocking, and throwing fireballs while all I had were “punch” and “kick” buttons.
Later, I heard about competitive Melee and thought that sounded interesting, until I read further and found you were only supposed to play Fox and Sheik (my least favorite characters) and you needed to abuse glitches just to walk around.
I played in exactly one Brawl tournament, because I heard in Brawl they’d taken out wavedashing. They did, except somehow Snake’s mortar animation or something gave him access to an equivalently ludicrous movement speed. (They’ve fixed that particular glitch for Smash 4, at least.)
Anyway! A coworker introduced me to Puzzle Strike a few years ago, then a few things happened, and I ended up at home all day with nothing better to do than log ~400 hours playing Puzzle Strike on the old FantasyStrike.com website, ultimately winning a small online tournament, which I attribute to sleeping in until just before it started and thus being the only person fully awake in the last rounds.