Overswarm

That's me, Overswarm.

My "real" name is Evan Downing, and I was born November 19th, 1985, and am currently 21 years old. I attend Northern Kentucky University and am studying to become an English teacher, and the plan is to teach in high school. Someday, perhaps, college could be somewhere I venture. I'm the second of three children, and I grew up in Falmouth, KY for most of my life. I am currently dating Erin Sandy of California, KY, and have been doing so for nearly three years. My primary interests are gaming, music, photography, philosophy, and literature. I enjoy above most other things the spreading of knowledge, and the teaching of those that benefit from it. I believe in the potential of NSCS and this website, and my reasoning can best be defined by a truth that was explained many years ago by Aristotle in the text Metaphysics:

All men naturally desire knowledge. An indication of this is our esteem for the senses; for apart from their use we esteem them for their own sake, and most of all the sense of sight. Not only with a view to action, but even when no action is contemplated, we prefer sight, generally speaking, to all the other senses.The reason of this is that of all the senses sight best helps us to know things, and reveals many distinctions

You are here because you want to learn. Why else would you be reading a biography? Why else would you be coming to a website devoted strictly to enhancing your ability to compete in the gaming world?

My Gaming Story

I have been a competitive gamer since I learned to play Chess, and it has evolved since there. Board games were the primary source of competition when I was younger, like most children at that time, but it soon evolved to electronic games. It started off as competition to beating the computer. Super Mario Bros. being my first game, Megaman III (we didn't have two at the time) being my favorite. As I grew older I found that beating the computer was way too easy to be enjoyable for long. I found solace in RPGs in the vein of Final Fantasy VI (then III) and Chrono Trigger, but the challenge there was slim to none.

Then, out of the blue, came Goldeneye. My first real "competitive" experience in gaming. There had been a few fighters for the super nintendo that were worth playing, but there was always something broken about it. Goldeneye was much different. Unfortunately for anyone that plays me in games nowadays, Goldeneye taught me that camping was a good thing. My aim was better than my brothers, but your aim didn't matter nearly as much as your health did due to auto-aim. The best way to win? Camp the body armor spawns, shoot it if your body armor is full. Suddenly, the game wasn't nearly as competitive or fun. I won, but people didn't play as often. We found other games to play. Killer Instinct Gold was a lot of fun until the combo breaker was found. Mortal Kombat Trilogy had enough characters to keep us interested for a while, but the gameplay was very plain and uninteresting. Console games were failing me.

I soon moved to the PC, and played Starcraft online, which is where the tag "Overswarm" came from. A combination of "Overmind" and "swarm", two zerg words used often, which also helped to describe my style of play. Ironically, I ended up playing Protoss. This took up much of my high school years, and my summers turned into nothing but starcraft all day. Even on the 56k connection speed we had, I played Starcraft and did very well at it, even beating professional players on occasion. Since battle.net was free, I was more than happy to play. Starcraft itself never got boring; it just got old. People stopped playing it as much, and those that did played the "fun" gametypes, such as infinite money or "big game hunters" over and over again. The miniscule amount of players that considered themselves competitive played on Lost Temple and only Lost Temple. People just stopped playing, and I was left in the dust. Unbeknownst to me, something similar would happen with my new obsession.

While I was dabbling in Warcraft III at the time, I didn't find it nearly as enticing as Starcraft. This might have been because of Blizzard's philosophy of "release game first, finish it later", which caused every patch to subsequently make one race broken, and another one unbroken, or it might have been the flawed hero system it had. Regardless, I played it mostly because it was there. My friends introduced me to a weekly gathering they had called "Halo night". It was on the Xbox, a system that I had heard horrible things about. It was clunky, large, and I hadn't heard of any games that I would really enjoy. Even worse, it was expensive. I preferred the gamecube for the party games, and the ps2 for the single player RPGs. This was free though, I decided to give it a shot. It would soon replace Warcraft III as my game of choice.

I'm what you would call a "natural gamer". While I do practice, I tend to pick up on games very fast. The first game of Halo I played, I got 5th. It was Chiron, Slayer, to 50. The second game was Longest, Slayer, to 50. I got second. From that game forward, I never placed below 2nd place, ever, at Halo night. I found that I loved the shotgun, and my first thought was "this gun is broken". In a sense I was right, because in close range it was broken. My friends wised up and then proceeded to shoot me from afar with sniper rifles, and I realized that rushing them with a shotgun was a bad idea. Plasma rifles and Assault rifles came into the mix, since due to their rapid fire they could be used with recklessness and still be powerful tools. I still remember the day our entire view of the game changed. The other "good" player, the one who placed first or second with me every game, was sitting at a TV shooting at unmoving players. "Hey Evan," he said, "did you know that if you shoot someone in the head three times with the pistol they die?"

Suddenly we realized that aim was a much bigger deal than we realized. Our games had been more about being sneaky or just outpowering them with weapons. Never before had we actually had to out-aim one another. How do two assault rifles get in a fight that involves aim? Now the pistol duels came into play, and so did the TsK. From Goldeneye I learned to be "cheap" to win. To camp corners, to hide, to watch spawns, that sort of thing. From Halo I learned to practice the minute details, and that the people you play determine how good you are. Playing my friends made me decent, but when I played new people that actually had real competition they did much better than I did.

But sadly, Halo faded away. With no reliable online play, it required intensive travel to play competitively. Halo 2 was greatly anticipated, and I was waiting in line to get it on launch day. Unfortunately for me, the game was a horrible disappointment. It isn't that Halo 2 is a bad game, because it really isn't. It just doesn't fit as a "Halo" game. Halo:CE was all about individual skill, a skill cap that was never reached by the players at the very tip top of their game. Halo 2's skill cap was met relatively quickly, and now the skill of the game is influenced more by small nuances in gameplay. No longer is there an adequate "equalizer" like the pistol from Halo:CE, and no longer can one player be good enough to take on a team by himself. This means that the entire game is about teamwork, and while that isn't necessarily bad, the fact that teamwork was a plus, not a necessity, in the original Halo was what made it so amazing. The top players got there by being individually good first, then found a team and etched out team strategies. In Halo 2, the difference in skill level is a blurred line for the top sixteen teams. You can find people with a few extraordinary talents, such as sniping or close range, but all in all it is difficult to determine who is really "better".

Super Smash Brothers Melee was a game that had always been around. I had played it some with my little brother when we first bought it, but it never really caught on. He played Sheik, I played Doctor Mario, and I beat him repeatedly. With no online play, I had no competition. I wanted a competitive game, a tournament game. Lucky for me, I was going down to St. Louis to commentate on Halo 2 Video on Demand for MLG, and didn't have a Halo team to go with me. What I did have was a gamecube controller. I figured I was pretty good, so I wanted to see how I would do. I looked online and found smashboards, read a few articles and guides, and decided to pick Fox since everyone was calling him "broken". I found that I liked him a lot; playing Fox was easy, just grab, u-throw, u-air. That hasn't changed much. I made top 32 in St. Louis, and in my initial pool to determine brackets I had to play Darkrain. This was my first experience with a "pro" smasher, and Darkrain amazed me. He was, and still is, one of my favorite smashers of all time. I left St. Louis knowing that I needed to work on a lot of technical abilities, and that I wanted to play Captain Falcon.

I continued to play Smash on the side, but Halo 2 took up most of my time because I had decided to start up a project called "Not So Common Sense", the name being a slight reference to Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" letters to the British. I was basically doing the same thing to the Halo community. I wasn't always able to apply it, and didn't have the raw skill that some players had, but even today I know as much if not more than the majority of the Halo players out there. NSCS was a large success on the Bungie forums, where it originated, and I decided to move it to halo.bungie.org, where Louis Wu was incredibly hospitable. He did everything as I asked, and was always quick to do everything. I wish I could repay him in some way, but the debt I owe to him is immeasurable. Both financially AND metaphorically. He spent TERABYTES on my stuff, not to mention hours and hours of his time.

I became proficient in Smash and wanted to spread my knowledge of the game with my special talents. I couldn't do this on HBO, so I looked for an alternate path. I found www.gaming-lessons.com as being a good match, and worked with T2 to get my content there. After five months of little to no cooperation from TSquared and many complaints about his webmaster, I decided it was too unreliable. I left and was going to work with Bluestrike2 to make a gaming website very similar to the one here, but after four months of no progress with him I again lost another potential host for NSCS. This was disheartening, as I know (or knew, rather) nothing about HTML or web hosting, and have little money to my name. I then decided to learn. In the course of two hours I created the shell of the website you saw here, and over the next month plotted out the future of the website and filled in the blanks, created images, contacted potential sponsors and advertisers, and did all the other busywork that is necessary. "If you want to do something right, do it yourself", as they say.

So ends my gaming story as of May, 2007. It continues and evolves every day, but now you know the history. Through history, we can see the future, and the future looks very promising indeed.