That’s news.com.au for you, just rubbish clickbait

Hang on, core memory unlocked.

About three years before that, a neighbour set up a WiFi network but had open authentication on it.

I remember seeing it on my little EEE PC and connecting to it. I remember completely not knowing what it was, if it was going to cost my parents data money, or if I’d otherwise get in trouble for using it.

I had friends on the same street as me, so I showed them this WiFi network and they weren’t really sure if it would charge my parents or not either.

I had been playing a game that came on a shareware disc called “Wild Wheels” (later learned that was the publisher’s name of the game, the actual name was BuzzingCars) and it referenced ceebot.com as a place to download more demos.

Well, that was the first website I ever visited and I downloaded a 26MB setup for Colobot, an RTS first person space exploration game that had you literally program robots to complete missions. I was still so anxious that there’d be some massive bill in the mail (hence the setup size still being burned in my head) so that was all I downloaded.

And oh boy did I play the shit out of that, and I attribute that game to why I still enjoy computing and programming today.

First internet experience for me was 2013 as a child. Back then our home connection had a usage cap of 10GB, but the ISP hosted a “free zone” website that contained a bunch of cartoons and mirrored ABC (Australia) content.

We would watch YouTube videos together as a family because the bandwidth was considered that previous and laugh at those fail compilations and whatnot.

Otherwise about a month or two into having internet, I realised that this would open me up to online gaming, and I excitedly put Mineplex’s IP into the cracked copy of Minecraft that I had on a USB from school, only to get an authentication error because I hadn’t bought an account. Managed to stumble into some Dutch server that was cracked and despite the language barrier, had tons of fun trying to work out the game.

Edit: that Dutch server was on a server list and I remember being mindblown that when I was on, the website would update to show that I was playing and my username was there. “A website with my name on it? I must be famous!”

On the topic of Sonic Unleashed, I played it as a kid on the Wii and actively disliked it because it just seemed sad and freaky to see Sonic effectively become mutated.

To give some idea, back then I had no internet so whatever games we had, I always gave a good go and I’d always play even the most mediocre of games.

We also had Sonic Colors and that game just felt the total opposite: very positive, lots of eye candy, arcadey, very much enjoyed it as a kid.

Some 20 years later and I’m speaking to a Sonic fan and they bring up how they’ve played every single game including Unleashed, and it was the only one they hated, which made me realise I’m not the only one.

To answer your question, I’d say Shrek for the Xbox - I did enjoy Shrek 2 more than the original game as a kid, but I also didn’t mind the original either.

Once I had internet, I saw plenty of references to the original game as the butt of jokes and an example of what games should not be, and honestly those criticisms were valid.

I’ll be revealing my nationality with this one, but Wheatbix and Milo (chocolate malt usually for milk drinks) is something apparently no one else I’ve met has.

Before I moved away from dairy entirely, I couldn’t stand the taste of plain cow’s milk and adding Milo helped with the wheatbix severely.