Seeing Curtis playing a game which tickles my fancy and popping him a few questions about it reminded me of how I first found myself skim reading the garbled nonsense of the old Edge forum and joining up in the first place.

Long ago, I'd jumped on to the new generation of consoles with an Xbox 360 as Halo 2 MP was my addiction at the time. I was happy with the console, but there was a PS3 game which caught my eye after reading Edge. Fortunately it was a Japanese only release, so the temptation to buy a new console for one game wasn't quite there. Roll on a few months and it's down for a European release. I was excited but cautious, the game was devisive and a lot of people were being put off my the difficulty and lack of hand holding, but a lot of that was music to my ears. I needed more information, so typed the name of the game into Google and started working my way through the few reviews and stumbled upon a thread on the Edge forum. I'd read Edge, saw Online/Offline etc. but online forms were not something I'd dabbled with in the past, they the domain of spotty nerds innit? Dare I dip a toe into the murky waters?

Turns out this was exactly what I needed, honest opinions of people playing the game, struggling with and overcoming the difficulties found within and being rewarded for their efforts, all the while posting (spoiler free) tales of their exploits for the benefit of the community. On the back of their discussions I felt better about weighing over £300+ to play a fucking video game, and was delighted to find out that they were true to their words and I loved the game they had been describing.

If you haven't already guessed, the game was Demon's Souls and the forumites were Curtis, Kilted Moose and a few others I'm sorry to forget. I still remember going to the hall of fame thing the first time I got to the Nexus and seeing Curtis' guy proudly holding a top three position on the EU leaderboard.

So I have those guys to thank, and the rest of you know who to blame for drawing my eye to this hidden patch of the internet, as without them I'd not be here.

So, what brought you lot here then? Was it a game, console, someone's posts? What got you reading these pages and what made you dive in, sign up, and chuck your opinions around with such wanton abandon?