Every now and again, a game comes along which will sink its teeth into my very soul, biting down with such ferocity that I spend my working day glancing at the ever-slowing clock on the bottom right of my Windows toolbar wondering why what felt like “the last hour” has, in actual fact, been no more than ten minutes.  Granted, there haven’t been very many… but enough for me to realise that my only wish for that day was to replace my business head with the gaming head and immerse myself in a world the likes of which I could only have dreamed.

For me, a passion is an “all or nothing” thing.  I sacrifice so much of my time to the business that, when I am finally able to shake off the rusted chains of Google-shy clients and those who are incapable of reading very clear instructions, I want to lose myself in whatever I do to remind myself that I am still human.  In the past, it was my love for movies which pushed me forward… looking forward to the next wave of releases… and this, coupled with my love for technology, meant that I was always dipping my experimental toes into the waters of virgin technologies.

When Philips released the CD-i format, I was on board immediately and I vividly remember watching The Hunt For Red October with my face almost pressed against the television screen, marvelling at how superior the picture quality was to typical VHS transfers.  Until this point, such “high definition” imagery was only ever possible in science fiction movies and yet, here it was… in my own bedroom.  I had never made the leap to Laserdisc as the 12″ discs really never appealed to me and, although I enjoyed watching them at my friend’s house, I couldn’t see past the fact his movie collection had spines you could barely read… and so I waited for the rumoured format which was said to be the ultimate in viewing quality… DVD!

In 1996, Toshiba released their pivotal SD-3000 DVD player and my eyes lit up.  Sadly, it was a couple of years before I was able to take that first step into the world of DVD when I bought my Pioneer DV-515 and took a trip into Tower Records in Glasgow which was, at that point, the only place that you could buy DVD movies… and their entire display was a table top affair of with four rows and five columns… with most of the titles repeated several times as there simply weren’t enough to fill the whole display!  I grabbed Amadeus, Contact, Life, Nightmare Before Christmas and Practical Magic and figured that’d be enough to get me started.

Over the years my collection grew and I migrated from one player to the next, before eventually tiring of watching my beautiful DVDs on a standard 32″ television and so I ventured into new territory… the realm of home cinema projector.

This is where things started to change for me, because it was my first taste of “major” technology purchases where I really started to appreciate the clarity of the image and enjoyed the full DTS sound through my beloved AV Amp, but it was also the first time that I actually allowed myself to become immersed in a game and actually enjoy playing consoles.  The first game I ever played through my projector was Morrowind on the XBox 360 and I was immediately smitten with how I became almost encapsulated by the game and found myself physically moving my head around to see everything that was happening on front of me due to the sheer size of the display.  I was no longer booting up my XBox to play games… I WAS that Khajiit!

With the release of the XBox 360, a whole new problem arose.  Games were developed with the capability to display on high definition screens but my 800 x 600 resolution Panasonic projector just didn’t cut it anymore.  The graphics of the next gen games such as Oblivion and Gears Of War were undoubtedly second to none, but when you’ve stood with your tongue on the floor in GAME while some snot nosed kid in front of you hogs the machine on a glorious 1080p Samsung display you very quickly realise just how much is being missed by running this graphical beast through a standard definition display.  Oblivion was taking up so much of my time that it wasn’t feasible to have the 360 set up in the lounge through the projector, so it sat in the bedroom going through a 32″ CRT television and the on-screen text was almost unreadable in places.

A decision was made, and that decision was to upgrade the projector to one offering 720p HD resolution.  That projector was the incredible InFocus IN78 and with it came a whole new appreciation for home cinema projectors… blacker blacks, sharper images, accurate skin tones and an overall tonal quality that really can’t be put into words without sounding like some drooling uber geek… so I’ll stop there.  In terms of graphic representation, I could now read the text perfectly and was able to see detail in the surroundings and textures that I didn’t even know existed up until that point.  The InFocus IN78 changed me forever… I didn’t just look forward to gaming, I actually craved it.  Whenever time permitted, I would pull the curtains shut tight, close the door, turn off the lights, fire up the XBox, pull down the screen… and enter Cyrodiil as promptly as I possibly could, remaining there for as long as my eyes were able to stay open.

At the time of buying the InFocus IN78 the 1080p price tags were far too cost prohibitive to even contemplate, with the Sony VLP range coming in at over £15,000 and a bulk that would require several Icelandic strongmen to mount it to the ceiling.  My desire for a 1080p projector could not be quantified other than “I want it this much” with the obligatory outstretched arms, but it wasn’t something I’d be able to savour until the prices plummeted considerably.

Thankfully, in July of this year, I was fortunate enough to find a listing on eBay for the InFocus IN83 complete with a luxurious black velvet seven foot motorised screen but the seller had misspelled it as “Inofcus Projecter”, so it hadn’t had any viewers and had only hours left before the auction closed.  I opened a line of communication with the seller and took a chance by offering him less than the starting price.  It wasn’t something that I’d normally do, but the starting price he’d set was still more than I could easily afford… in fact, even the price I’d offered him was outwith my means but I had to take the chance to try and pick up this gem if I could.  The auction ended with no bids, and the seller eventually accepted my offer which meant I would be paying less than a third of the retail cost of the projector itself and had the added bonus of the motorised screen as the icing on this rather expensive cake.

Due to the throw ratio of the IN83 compared to the IN78, I was giving away around eleven inches of screen size as a trade off so my actual diagonal display width dropped from 97 inches to 84 inches… but it was worth every single sacrificed inch, with a whole new level of gameplay immersion that is truly hard to describe.  Games such as Fallout 3 have you believing that you are about to be attacked by a rampaging Death Claw, and Burnout Paradise has you leaning back as much as possible at the end of the Ski Jump on Big Surf Island just to give you that extra bit of air and distance… it is THAT immersive, and more.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that if you want technology, however, you need to be able to pay for it.

I’m paying for my technology in two completely different ways.  The first is obvious… cold hard cash.  Even at a third of the price, the projector cost more than I realistically wanted to spend and the cost of having everything sent up by courier itself was £114.  Then we have the cabling to make everything happen, the AV Amp to ensure the highest possible audio quality at all times and the replacement projector lamps every 2000 or so hours.  These costs mount up and, although it really is worth every single penny, there is another cost associated with all of this which isn’t quite as affordable.

In order to pay for such luxuries, I find myself working more than most people would every week.  Where most people are sacrificing 35 or 40 hours every week in exchange for their salary, I tend to hover around the 85 hour week mark.  This translates as an average of ten hours per day at weekends, plus a 9am until 6pm working day throughout the week as well as a typical 8pm until midnight additional shift that I’ve found necessary to catch up with actual work as most of my day is spent dealing with clients on the ‘phone or by email.  Those hours are irreplaceable and so they have to come out of my evening, or they’ll be lost forever.

This means that, under normal circumstances, weeks may disappear without even a single minute on the XBox.  I boot it up a few days ago (October 20th) to try the Brutal Legend demo and was shocked to see that I hadn’t actually played since September 22nd… almost a month, thanks to a ridiculous work schedule.

For all my cravings, for all my expenditure to ensure that I’m giving myself the best possible gaming experience… I leave myself in the position whereby I’m no longer able to game unless I steal the time from the additional hours that I endlessly gift to the business.  The irony of this situation is that, by claiming this time back as my own, I’d lose my ability to pay for those luxuries and have to again struggle to read text on a 32″ CRT in standard definition when my eyesight is already at the stage where I’m only able to see clearly for around 3ft in front of my face.

At the moment, my only craving is to enjoy life a little more and make the endless working hours worth it.  There should be a balance, before my passion for gaming in high definition suffocates my ability to do so.

Last five articles by Mark R

• From Acorns to Fish
• Alone In The Dark
• Why Borderlands is Better Than Borderlands 2
• Falling Short
• The Division: A Guide to Surviving the Dark Zone Solo