User:Dabombster

= About Me = I am a 17 year old male member of the human race that is currently living in the "great" state of Utah. I enjoy playing casual, single-player games, such as Zelda, Mario, Metroid, and Pokémon. I also enjoy playing a multitude of multiplayer games with friends, ranging from Halo to Super Smash Bros.

I am currently attending High School in the area and am in my senior year. I plan to graduate in May of 2009 and pursue a career as a Civil Engineer. I plan on attending college, but I don't know where I'd like to enroll at the moment. I guess I'll find that out later.

= Zelda =

I first became interested in Zelda when I saw my aunt playing A Link to the Past when I was about 4 years old. I watched her play through the entire game and memorized how to do it. My parents also had the game back at our house, so I played it and beat it, though I didn't figure anything out on my own. I didn't know this would spark my interest and Zelda, and even now look back and laugh at it.

When Ocarina of Time was released I begged my parents to get it for me. They finally did and I began on another adventure, but got stuck in Jabu-Jabu's belly. My aunt came over to give me a helping hand and we stayed up all night beating the game. Shortly after that I heard of a new Zelda game being released, Majora's Mask. My parents got this for me as a Christmas present along with the needed expansion pack for the N64 to play it. I had some difficulties playing through this game, but with the help of a friend who lived across the street, managed to beat it.

This is about the time I first got interested in Zelda online. I ran a search for "zelda" in Google and it brought up several websites, including Nintendo's official site. I looked through many of them, and even registered at a few, though I don't know which ones anymore. This got me started in my online Zelda experience.

Zelda Legacy
In March of 2006 I noticed an up and coming site, Zelda Legacy. I spoke with Killswitch, the webmaster of the site about a possible position on the staff there. He agreed to let me help him and I started to learn HTML and a little PHP. Two months after I began working there, Killswitch decided to switch over to a Content Management System (CMS), more specifically, Joomla. We realized this was a mistake as soon as we installed the new CMS, but we couldn't really go back and fix it. It took us a week and a half to figure out how Joomla worked and transfer all of the content over to the "new" site.

In the meantime we had tried installing several forums for the site. Many of them had several problems or would get hacked shortly after installing them. Killswitch finally purchased a license for vBulletin (vB) and said "Well, we won't have to worry about installing forums again after this". So I spent a day setting up the forums, usergroups, and everything else we needed to get started. I returned the next day to find out that Killswitch had managed to crash the forums and that I had to do it all over again.

For a while the forums were a good place to be. Plenty of webmasters would visit them frequently and there would almost always be something interesting to say. However, some of the members that were in this group of people that visited frequently began to develop an idea of elitism, thinking they were better than newer members.

The forums became a horrible place to be at, and I despised being in charge of them. I made a last ditch attempt to bring order back to the forums, but failed miserably. I resigned from my position in March of 2008, 2 years after I started helping there.

Zelda Dungeon
In March of 2008, some of the members of Zelda Legacy became rather aggravating, so I left the site in search of someplace else. Mases heard about the incident and invited me to Zelda Dungeon. He then offered me a "job" in May of that year and I volunteered to work on the Wind Waker section of the site.

I quickly wrote up a walkthrough for The Wind Waker and several smaller guides along the way. But school and family problems got in the way of me furthering along the way of writing and coding the content and I had to temporarily leave the site.

In late December of 2008 I returned to Zelda Dungeon to discover that Mases had three times the amount of staff members as he did when I left the site. I was informed that I could continue working on the Wind Waker section with the assistance of Josh, a staff member hired in my absence. I then began to code out the Wind Waker walkthrough, while Josh collected screenshots for the game. Working together we are progressing quickly through the walkthrough and plan to finish before summer.

On April 1, 2009 I was promoted by Mases and Caleb to a webmaster position, which I humbly accepted. I still continue to make guides and construct templates for some of the other guides as well.

Amazing Gameplay Adventure
On the 14th of March, after the 7th Zelda Dungeon video podcast Mases had to take a leave of absence for a few hours. Instead of killing the live stream, he instead decided to allow me to play through A Link to the Past and stream it live to the forums for people to watch if they wanted. People seemed to enjoy the experience and we had 38 people viewing the stream at one point, which was very good for the time of day. After beating the game, people still wanted more so I started a file on the Adventure of Link. I soon gave up and started a file on the Legend of Zelda, but the game froze up and I hadn't saved earlier. After these setbacks I started on The Minish Cap and had a constant of about 23 people viewing, since it was about 12:40 Mountain time. I completed this game in a little less than six hours and closed the stream, making the first ever 'Amazing Gameplay Adventure' that Zelda Dungeon had and the longest stream we had ever had, lasting 16 hours.