Pixelation: Books, Boners, Wastelands, & Aliens
[pixelation | weekly gaming/life column every wednesday or uh thursday]
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And a good god damn to you as well! What’s percolatin’? Crackalakin? Say word? Double word? Aiight, whatever. Enough bullshit. Put on your wastelander outfit, and let’s party.
The only gaming I’ve really been doing over the past couple of months, or maybe I guess, this year, is wastelanding and outer-spacing. I’m making up all sorts of words here. Take your dictionary and burn it! Don’t conform to what the man tells you as far as proper grammar and spelling! Beware the brainwash clinic! You’re all doomed, we’re all doomed!
The amazing part is that one of the predominant reasons for my awful gaming schedule is the fact that almost all of my waking life is dedicated to either A) writing papers or B) worrying about writing papers. I have an inability to engage in things I enjoy if I am stressed, or worried about something.
Two important asides:
This doesn’t include masturbation, which is my refuge from anxiety. If I’m worried whatever, and I have something looming over me, I whip out das schlong and punish him. If you think I’m worried about writing another paper, you should ask him what’s up. He’s absolutely frazzled, beat red (pun!), and worse for the wear. I think I’m going to wear out whatever tubing and connections hold the thing together by the end of my Master’s Degree.
So when I can get some gaming in, I’m working through Fallout 3. I had the misfortune of playing through Fallout 3 last year way too fast, and so I’ve been spending all my time now trying to blast through everything before Fallout: New Vegas comes out.
Including the expansion packs.
Right now I’m rockin’ through Mothership Zeta, and I have to say it’s pretty much ass. If you took ass, and then you were like “Hmm, what’s analogous to this in the gaming world”…there’s be plenty of other examples. Whatever! Hey, but it just isn’t that good.
It’s almost as bad as BioWare DLC. Ohhhhhh shit, zing! And whatnot! I’m losing my mind. Can you tell that? Do the monsters have the teeth in their eyes!? The Microsoft Word processor beckons to me in my sleep. Ian, it says. Pump me full of verbs and run-on sentences! Semi-colon all over me!
But seriously though, I love me some Bethesda, and I love me some Fallout 3, but this expansion just really ain’t cuttin’ it. What can you do? I bought it for half-price back in the day when they had slashed all their DLC, and I guess I really don’t regret playing it.
Sort of.
Gaming these days is like trying to have sex while you’re fuckin’ rushed. Theoretically, I should be enjoying it. It’s fuckin’ gaming! Gaming! Holy fuck, how can I not enjoy gaming? But you ever try and have sex when you’re rushed? First of all, my magic missile always takes some cajoling. C’mon big guy, I have to say to it! C’mon, duuuuuude. And he’s like “You fucking jerked off nine times today, dude, what do you expect?”
And there’s all this stress, and whatever, and blah. And what should be an enjoyable act really becomes work, and you’re tweaking and you’re yelling and there’s blood upon the walls and hate in your voice!
That’s what gaming is like these days for me. I only have so much time, so when I get to play something, I have an immense amount of “I need to fucking accomplish something!” in my brain. Let me tell you what Mothership Zeta is: not really accomplishing anything much. For sure, there’s some gameplay, and its sort of fun. I even enjoy it. But if I only have two hours to spare on a good evening, and I’m stuck rocketing through it, it feels like wasted time. I should be enjoying myself more, but there is this huge cloud of “Dude, you have a fucking backlog the size of SOMETHING LARGE and you’re dilly-dallying around in a fucking UFO? You douche!”
You know what I mean?
No?
S’cool.
I told myself that I could catch up on my enormous backlog of everything this summer: books, movies, comic books, and video games. I told myself! There was a drought after Super Mario Galaxy 2, I told myself. And? Yeah, I ain’t accomplished much. What am I sitting on? Well, Borderlands, and the new Ratchet and Clank, and Red Dead Redemption, and Bioshock 2, and Final Fantasy XIII. Not to mention fucking Metroid: Other M dropping next week!
How did I get this way?! What the fuck is going on?
And now its July and I ain’t accomplished shit, and I’m stuck in a fucking spaceship, and aliens are probing my ass, and for some reason I’m not enjoying it as usual (ass probing is rock), and I need to get through this shit! And I got papers to write and fucking books to read, and a god damn column about space-cocks fucking robo-dinosaurs!