Properly Calibrated

I never lived in New Orleans – at least, I don’t remember living there. When my father finished medical school, we moved to his residency in South Carolina.

I was born in a hospital somewhere in downtown New Orleans. I was born in a tall, grey rectangle that my parents would point out to me as we drove by on the interstate, coming to town to visit my grandparents. I don’t know the name. It was next to the Superdome.

I remember a few things from those New Orleans visits. My grandparents (my father’s parents, the Daigles) lived in Gretna, across the river from downtown. We would take the ferry across the Mississippi to visit the French Quarter, avoiding the palm readers’ booths on our way to watch the street musicians and eat beignets at Café du Monde.

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Hey kids! A bit of housekeeping: the RSS feed is now fixed. So now you can subscribe to that instead of feverishly refreshing all day. (Right!)

Anyway: My Mass Effect 2 Collector’s Edition got Amazon Primed to my doorstep yesterday, and I managed to carve out a few (very late) hours to break it open and start it up.

So let’s get to the Brief But Exciting First Impressions, complete with blurry late-night box shots! (That sounds dirty!) Click “continue reading”, or push me off the balcony to earn Renegade points!

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I know you needed a breather after the double-barreled blog barrage I fired your way earlier this week, so I decided to give you some days off.

I’m lying! But you knew that already, some of the nervous sweat being flung at your face by my (also nervous) tic landed in your eyes! I’m not a very good liar. What really happened is my job exploded due to some unexpected things happening, the details of which did not involve food, drink OR video games, and as such are outside the scope of this blog.

Suffice to say that only part of that (metaphorically) blinding (metaphorical) sweat/tic combo is due to my poor lying-to-you skills — the other half is due to my work flying off the proverbial handle.

Historically, when Video Games become a necessary source of order and sanity in this crazy world, I have turned to the largest, deepest, driest games I can find. Morrowind got me through a rough winter at school (and a breakup), Fallout (1 and 2) kept me sane through a rocky transitional period, and Rome: Total War helped me make it to graduation.

So, seeing as I’m already halfway(?) through Dragon Age, you’d think I’d be questing long into the night. Well, here is (are) the problem(s): I’m tired at night these days. I don’t have the blocks of multiple hours that are required to sink back into the groove of knowing who’s equipped with what and what my hotkeys are and how my five layers of tactic slots translate into how to keep my mage from being immediately fricaseed by angry Darkspawn™.

Instead, I’ve been turning in the exact opposite direction: the far reaches of Space. Crazy Space. Mario Galaxy Space.

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Anything on this site dated prior to the post that you are now reading is content from a previous incarnation of Properly Calibrated. Said incarnation was significantly more (completely more) focused on video games and the playing thereof. It was also an attempt to write such things in a diary format, which (clearly) did not work out. It was also originally intended to be a fairly private (or at least non-publicized (that means I planned to do it without Twittering about it)) venture, which also did not work out, primarily because half of the fun (a third of the fun) of writing a blog is interacting with folks that read it. Otherwise I might as well be writing in a diary next to my bed, an activity I have also attempted but generally don’t understand (and I get hand cramps).

In any case, don’t read past here because it’s boring. That’s all.

Character creation.

Around 2004, in Tiger Woods ‘03, ‘04, or ‘05 (can’t remember, whatever) I spent the better part of two hours with a mirror leaning against the coffee table, creating my spitting image, complete with hoodie and Chucks, who would then saunter ‘round the courses for the remainder of the semester. At least once in the process I accidentally hit the accursed Randomize Button, which is true to its name (and the human race); a cosmic dice-roll that almost always results in some homely, unpleasant, pudgy, crushingly average avatar. The Randomize Button was a tiny existential black hole; hit it again and again, assorted unattractive folks flicker by, and every once in a while, someone decent-looking — a genetic crapshoot, and then when you really think about it, most people you know kind of look like that, and hell with it, I’m going to make a chick with a big rack. It’s okay, we understand — a video game that provides true character creation risks uncovering all of the non-ideal features of your average homo sapiens.

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It came about 3/4 of the way through, in the form of The Blob.

After a pretty satisfying large-scale battle with a boss a few dozen stories tall (spoiler alert, Sentinel), there it was. Wolverine relocated from the desert to a grocery store in one crossfade, and next thing I knew, this character of whom I was previously aware in only the vaguest sense began trying to kill me. The fight ended up getting stranger; I assume The Blob was in The Movie (which I have not seen), but I’m pretty sure Hugh Jackman didn’t ride him around the produce section, steering him by stabbing his claws into his back.

But then, like I said, haven’t seen the movie. I heard it was a pretty bad movie.

X-MO:W continued on that note for the remainder. Wolverine was still fun to control; the story just disintegrated into a checklist of setpieces and boss fights. Still definitely worth an $8 rental. If I was a kid with Wolverine posters on my ceiling, I’d play, replay, and re-replay this game.

I’m behind. Since I finished X-MO:W, I’ve attempted to start Saint’s Row 2, lost a few years of my life to the new XBLA Worms, and spent many cinematic evenings in BF1943. More to come.

Two things I’ll rarely do: rent a game, and spend $60 on a new release. As a member of the common people, my hard-earned 5 dozen dollars is not being spent on 6 hours of brawlery. Cheapskate? I prefer value-conscious, but whatever you wish is fine, sir.

However, in a stroke of brilliant luck, I managed to nab Saint’s Row 2 for a cool $15 at Blockbuster, along with a rental of X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

Patience pays off; I’m sure Saint’s Row will have aged just as well as when it was fresh in the plastic. Wolverine fits perfectly in my rental plan: short, fast, not boring, not worth playing twice. The last game I rented was The Force Unleashed, which was a fairly sordid experience (Item 3 on my cobwebby “Games To Review” list), so I went into Origins in fear of the Dropoff: that moment past the hump where the developers started padding content and stopped caring.

Actually. I have to keep talking about SW:TFU because it’s an apple from the same corporate tree: heavily-licensed third-person action-brawler with lite-RPG ability-trees. This is a path well worn — a venerable trench, lined with cash. (Maybe the trench goes around the tree? The trench leads to the tree? I apologize for this.)

In addition to those items, X-MO:W and SW:TFU both feature:

• overpowered übermen
• dozens of minions to decimate
• giant bad guys upon which to leap and then slash and then jump off
• bizarre jumping physics
• testosterone

Bullet #3 is important: so far, the Giant Bad Guys Upon Which To Leap in X-MO:W, while repetitive and Not Fun, are much, much less frustrating than the GBGUWTL in SW:TFU. The actual battling is organic enough: wait for creature to attack. Dodge out of the way. Leap upon giant creature’s back and press X a lot. Leap off before giant creature forcefully removes you. Repeat 4-5x per creature. The failure state here is important: leap at creature when it’s facing you, and it will lay The Hurt upon you.

Compare to TFU’s giant creature (or AT-ST) battles: leap 60 feet into air, flit in place (because The Force) and hold down the Force Lightning Button until the creature’s Meter allows you to proceed with a button-reactive Quick Time Event, the failure of which results in the creature laying The Hurt upon you. Hell. In X-MO:W, at least your mistake is in execution of a reasonably complex process (dodge, wait til the right moment, target, leap) rather than a giant pass/fail “PRESS THE A BUTTON” graphic on-screen. I used the term “organic” loosely, earlier.

In other words, X-MO:W is holding up nicely. I’m looking forward to more wanton decimation tonight.