Thursday, April 16, 2009

Frag Me

I've been playing more video games since moving in with the Fella, and especially since he got an Xbox 360 for Christmas. And it turns out that I suck. Hardcore.

Specifically, I'm terrible at First Person Shooter games like Halo 3 and Call of Duty. I've pretty much figured out why I'm so bad, but I'm not sure what to do about it.... My biggest problem is that I have no concept of how various parts of the map relate to each other. When I'm playing, I'm pretty much wandering around the map with no concept of where I'm going or how I got there.

Aaron and I were playing Halo 3 on a newly downloaded map last night, neither of us had played it before. It wasn't long before he had the layout pretty well figured out, and was trying to describe it for me.

Me: Hey! Where did you find that Gravity Hammer??
Aaron: It's in the central tower.
Me: Central tower? Where the hell is the center?
Aaron: Ok it's like this: there are the two smaller towers along the edge of the map, and each one has a couple of catwalks leading from there to the big central tower in the middle.
Me: (non-distinct gurgling sounds, brains start dribbling out of my ear)

The thing is, I could totally take what he was saying and turn it into a top-down view of the map in my head. But for some reason, I just cannot seem to relate my imagined top-down view to what I'm actually seeing on the screen in 3D. I try really hard to pay attention to what I'm seeing and build that map in my head but my brain just doesn't seem to be wired that way.

I am slowly (veeeeery slowly) getting better at it, but not quickly enough to prevent myself from getting the shit kicked out of me 9 times out of 10.

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