Gaming is Voracious

Rumors of my untimely demise have been greatly exaggerated. After the craziness of the holidays and the unending barrage of activities in and around the holidays, I merely needed a couple weeks to recuperate. Part of the blame rests with the fact I finally obtained the mother of all penis jokes, a Wii. As can be expected, I’ve been playing Twilight Princess. All in all, a very good game with an unusual dark undertone for a Zelda game. It’s not exactly Eternal Darkness, but it’s not bad. I took a couple days off to play ITG and I’ve noticed something: I’m magically better.

Not just a little better, but if the ITG scoring system is to be believed, 5% better. After a month of not playing, my stamina and accuracy have both experienced an inexplicable increase. I played on Thursday and after almost two hours of constant level eight and nine difficulty, I decided to end the day with Tribal Style. Until that night, my highest score was a 75%, meaning my usual predilection is failure, and pass infrequently on a narrow margin. I pushed it up to 80% while physically and mentally exhausted. Up until this week, I would fail Bouff frequently, but Thursday night I also beat that record. To all this, I have only three words:

What. The. Hell.

Last month, I believed I’d hit some kind of ability ceiling, which considering my medical background, lies within the realm of possibility. Now I’m not so sure what to believe. I’d like to record a video to prove just how ridiculously difficult Tribal Style is on Expert, but the train would invariably ruin any attempt, meaning several takes, and I certainly don’t have endless stamina. Instead I’ll say: 5 steps per second for two solid minutes, 80% of steps hit within 1/60th of a second. I’m certainly not elite, but my arrow-stomping skills are definitely not sub-par.

Before I leave for tonight, please go see Pan’s Labyrinth at a suitable proximal theater. I won’t summarize or review the movie, but I will say this: it persuades even the most jaded soul to believe in fairytales.

Until Tomorrow