So, I dyed the rest of my hair yesterday. I couldn’t get the red I wanted, because it’s getting really hard to find anything that resembles red in the store these days. That doesn’t really matter, though — it’s just…disappointingly browner than I expected, even though it’s supposed to be ‘true red’. Oh well.
Now that I’ve got that out of the way….
I played Left4Dead with Gremlin yesterday — it’s got a 2-player co-op mode, and I love those. And, hey, I enjoyed this one, too, even though it’s an FPS, and I hate FPSs with a passion that makes the sun look like one of those cheap hand-cranked LED flashlights. I don’t know if it was the ‘yay, let’s kill zombies!’ or the fact that it wasn’t all that important [or difficult] to stay alive, or the, uh, piles and piles of pills [okay, not really] I took before even looking at the screen to prevent the godawful headache and nausea that usually accompany just glancing at an FPS, but it was fun. I might even do it again.
…I still loathe the controls, though. You know what I mean. Those fucking first person shooter ‘walk with one button, look-with-the-eyes-permanently-affixed-to-your-gun with the other, and god help you if you get them mixed up’ shit with zero perhipheral vision. Because, y’know, we humans, we’ve got this fucked up perspective on reality that involves an awkwardly placed gun sprouting out of the middle of our field of vision where our nose would usually be, and we can’t see anything — ANYTHING — unless it’s straight ahead.
It’s a short game — I still wonder if it was really worth the price — but I guess I wouldn’t hate trying to play it a few more times, to see if maybe I can get the hang of this FPS thing.
So I asked Chris what that sickness is caused that we talked about in chat. Cybermotion transition syndrome. You get used to the weird motion of the video game and then when you return to reality it messes with you. The only way I really know to deal with it is to lie down somewhere dark and quiet with your eyes closed for 15 to 20 minutes. Anyway, there’s a whole new illness for you to learn about, yay!
Cybermotion? That may be a misnomer in enough ways to doublenegative the thing into making sense. Between ‘cyber’ meaning ‘helm’, and helms pretty much by definition being in motion, and the condition predating Pong….
It hasn’t happened to me in decades. But I used to get that transitional weirdness after watching a film in a cinema for a couple hours when standing up to leave and trying to walk out to the lobby with more light than the singlepoint screen. I suppose that’s changed now that cinemas never get that dark anymore, and it’s functionally impossible to see a film in public without the public cackling dryly five seconds after something wasn’t funny every couple minutes; and of course I used to see more colours than shades of grey. All I notice these days is when someone who shouldn’t be allowed to use 3DS [not that anyone should be allowed to use 3DS] hasn’t done the math to matchmove everything correctly, letting the CG elements drift weirdly around the screen; that can’t happen in a videogame unless someone really, really sucks.
Though there was that time a few years ago when I had to drive to the store to get more soda after playing GrandTheftAuto for twenty-eight hours. On the bright side, I learned that my car can survive averaging 130mph while powersliding around corners.