Deyou Sex

by Scarlett on June 8, 2010 · View Comments

in: Girl Gone Gaming

Having recently celebrated my birthday, I’ve found myself reflecting with fondness upon some of the quintessential firsts in my life. The awkward tenderness of my first kiss; the anxious thrill of my first solo spin as a freshly licensed driver. But soft! What light through yonder memory breaks as shiny and brightly as the first time I fell in love … With a video game.

What? You were expecting ruminations over my first time with the humpity-bumpity? Interesting enough, that eager young lad was also the one who first introduced me to the joys of PC games … And let’s just say that the latter was much more satisfying. =)

Now if you’ve been betwixt and between my ramblings here, you may remember that my first true foray into gaming was with my beloved Oregon Trail, followed several years later by the NES – a console burned so fondly into my heart that I happily refer to myself as a Nintend’ho. But I can’t say that I truly fell in love with gaming until I got my first PC and began a torrid affair with an intriguing gentleman named Gabriel Knight.

Oh, that Gabriel! He was so mysterious and clever, voiced to utter perfection by the infallibly swoon-worthy Tim Curry. I was transfixed by Sins of the Father, and later transformed – into a lifetime PC gaming enthusiast, thanks to the sequel, The Beast Within. But while the first two Gabriel Knight titles will always rank high on my “favorite games of all time” list, my affection for adventure games was fleeting. There are a few other wonderful adventures still fondly remembered – The Longest Journey, Syberia – but it wasn’t long before I craved something with a little more interaction. I’d heard about role-playing games, but had assumed that they might lack the intrigue and spice that a solid adventure game inspired. But much like that first tumble in the bed sheets, all it took was a little trial and error, a little patience and practice, and before long, I’d found my sweet spot.

Lost in my heady romances with RPGs (and the occasional real-time strategy), I became a woman obsessed. Arx Fatalis! Morrowind! Oblivion! Scores more than I can no longer recall, all blurred together in a delirium of bludgeoned beasts and honorable quests. And yet, there was still something missing. I watched friends playing first-person shooters with a mixture of awe and disdain. I was impressed by their lightning-quick reflexes and intuition, but the lack of storytelling left me cold. The perfect game, in my eyes, had goals far beyond your number of kill-shots. It had adventure and open-ended possibilities and made endless combat look lazy in comparison.

And it also had melee weapons, dammit! Like a crotchety old woman stationed in her ubiquitous front porch rocking chair, I ranted over guns like they were some kind of new-fangled technology. “When I was your age, we killed things with broadswords and claymores! We used bows and arrows, not those blasted sniper rifles. We swung clubs (or old bones, when times were tough) and we were fighting like men!”

In truth, I was secretly inflamed by my lack of superior reflexes and that nagging sense of vertigo that crept up anytime I attempted a fast-paced shooter. Had The Guild existed in the early 2000′s, I’d have aspired to be Riley, the “stupid tall hot girl” who excelled at Halo and could match the boys skill for skill.

But then, I found it … A game with the perfect blend of action and RPG elements; an intriguing storyline that perfectly melded mystery and conspiracy; a game that taught me to embrace gunpower (and the shooter within) as I fought the good fight in a seedy, dysotopian world. Enter, Deus Ex.

If you haven’t played this amazing game, you are dead to me. … Okay, not really. But I’d be willing to take you over my knee and learn you some lessons, because missing out on Deus Ex is a crime that’s certainly worthy of a punishment! And if you don’t believe me, the respected publication PC Gamer Magazine has declared Deus Ex to be “the best PC game of all time”. As in, ever! And while I do take a slight bit of umbrage with this sentiment, having declared a Mass Effect 2 as my personal all-time favorite, that distinction was won by the most narrow of margins – and was a recent victory at that. Deus Ex, after all, debuted 10 years ago and is still a classic with a luster that has not been dulled by time or dated graphics. Ahhh, but there is one notable blip in its history of awesomeness, and unfortunately it’s a glaring one: the all-around disappointing sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War.

But 7 years after Invisible War tainted the Deus Ex legacy, and long after I’d stopped hoping for another go-around with JC Denton, I learned of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, set to debut sometime in early 2011. Ohhh, if you could have witnessed the fan-girl squee! I’m cautiously optimistic that Human Revolution will find a way to reinvigorate the franchise, especially since it’s being billed as a prequel to the first game. And now that Spoony has secured entrance to the iconic Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), along with his brilliant and talented TGWTG comrades, AngryJoe and JewWario, I’ve tasked him with a quest line of my own. He is to bring me any and all juicy bits of news that he can summon with regards to Human Revolution … And I’ve also made him promise that if there’s a Thane cosplayer at the Bioware booth, he must be rubbed up against in my honor. Association by osmosis! (Or something.) But c’mon, who wouldn’t want to hob-knob with Mass Effect 2′s drell assassin, that most lethal Lothario of lust-worthiness …

Hey, don’t judge! We all have our vices, and I can’t help it if I find certain video games to be alluring, intriguing, and downright Deu-Sexy. ;-)

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{ 29 comments }

Re-Nude

by Scarlett on May 1, 2010 · View Comments

in: Scarlett Under Covers

Why hello there! Fancy seeing you here again! I know, I know … But I thought that May 1st would be an apropos return to Scarlettopia, given that the first few months of the year were particularly challenging ones, and it finally feels like a good time to begin anew. Today also marks the final month of my 20s, that mysterious decade when a girl becomes a “woman-child” and is known to engage in a cocktail of salacious activities and adventures.

My 20s were actually divided into equal 5ths, and I remember turning 20 years old as clearly as if it were yesterday. I was in Ireland, a tiny village called Cashel, with my college acapella choir. We were at the midpoint of a deliriously amazing 10 day tour, and on June 1st I shyly mentioned that it was my birthday, which led to an impromptu celebration in a local pub. You haven’t lived until you’ve had cake topped with frosting infused with Irish cream, and an amber-colored, locally brewed ale on the side. I got so blissfully “blurry” that night, raucously dancing with the barkeep while my choir friends belted an African folk song at the top of their lungs. The trip was punctuated by a truly incredible few days in Dublin, at which point I came home and promptly informed my parents that I was breaking off my mediocre relationship, dropping out of college, and moving to Ireland.

Hey, I made good on 2 out of 3. ;-)

Despite my lofty transatlantic intentions, the first 2 years of my 20s were actually spent working a mindless clerical job at an engineering firm; a job that became burdened with daily anxieties and weekly pink slips after 9/11. Like all my fellow New Yorkers, I gazed skyward in fear every time I jet roared overhead, and I watched the industry I worked in crumble as swiftly as those iconic towers. Come my 22nd birthday, I was desperate for a change, and ended up moving to Chicago, wherein I kicked off the second 5th of my second decade.

Those two years were depressing as hell – living in a home, a city, a relationship that were at times unfamiliar, unfriendly, and unforgiving. At 24, I moved to Arizona, a place I instantly loved, and began working on putting the heretofore scattered pieces of my identity back in order. I started a new business, and within another 2 years I had gathered the strength to start a new life. By the age of 26, I had reached my turning point.

I indulged – oh, and how. I made new friends, tried new things, had some experiences that put a guaranteed grin on my face and merry giggle in my chest to this day. I was flush with the success of my business and the freedom of my spirit, and I enjoyed the hell out of myself. But reality is a cruel mistress, and I think the overwhelming majority of my American denizens remember the dark cloud of uncertainty that settled over the country in early 2008. It was like all of the carefree cheer had been vacuumed out of the atmosphere, and I rediscovered myself as a lonely 28 year old woman, worldly and wise, but weary and worried all the same.

The final chapter of my 20s has brought mixed blessings. I started a new relationship as I was falling out of love with my failing business. I began experiencing gnawing insecurities – the same ones that made my teenage years so brutally lonely – but at the same time, I was enjoying some wonderful new friendships and interwebs connections. I started sensing the tumultuous reality of mortality as parents and brother all suffered a variety of maladies and misfortunes – the latest being my dad’s cancer diagnosis, which cast a particularly dark cloud on these last several weeks.

And then, the realization that the roiling, toiling waves of this decade were subsiding, and the swiftly moving current of my 30s was beginning to drag me in with the undertow. But when it comes right down to the passing of the baton between this decade and the next, I’m not sure how to feel. When I turned 10 years old, I remembered a passage from A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, one of my all-time favorite novels: “Today, I am becoming a woman.” When I turned 20 in the (literally) intoxicating merriment of that Irish pub, I thought, “Today, I am becoming an adult.” But what does one become when they turn 30?

If you ask some women, the dawning of your 30th year is immediately fraught with emotional anxieties – but not for this girl. I don’t have the tick-tock of a biological clock in my ears; no gray hairs to hide and no “fine lines” to diminish; no mysterious creaks in the knees or cricks in the back. In fact, the older I get, the younger I look – a notion that my mom lovingly (though begrudgingly!) agreed to. I’ve always been a firm believer in the “you’re only as old as you feel” philosophy, though at the moment, I’m hard-pressed to define the digits in that equation. Still, I’ve always had a fondness for people with that luminous, ageless quality about them – something you usually only find in enlightened people past the mid-century mark. Ask me again when I turn 50, I suppose!

So … That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it. This year has been challenging thus far, but I’ve buried a seed of confidence that the 2nd half will be promising, and that bud is slowly starting to blossom. This decade has been at times weird and wearying, whimsical and wild – but I look forward to what the next one holds. In some ways I feel as though I might just be reborn – renewed (or perhaps “re-nude”) in a sense. But for now, I’ll enjoy these last few days of my troublemakin’ twenties. My next birthday might not be as heady and hedonistic as my 20th, but if women do indeed age gracefully like fine wine, I look forward to the intoxicating memories to come.

{ 21 comments }

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