After having spent pretty much the entire week with me (barring work), Elizabeth left me yesterday to get her laundry done and meet with an old friend. This in itself was not bad; I'd grown quite burned out on people and wanted some solitude. However, since this old friend of hers also happens to be a past boyfriend, I got a little unneccessarily freaked out (one of those "I
know better than to worry, but I can't
help it even though I'm 32 and should be beyond this kind of thing now" things I'm going to get over Real Soon Now.).
To distract myself, I thought about putting my shiny new
Firefly DVD into play, but then I recalled that I'd promised not to watch them without Elizabeth. So instead, I placed the shiny new
Crimson Skies X-Box game in the tray and pressed
START. And then I promptly lost three hours.
"Awesome" is a word that has been robbed of much of its power by frequent overuse in the 80s. But to accurately use the word for a moment, Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge is absolutely awesome. It is a bright light in a landscape of so-so console flying games. It is a new high-water-mark in games. And it almost has me ready to get X-Box Live so I can fly against other aces of the alternate 1930's the game envisions.
I quote the game's website:
High adventure, daring piracy, cold vengeance, art deco style, and the occasional gorgeous dame...what more could you ask from a videogame? (Well, most players would also demand excellent graphics, slightly fiendish level design, and good, solid gameplay—but we've got those too.)
And then there's the Tesla cannon. And the chickens. Oh, and something about multiplayer so good it'll keep you awake until 5AM and send you to work like a mumbling zombie.
I'll let you know about the multiplayer, but I can say that the single player campaign is killer. Flying through canyons and crashed blimps in death-defying maneuvers while firing fully automatic guns at the Ragin' Cajun gang is one thing, but when I shot down a Nazi Zeppelin and the nose-cone became a giant
walking mechanical spider-thing intent on destroying my friend's lab, well, I sat up and took notice.
The music, the voice-over work, the dialogue -- all of it is straight out of pulp-era adventures.
Thank the Nine I have no school for the next three weeks, eh?