Kat Dancing

"ALIEN IN SLAMMER AFTER FISTFIGHT WITH BILL... OVER HILLARY!"

Ah, tabloids. My wait in the grocery store checkout line would be so much duller without you.

Spent most of the day being introduced to the wonders of X-Box by my ever-lovin' (and bored) brother. We played three total - a first-person shooter, a fight game, and something that was supposed to simulate riding a snowboard, which I gather is a pretty good sweep of the field of X-Box/PS2/whatever game thingies. I enjoyed it, but don't expect me to become a regular player of these games... I don't have the reflexes. I also don't know my right from my left very well, and I get lost even in real life, which meant that in the first person shooter I spent a lot of time banging my nose against corners and being fragged by people, while proving that my own aim was absolutely absymal, unless I was shooting at my teammates by mistake, in which case I was very accurate. This led to a pretty predictable pattern for gameplay:

Bro: I'm coming down the stairs! It's me! Don't shoot at me! Don't... ARG! You killed me!

Me: Sorry. There's one of those red guys around here somewhere.

Bro: You shot me with a heat-seeking missile!

Me: Sorry. Cool gun, eh?

Game Screen: Conner has been defeated by Murphy. Again. Get a grip, woman! Oh, and Murphy has been defeated by Phoenix Commando.

Me: See? I told you one of those red guys was around here somewhere. Why didn't he die when I shot at him?

Bro: Because you were pushing the left trigger instead of the right. Also, you'd used up all of your ammo on me.

The fighting game I did a lot better at, or at least a lot better at than I deserved. This is because after a while I start panicking in these games and just punch as many buttons as I can, all at once, over and over, which turns out to be a pretty good strategy in fight games because:

a) My opponent cannot hit me, since my character is apparently trying to do the hokey-pokey while breakdancing and suffering from St. Vitus's Dance. Any blows anyone can land on her are completely accidental. Of course, I can't hit him either, but that's okay because

b) The programmers of these liked to put in a bunch of really cool moves which can only be accessed by knowing all the key combinations for all the characters by heart or, alternatively, by randomly pushing a bunch of buttons. This means that every so often, and to my complete surprise, my character would make a Mystical Hand Motion and announce, "The Path of the Lotus is Strewn With Rice Paper," or something, and then her opponent would be struck with blue lightening, frozen in solid ice, picked up by his feet and banged headfirst against the floor a couple of times, or, on rare occasions, all three, while my brother shouted, "What? How did you DO that? YOU'RE JUST PUSHING BUTTONS! THAT IS SO UNFAIR! Cool though." The opponent would then roll around moaning a bit while my character made finishing-up passes and smiled serenely, the impressiveness of her chi only slightly marred by the fact that I am not very quick on the uptake and so the hokey-pokey St. Vitus's breakdance had continued throughout.

Snowboarding was more or less a draw. My random-button-pushing did uncover several nifty snowboarding tricks for which I got points, but sadly it was not enough to make up for my complete inability to keep the character upright, going where I wanted, or, on several occasions, doing the course while facing the proper direction. I do not think I shall ever take up snowboarding. My ability to keep a real snowboard under control is probably not much ahead of my game abilities, and and the noises the characters were making while I careened them off of various solid objests were very realistic.