Video games are a vague and persnickety addiction for me. Sure, I dilly dally in lots of stuff… you could take a look at the ancient Gkikas Time Machine to see the money and time spent on passtimes like hydroponics, Volkswagen busses, Phish tours, or iguana husbandry. These things, like sands through the hourglass, have given way to new and different obsessions, like webmastering and playing guitar and marriage and marketing (but not in that order).
Along the way, a few years ago, came a fascination with modifying Xboxes. Something about soldering black market microchips and hax0r3d alternative dashboards into the humble Micro$oft console did it for me. It wasn’t about piracy or copyright infringement, although I was guilty of that. It wasn’t about playing video games, even, though I was guilty of that, too. It was more about the challenge and forbidden fun of discovering and mastering something entirely sexy, entirely new, and pretty damned badass to put it mildly.
Once I mastered it, and performed this surgery with the help of a good friend and multiplied the boxen to include fully loaded hard drive gifts for people and ecstatic friends whose minds were boggled, I settled comfortably into the task of actually playing all of these games. A handful appealed to me. Halo and it’s successor brought heaps of people to my house, toting their consoles and producing hours and hours of cable-strewn happiness and shouting for all. Need for Speed Most Wanted allowed me to drive like I wished I could in real life. Crimson Skies let me barnstorm the weirdest settings and shoot bad guys.
There is, however, one obsessive gaming compulsion that stuck with me, due in great part to its cooperative mission aspect: Splinter Cell. I skipped the first incarnation entirely, moving straight to Pandora’s Tomorrow. The controls, examining the original installment of the series, were ancient and backward compared to what Pandora offered, which included a versus-mode for playing online. I figured out how to do that without Xbox Live, too, which was super satisfying.
Then came Chaos Theory, the 3rd installment in the series, which I happened upon in a Blockbuster one day after we’d moved to Sarasota and I was hurting for friends. CT had a different slant to the multiplayer mode… co-op mode, where Trox and I learned to sneak around in split-screen happiness, creeping up to baddies and snapping their necks.
We played that game until it was limp and begging for submission. I played single-player mode all the way through a second time. Trox and I added a layer of complexity to co-op mode: no guns, sneaking through the missions on 100% stealth and slinking along overhead pipes to avoid detection by the Bots. It was fun, but we utterly killed the game. Around this time, word came out that Splinter Cell 4 was in the works, and our vigor was renewed in anticipation of further sneaking and crawling and assassinating.
As is customary of video game release dates, they’re loosey-goosey and shouldn’t be trusted until the game in reference is held in one’s hot little hands. The day did come, though, and prancing into Best Buy I got the freshest copy that hadn’t even been put on the shelf yet. Hark, the herald spies sneak.
So basically, Trox and I are back in the spies game, and it’s wonderful even though there isn’t much different between Chaos Theory and this latest installment, Double-Agent. News as it arrives, Trox’ll be here soon.