'Til (Zombie) Death Do Us Part

I don't often blog about my husband. It's not that I don't think he's worth writing about...that's not the case. He's great. It's just that the subject matter I tend to write about often falls into a category of.....how should I put it?

...not very nice?
...overly sarcastic?
...shit I can't stand?

Whatever. The point is, I love my husband very much and most of the stuff he does from day to day isn't exactly (by my evil standards) blogworthy.

Until now.

This afternoon, my husband and I were having a New Year's Day Veg-Fest. We spent most of the day hanging out in our pajamas, watching a Three Stooges marathon, eating leftover junk food from our party the night before, and basically being giant blobs together. At one point, my husband decided to play some video games while I watched and surfed around on my laptop. It was during this downtime that I decided to give my husband his fair tribute on The Octopus...because I think it's worth mentioning that my husband, who is an intelligent, kind, sensitive, compassionate person has another side to him.

He loves shooting stuff. And I'm going to tell you all about it.

Now don't go getting any strange ideas. He doesn't actually shoot things. It's not like he owns guns and goes to the range and shoots targets and crap like that. That's my crazy brother in law. He's the one you should be worried about. My husband just likes shooting fake video game people. I don't know if it's a guy thing or a nerd thing or a rebel thing or what. All I know is that when it comes to video games, we have the "our" games and the "his" games. Here's the difference:

The "our" games are games we play together. They mostly consist of...

-driving cartoon race cars around a track
-being on a game show
-playing baseball
-bowling against aliens
-playing a board game...on a TV screen...even though we have the same real-life board game upstairs in the closet
-being in a rock band

The "his" games are games he likes to play alone, not necessarily because he likes being alone...but because I refuse to play the games with him. They mostly consist of...

-shooting people
-shooting robots
-shooting dragons
-shooting zombies
-shooting Nazis
-being a fighter pilot
-being a kid running around the woods in the dark trying to avoid being eaten by a giant spider before getting caught in a bear trap or being crushed by a falling tree

I got him a game for Christmas called Call of Duty: Black Ops. I knew nothing about this game before buying it other than...

-I had seen a lot of commercials on TV for it
-Whenever those commercials came on, my husband would get very excited
-I had heard lots of 8th grade boys in school talking about how awesome this game is
-If an 8th grade boy likes it, then it must be a great game (and it more than likely involves lots of stuff getting shot, blown up, or decapitated)

Judging by that criteria, I knew I had a winner. I haven't had the opportunity to watch him play the game yet. In fact, I don't even think he has opened it yet. The reason? He wants to find a time where he can set aside an entire day just to play it. I am not kidding. This is a guy who is probably the hardest working person I have ever met...who cooks and cleans and helps everyone out and hardly ever just sits. This same guy wants to dedicate an entire day of his life just to play Black Ops.

Huh?

Then there's this game he is playing today called Portal. Let's backtrack for a second. Even though Black Ops isn't exactly my cup of tea, at least I can sort of understand it and (if forced) could probably figure out how to play it. From what I gather, you're a dude in a war and you're fighting other dudes. You run around and shoot other dudes before they can shoot you. Sounds about right.

But this Portal game takes it to a whole new level. I have been watching my husband play this game for about three hours now, and I still have no idea what the hell is going on. He tried to explain it to me (because it's important for me to appreciate these things, apparently). Here's what I sort of guess is happening based on what he explained: His character is in a room. I can't see his character...all I can see is a giant laser gun thing in his hand. So far, so good. Then my husband said, "Watch this!" and shot a hole through the wall. After he shot a hole in the wall, I could see into the next room. There was a dude in the other room holding a gun. My husband said, "That's me. Get it? I'm looking at myself through a portal!" Right. Am I supposed to be impressed by this? More importantly...am I supposed to even understand what it means?

After that enlightening conversation, I made the mistake of asking my husband if Portal was a newer game or one that he had for a while. Here's the quick, one word answer I got...

"It's an older game that I had that I never played. A while back there was a game called Half Life, and it won a bunch of awards and they put out this game called Orange Box Game of the Year Edition. And I bought it for nine bucks at the time. It was like four games. FOUR GAMES for nine bucks. It's not a very long game...it's more like strategy. It was kind of like an add on."

It was at this moment that I realized something...

OH MY GOD. THIS IS WHAT HE MUST FEEL LIKE WHEN I TALK ABOUT NAIL POLISH. OR JEANS. OR SHAMPOO. OR SOFTBALL. OR PEREZ HILTON.

The poor, poor man.

As interesting as "The History of Portal" conversation was going, it was sadly interrupted when my husband sat up in his seat, shot a hole in the wall and said, "Ooooh I know what I can do now." And that was the end of that. Bummer.

Let me tell you a little more about this game, since I'm sure you're very interested. It features an invisible talking robot woman who taunts you the entire time you're playing. She makes weird jokes and says incoherent crap and tells you she is going to kill you over and over again. Sounds like a lot of girls I know.

Since I had about four hours of material in front of me, I decided to jot down some of the more entertaining lines from Talking Robot Woman. Here are some of my favorites:

"If I were you, I would just lay down in front of a rocket."
"Killing you and giving you good advice are not mutually exclusive."
"Starting now, there is going to be a lot less conversation and a lot more killing."
"As much as I'd like to, I can't get the neurotoxin in your head any faster. So get comfortable while I warm up the neurotoxin emitters."
"Your entire life has been a mathematical error that I intend to correct."

Did I mention that by day, my husband is a physicist who studies radiation and plans cancer treatments?

Let's get back to the whole laser gun in the hand thing. Apparently in a lot of these shooting games, where the main objective is to kill stuff, you view the entire game from the perspective of the person doing all the killing. Does that make any sense? Basically, you can't see the dude's face or body or anything...all you can see is the gun sticking out of the bottom of the screen. Apparently the technical video game jargon for this is "First Person Shooter." At least that's what my husband calls it. So essentially, you feel like you are right in the middle of the action...as opposed to the kinds of games I like, when you feel like you're watching the 2D action from the last row of a movie theater.

There are a lot of people out there (like my husband) who are really into this whole first person shooting thing. It makes them feel like they are really there and it makes the game seem a lot more realistic. I, however, am NOT one of those people. It has nothing to do with the whole "being there" thing. I don't really care about that. The problem I have with this kind of game is simple: it makes me puke.

I get motion sickness pretty easily...in a car, on a bus, on the T, in an airplane, on a roller coaster, in an elevator, if I'm sitting too close at the movie theater, on a swing, etc. You get the picture. Let's just say I'm easily nauseated. Certain people have that effect on me too...but that's a whole other story. Needless to say, it only took about two seconds of watching that stupid Portal game before I started feeling dizzy and pukey. It was at that point I decided it would be much better to turn my head away from the game and direct my attention to something much more healthy: writing about my husband's freaky gaming and publishing it for the entire world to read.

After about four hours, my husband finally BEAT the game. It was quite the monumental occasion. Actually, it wasn't really that monumental, considering my husband wasn't even sure if he had beaten it at first. All of a sudden, the game went quiet and a bright white blob appeared on the screen. My husband just sat there, staring at it.

ME: "Did you beat the game?"

HIM: "I think so. I'm not sure. I think she might have sucked me into the portal."

Seriously? That's it? Shouldn't there be some kind of parade or something? I can remember the exact moment in my life when I first saved The Princess. It was epic. There were fake Nintendo 2D fireworks. There was music. It was outstanding. There was no doubt in my mind that I had defeated the evil Bowser. So what the hell kind of a game is it when you don't even know if you've won? That's some straight up bullshit right there.

After a few confusing moments, we concluded that my husband did, in fact, did beat the game. How did we know? Because a song came on and some credits rolled on the screen. Thankfully, I videotaped it so you can relive the magical moment along with us:

I apologize for the swearing. Hope you weren't watching this in church.

I'd also like to point out that my husband thinks our brother in law still hasn't beaten this game yet. Apparently in the world of video games, it is very important that you "beat" the game before someone else does...or in less amount of time. So, dear brother in law, please know that in the world of first person shooter talking robot games where the main objective is to shoot holes through walls....you are far less superior. Go sit in the corner for a while.