Out of the MUDD and MUCK into Oblivion

My younger brother has been kind enough to take me under his wing and give me a crash course in gaming. Although, I'm afraid to say that I'm really bad at jumping from game to game. Where some people might play one game for a few hours and then try something new, I like to wrestle with something for ages. In a rather mulish way I'll beat my head against a wall until I burst through. Or pass out. Whichever comes first. That said, he's being amazingly patient with me in this endeavor and has even gone so far as to help me set up an Xbox Live account (he, in fact, is the reason I have an xbox at all now). Now, I say 'help' not because I'm not technically savvy and couldn't figure it out for myself. No, I can figure out the particulars. It's just that damn 6 - 15 character username that gets me every time. When faced with defining myself in such a small, irrelevant way my mind goes blank. Cue my brother and his friend with suggestions. Some of you might be happy to know that I didn't steal the following names away from the world last night:

Angry Alan Thick
Lovely Carl Winslow
Be Bea Arthur

Although, I think that my brother's friend my have taken some form of 'Lovely Carl Winslow' by now. And if you were curious about 'Kirk Cameron', 'Lisa Turtle' or 'Kelly Kapowski' they were all taken. I'm pretty happy with what I ended up with, though I can't claim it's clever or even similar to any of my usual monikers. But if you see 'candace cameron' running around, it's me.

The only down side to having my own xbox live account instead of playing on my brother's is that I had to restart my Dragon Age Origins game. Really it's not such a hardship because I hadn't gotten so far. The interesting thing is that by going back and playing again I unlocked different accomplishments and have different characters in my party. It's interesting to me that the choices I make matter so much. That's the sort of thing that I love. Years ago when my brother introduced me to Knights of the Old Republic he lost access to his xbox for an entire week.

Now, the fantastic thing about Dragon Age is that, even for someone like me who is accustomed to MUSH/MUCK/MUDD platforms and not a heavy console gamer, it is easy to slip into the game play. Control functions make sense and after a little bit of fooling around with are really natural. The controls for Mass Effect I'm much clumsier with. I ended up having to invert the controller because somehow making up into down and vice versa made more sense to my head. Go figure.

Maybe I'm just inherently better with sharp pointy things than guns. Hm. Something to ponder.