Happy F***ing Valentines Day

Well, here it is: the holiday dedicated to love and devotion to that one special someone. Ya da da da da, point is, I hate it.  Not the concept of the holiday, but what it represents to me and all others like me.  On any other day, I can see a happy couple and not be bothered by it, but now that it's f***ing Valentine's Day, happy couples are everywhere, and general lovey-doveyness is all over the place.  It ironically makes me pissed off to the very core.

Antipathy towards Valentine's Day is fairly easy to explain.  For every one of the happy couples out there that fortune smiles down upon, there are a few dozen sorry losers that are still wiping off the blood and scat from their last meeting with fortune.  Yeah, I know, "fortune" and "fate" are basically just excuses for us to not try, but the thing is that a lot of us have, lots of times.

Let me tell you about the 600 foot wall.

Everyone who's ever felt any amount of social anxiety knows about the 600 foot wall.  It's that feeling you get where, with every fiber of your being, you want to go and meet someone and/or get to know them, but you are at the complete mercy of a barrier made of excuses and self-doubt.  I know this feeling very well, because it happens to me all day, every day, and I have no way that I know of to stop it.

It's funny that the acronym for Social Anxiety Disorder also describes what it does to your psyche.

For all the S.A.D. people out there, Valentine's is the time for anger and apathy.  Particular emphasis should be placed on the apathy part, because that's the only way a lot of us get through the day without going hair-pullingly, teeth-gnashingly, screaming-profanities-in-publicly insane.

It was looking like one of those days today.  I walked down to start classes in the morning met by a chilling wind and a thick blanket of dark grey clouds neatly conveying my mood most mornings.  After a few sessions of trying to stay awake during lectures, I walked over to my mailbox, and what do I see but a very special Valentine's gift courtesy of GameFly.

Yay for temporary distractions.

Might as well give my first impressions of what was in those special envelopes.  Crackdown 2 is a super-sprinting, moon-gravity-jumping third-person shooter developed by Ruffian Games for the Xbox 360.  At first glance, it looks a lot like another game published by Microsoft Game Studios, with the energy shields, power armor, and regenerating health.  However, when powerup orbs, auto-aiming, and going all kung-fu on people's asses are introduced, these comparisons are immediately thrown out.  The controls are rather slippery, and the platforming rather imprecise, but it almost works for this kind of game.  This would be a fun game for multiplayer, definitely.  I could just imagine opening fire on one of my friends from 60 feet in the air, and engaging in good button-mashing fisticuffs when bullets fail.

The other game is 3D Dot Game Heroes, developed by From Software and published by Atlus in North America as an exclusive for the PS3.  It features a hero who must collect six power orbs to free the land from an ancient evil force, and starts with you getting pulled out of bed and sent to the king, who gives you a weapon and says "It's dangerous to go out alone - take this."  Yep, this is a 3D pixelated homage to the 8-bit action adventure classics, especially one in particular put out by Nintendo.  From what I've played of it, it's just great, and I'd totally recommend it to any fans of the old-school Zelda games.

Well, the day is almost over, so I shall spend the rest of the night in solitude playing more of the awesome games that GameFly was nice enough to finally get to me today (I sent in the previous two games on Sunday, last Sunday).  Good night, all, and have a happy f***ing Valentines day.

EDIT: Turns out "the rest of the night" was wrong, because I got called in to work at around 6.  Blast!