Sitrep: Shaking the Rust Off

Groan. Holidays. Aren’t they great? For a while. The gravity of the situation is horrible, though. What goes up must plummet shockingly back down to earth in a great flaming meteor of terrible gamer. So while I went away and forgot my troubles with many a Melbourne chardonnay (shut up, Sydney habits die hard okay), I have returned unto the Emerald City a broken man. Rich in spirit as always (and actual spirits, oh my god, have you guys tried that Belvedere vodka?), but nowhere near the slaughterhouse of mostly accidental FPS carnage I was before Christmas happened and look, Tim. Somehow, I don’t have much money right now. You understand.

Normally I could explain away my crippling ineptitude with this handy pie chart:

But that only explains away my middling Call of Duty outings (and quite neatly and accurately, might I add), which are fewer and fewer these days although I hear that BLOPS II was actually quite the good. There is nary an internet pie chart to let my long-suffering squaddies in BF3 or those poor-ass randoms who chance upon my wobbly friendly fire just about anywhere else know that I, my good sirs, have been on holiday. I’m rusty. “Why Toblet,” they say. “That is funny, you’re still just as terrible as we all remember. What’s your WD40?”

WD40, as we all know, is a salacious lubricant a disreputable young woman I once knew used to oil her bedsprings with so that the squeaking of said overused bedsprings would not distract her many paramours from the task at hand. In this context, it is an antidote to my poor performance. How does one shake the rust from one’s well-worn gamer’s gauntlet even as that rust seemingly stacks ever onward like transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water with each passing year?

Gaming is always training, I’ve realised. More so, too, as you get older. It’s weird. Until I visited the StarCraft II finals last year, I had no concept of games as sport. The physicality of the RTS and the FPS especially is so mutable but prone to instant erosion the moment you slack off and decide, “Whatever. I am going to drink this entire pop-up bar and not get out of bed for an extremely long time hereafter.” That kind of thing only works if you’re Michael Phelps or that Australian long-jumper who eats a pack a day and still goes home with silver.

I am neither of these people, and while 2013 is going to be my YEAR, baby, I have not started it with any panache where gaming is concerned. You might say I have less online friends than I did in December. The journey to win all thousand of them back starts with a single step, and that step is actual training. No kidding, how strange. Who even does that? I am seriously using one of those wrist-enhancing exercise squeezy things right now as well as checking out detailed schematics of all those maps my addled upstairs has fogged the intricacies of.

It’s all crappening.

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