Tired of Shooters?

Well, despite my claim that I'm tired of shooting games, the 1st-person ones to be exact, there on the couch I spent the weekend playing Call of Duty 4. I'm on a hook pretty big. I think it's through my neck and coming out of my arm. Seriously. Right out of my palm.

I've never seen a shooting game so detailed with statistics since Halo 2 and Gears of War. I know that's pretty recent, but CoD serves up those stats on a silver platter and offers you free refills. I know now that I shot an AK47 and killed 91 people, but if I do it just 59 more times, I'll get something cool. Something that will make me want to do it even more. And I guess 1000 points worth of Xbox Live Achievements weren't enough, so they created an entire list of crazy things to do in the game to make you "grind" online matches over and over again. But CoD online is hardly a game of "grinding" away, mindlessly.

I tried to play Mass Effect after a couple of days of CoD. When the game finally resumed, I was amid strange sights and unfamiliar names and places. It was almost as if my "Kaylee" Shepard had slipped into a comma and awoken, memories broken.

It's dangerous to play games of such varying composition back and forth from each other. It's like reading a novel and taking breaks to read comic books. You almost need crib notes to get back into the novel. Gladly, Mass Effect has those. Because BioWare knows you are weak.