People seemed to like my “LA Noire” piece,[1] so here’s a spiritual sequel. Enjoy (I know my liver didn’t).
This article – and the bad decisions detailed herein – arose from a confluence of factors. First was my purchase of an Xbox Series S and subsequent dive into the delights of Game Pass. The second was my viewing of the 2012 film Flight, starring Denzel Washington.[2] (Third was, obviously, the ingestion of enough alcohol to make Jim Beam himself blush, but what else is new?)
Let’s go over the premise of the movie: Denzel Washington plays the delightfully-named Whip Whittaker, a full-time drunk who moonlights as an airline pilot. During a routine flight, a drunk(ish) Whittaker saves the plane from crashing by executing a barrel roll straight out of Star Fox 64 before chopping the steeple off a church and performing what could generously be termed an emergency landing in a nearby field. Somewhat miraculously, the number of casualties is in the single digits, although Whittaker and his copilot are injured (the latter quite severely). Whittaker wakes up in the hospital, and then some other stuff happens.[3] The “other stuff” isn’t what I took from the movie: rather, I was wondering whether or not being intoxicated helps flying planes.
Enter Microsoft Flight Simulator, available on Game Pass.
I’d downloaded the title several weeks before seeing the movie and had spent a few days’ worth of gaming sessions delving into the tutorials, and, later, the “Discovery Flights” that let you skip all that “taking off” bullshit and get right to the money shot: that is, flying planes over exotic locales before inevitably pancaking yourself into a rock face and/or the ocean. Keep in mind, I was drunk for all of this.[4]
Since I’m fond of taking up new hobbies without thinking,[5] I picked up a discounted flight controller (Turtle Beach’s VelocityOne) and, after mounting it on my long-suffering coffee table, plugged it in, downloaded the necessary updates, fiddled with the basic settings, and got to flyin’. The tutorials were a little tougher, given that the game seems to assign numbers to the VelocityOne’s inputs by throwing darts at a board full of alphanumeric codes while blindfolded, but let it never be said I don’t have a work ethic – I spent a whole ten minutes on it before giving up and googling settings recommended by smarter-slash-more-experienced players. This thing has got a fuckload of buttons, and I have less work ethic than previously stated, so I don’t have the VelocityOne fully programmed yet – but it’s coming along.
The next day, I watched Flight for the first time. I’m reasonably certain that I learned the wrong lesson from it, given that I proceeded to fire up the ol’ VelocityOne and tried to land an Airbus in the Himalayas after having a double-digit number of adult beverages. Shockingly enough, this went poorly, as I pulled an unintentional Gandalf and smote my plane’s ruin upon the mountainside. Terra Firma: 1, Will: 0 (if you’re keeping score).
Several attempts later and I’d managed to succeed to the extent that the failure screen reflected “destroyed landing gear” instead of immediately sending my profile to the nearest FAA office with instructions to “liquidate with prejudice”. I counted this as a win and moved on to crash-landing in the ocean off Bora Bora (turns out the water is, like, really big. Bigger than you’d think.) Still, since MFS doesn’t render crashes (the screen just cuts to black, presumably to keep teenagers and Muslim extremists from having too much fun), my plane ended up just kind of coasting along on the water’s surface. I’m not sure why water “landings” don’t trigger the usual black failure screen, but I’m not complaining: it makes me feel like a fucking winner.
I ended up introducing a few variations to my emergency landing procedure: for example, I’d occasionally cut the power to half the plane’s engines mid-flight or attempt a Sully-style river landing. Somewhat predictably, these ended as about as well as the Challenger mission, with wreckage scattered throughout retirement homes across eastern Florida.
Because I’m fundamentally unable to accept the limitations of my worldly experience and refuse to learn obvious lessons from my failures, I upgraded my ride from an Airbus to an F-22 Hornet. Let me tell you this: there are very few things on earth that feel as awesome as turning to your pet chinchilla, saying “Let’s fuckin’ punch it, bro,” and cranking the throttle ‘til you smash the sound barrier like it’s a naughty tomato getting hit by the world’s biggest mallet. I’m still chasing that high, even though the trail always ends in a smoking crater on the side of an active volcano.
Since I’ve been in and out of my apartment a lot over the past few weeks, I haven’t gotten as many chances as I’d like to grease up the ol’ flight stick (that sounds like a horrific euphemism, doesn’t it?). Still, I was excited to see that the developers added the Pelican from Halo (and some other goodies) to the game as a free download earlier in the summer; now all I’m waiting on is the DLC for hot air balloons. I’ve always wanted to drunk-drive one of those.
[1] Located at: https://scrubreport.com/2022/05/31/the-joys-of-playing-la-noire-while-drunk/
[2] Question: has Denzel Washington ever made a bad movie? I can’t think of any. Some mediocre ones, maybe, but nothing outright bad.
[3] If you want a whole-ass plot summary, Wikipedia’s got you covered.
[4] For the record, this is not a good thing. Don’t emulate me, kids.
[5] See: my musical journey with the Peruvian pan flute and my ever-expanding collection of Lance Reddick body pillows.