Call us crazy, but we could run off a thousand and one worse problems for our girlfriend to have than being "addicted" to video games. That's why we watched MTV's True Life: I'm Addicted to Video Games with our mouths agape when we saw Brooklyn born beauty Charisse Nicole was arguing with her boyfriend about playing too much Call of Duty! Come on! What more could a guy ask for than a gorgeous girl that wants nothing more than to snuggle up with you and an Xbox? To find out if Charisse was really as cool as she seemed on TV, we caught up with her to talk about her favorite games, why she doesn't own a Nintendo Wii and how hard it is for a black girl on Xbox Live.
Average Day: I wake up pretty early—my boyfriend goes to work around 6 am—and the first thing I do is I go to my computer and check my little flash based games and see what happened. They're good time fillers before I have to go to school. I have class in the middle of the day. I'll come home and get right on a game on the console, where it's Mass Effect or Call of Duty. If I'm cooking dinner, I'll cook dinner while I'm playing Call of Duty. We might sit out a game, eat and get right back in it, and play until we go to sleep.
Gaming Origins: " Some of the first games I remember playing were Super Mario Bro's, Pac Man, Sonic the Hedgehog... pretty much anything that was out on the original Sega or the original Nintendo, I played them all.
Current Gaming Systems: Now my boyfriend and I have two XBox 360 Elite's. One's just a regular black one, one of the Call of Duty special edition ones, a PS3 and a Nintendo DS. I play the 360 the most, hands down.
Current Favorite Games:Modern Warfare 2, I play it all the time. I used to be in love with Halo, but Call of Duty kind of knocked that out of the foreground for me. Mass Effect 2: love it, love it, love it. We've been playing Borderlands. I love Rock Band, it's a really fun party game. Those are the main ones we play. Those are the ones that get the most time inside the console.
Playing Along with Boyfriend: We play Modern Warfare 2 together everytime. We like games with a sound multiplayer component. We play with our friends online. We'll come home and say, "What do you want to do today?" and it's like, "Duh! Call of Duty!" We have two flat screens sitting right next to each other, both Xbox's hooked up, we put our headsets on—we actually have some really extreme gamer headsets called Turtle Beaches. They actually give you full dolby digital surround sound in the headset. We have the X41's. You can hear everything. They're great. But, Call of Duty is great. We've played for 12 hours straight, just lost in the game. It's fun. It's nice to be able to share something you care so much about with someone you care so much about.
No love for the Wii: We don't even own a Wii! I'll tell him, "Baby, we should get a Wii this month, and he's like, Yeah, you know you'll never play it. Wii games are fun, don't get me wrong, but I'd rather be shooting someone than sitting around trying to collect tokens and coins. The Wii games are geared more towards the casual gamer and I don't consider myself a casual gamer. I do have a pink DS, but I haven't even touched it in a while.
Or the PS3: I can't say I invest a whole lot of time playing the PS3. A lot of the time the same games will come out for the 360, so I'd rather play them on the 360. I guess I'm more comfortable with the 360 and I have more friends that play it. The online experience is better. But there are some games coming out for PS3 that will take my attention off the 360, like Heavy Rain. They just released the demo last week and it's insane. The graphics are beautiful and the story line is great.
MTV's True Life not so true: The show really mis-portrayed our relationship. He plays just as much as I play. And the show made it seem as though he doesn't play at all. Which isn't the case. That couldn't be further from the truth. We met playing video games, we met at a Halo 2 tournament, so for them to try to portray it as I play all the time and he never plays isn't even remotely close to factual. That's the drama they were trying to play up, they were trying to put a spin on the typical drama of a relationship where it's typically the guy playing all the time and the girl getting made, I guess they tried to manipulate our situation. But in actuality that's not how we are.
Addicted to the flash life: I play pretty much any Facebook App that people invite me to. I haven't played Farmville in a while. Now, I mainly play Cafe World, Sorority Life and another game called Ponzi, Inc. Someone invited to that a couple weeks ago and I've been playing that a lot. These games I can play on the go, they're time fillers. If I have time to waste, I can sit down and play those. And, if I'm playing Call of Duty, I can have my laptop out and play those [laughs].
Shook Ones: I'm embarrassed to say I haven't played BioShock 2 yet. To be honest, I'm kind of a wuss with dark games like that, they kind of creep me out. When I played the first one, I kept scaring myself. It's necessarily a scary game, but some creepy things happen. I can't deal with the Big Daddy with the big hands. I got killed by one and I was like, "Yup, I'm done, I don't think I can play this game anymore!" [Laughs]. I was like, 'This is too much for me, I get too emotionally invested and now I just got killed by this terribly scary guy. Maybe I should play when my boyfriends home, with the lights on!' [laughs]. As soon as you let yourself get lost in the game, that's it for you. You're like, I'm a grown-ass person screaming over a video game, I'm gonna put this down now.
Most Anticipated Game of 2010Halo Reach. I'm excited to hear them talk about it and say how much better the experience is going to be and how much more creativity they've had with the character development. And attacking the story as a different angle, but you still get to play as a Spartan but not a master chief. It just seems like it's going to be a really good game.
XBox Live Hate: On Xbox Live I catch all of these, "You must be a fat lesbian", "You must be an ugly, pimple ridden bitch". I get called all sort of names. People have said, "Bitch, why are you playing video games, you need to be in the kitchen!" Or, "You're probably a lesbian, you ain't got no friends." I get all sorts of stuff. When they find out that I'm black and a girl, I catch the racism and the sexism. It never ends on Xbox live for me. It's always after I kick some ass. Here am I at the top of the kills and you're down there talking trash to me. So, I'm a girl who shouldn't be playing video games, but I'm way better than you, come on! [laughs].
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