At Riza's urging, I tried the Ultrakill demo last night. She was surprised her laptop could run it at all but, to be honest, she really undersells that machine's abilities. She could probably run Dolphin on there with no substantial problems. I mean, she's a bit of a stickler-perfectionist when it comes to framerates (60 FPS or don't bother), I've been playing games on unsupported hardware for my entire life, so I'm accustomed to not having full capacity. I'm perfectly content with 24-50 FPS. Anyway, she blazed through the demo in, like, under an hour. She had me try it too, like I said, and... well, I think she got annoyed at how much I compared it to Project Brutality (a descendant of Brutal Doom). And, like, there's a few bossfights that are different, but yeah, the annoying jumping guys with big mouths and no arms basically behave exactly the same way as Brutality imps. Even though I wasn't real taken with it, Riza sure was. I'm looking forward to having money so I can buy her games (although, the way the job search is going, it's looking like she's gonna get work before I do).
But yeah, Ultrakill was all she could talk about for about a day and a half 🩷 She's so cute :)
We've been paying a bit more attention to her Wii lately. I mentioned once that I converted a lot of RVZ's to ISO's so we could load them in Nintendont. One of those was 007 NightFire (spelled with the CamelCase to distinguish it from Chuck Tingle's publisher), which I used to be crazy about, but I don't think I've played in... uh... 15 years?! Anyway, I'm a little out of practise, but I'm surprised at how much of the game I remember. Pathing is pretty easy because it's so linear. I always fucked up the driving missions, so I never really played them much, but the GoldenEye bits are pretty easy. Considering it's the Gamecube, the environments have a surprising amount of detail, and some bits (not enough) are even destructible.
Even though the Nintendo 64 emulator experiment was a complete wash, the Wii can still do 8- and 16-bit consoles extremely well, so just tonight I filled up the Wii's ROMs folder with as much of my retro game datahoard as I could. Except Battletoads. Somehow I forgot about Battletoads. Oh well, easily fixed. As I'm writing, Riza is killing it on Contra for NES (and being killed a lot too; thank you, Hashimoto, for the 30-Lives code, but absolutely fuck Konami for putting such arcade bullshit on the NES). I played some Blackthorne and Super Mario All-Stars+World earlier, too. Next it's time to see how well the GBA emulator works.
Back to Ultrakill plus something that isn't really any fun to talk about. Since Riza was so keen on buying the full version of Ultrakill, but we're living on a budget of about $400 worth of food stamps at the moment, I suggested Project Brutality as a stopgap measure. Truth be told, I'm in extreme danger of falling back into my Doom addiction if I carry on playing Brutality. Or really anything else having to do with Doom. I'd been playing Brutality on Discord VC with Riza's friends, mostly so I would have something to do during downtime between my saying anything, but also because 2 of T's friends are new parents and I needed to play a game that I couldn't ruin with my hormonal feelings. I just realised, I haven't gone into that on my public-facing blog, have I? Just my hidden diary page. Well, no need to go into great detail right now, but 2 unpleasant side-effects of playing this game again are 1) I'm remembering everything that led up to my abandoning the game in the first place and, 2) I'm relapsing into my Doom addiction.
Videogame addiction is a very real thing, and it's not the fun, quirky kind of thing that the media makes it out to be. It's the same as being addicted to substances: you chase a high that you felt 1 time, you never get there again because you can't un-experience something, and the frustration over not reaching it plays with your blood pressure and nerves. Admittedly, it's not as bad for you as substance abuse, but it makes me motion sick. I've thrown up from playing Brutality before because I go so fast when I play it, whipping the viewpoint camera back and forth.
Anyway, I fully deleted everything having to do with Doom from my computer (except GZDoom Builder, which is an odd version that no longer exists and I can't remember where I put the installer file) and wrote a song about how I relapsed. I guess it's hyperpop? I don't plan to use any pitch correction on the lyrics so maybe it's not. I don't know. Music genres is even more bogus than music theory. From now on, I'm just going to either draw or listen to '80s pop hits when I'm sitting on call with H and/or S. It'll affect what I draw, but channelling my emotions into something creative is going to be a lot more healthy in the long run.