Turbo Titblast Excitegasm
This game is some kind of PixelChrist. During recent hands-on demonstrations, crippled children found they could suddenly play advanced contact sports, and men who tried the game became instantly more attractive; even those who smelled of week-old crab.
The designers claim that the entire Earth has been faithfully recreated in-game, from complex transatlantic weather systems all the way down to the faint look of irritation on your cat’s face when you stroke it the wrong way. You have complete freedom to destroy or have sex with anything you want - even time itself.
Of course, all this awesome has a downside. When the game is released, it will require a PC more expensive than the average contract killing. I will buy it anyway, of course, and like everyone else, I’ll be forced to play it with the graphics turned down a few notches. It’ll still look pretty awesome.
This is how the game looks to a casual gamer.
After a while, though, the itch will get unbearable. After all the casual players have completed the game and moved on, I’ll keep returning to it even though every session leaves me feeling unsatisfied. Don’t get me wrong: the breasts do bounce, but they don’t have the exquisite buoyancy that people with ultra-bastard computers are probably enjoying. I’m able to destroy Bristol with a single heft of my penis, but the buildings don’t cascade to the ground with quite the hellish force that they should. My cat is too nice.
Giving in to the lust
Eventually, when desire has gnawed at me for long enough, I will spend approximately six hundred stupids upgrading my computer with the latest hardware. My processor will be replaced by an Intel TitanBalls X950, scientifically proven to be better at Scrabble than Jesus. A new processor will of course require a new motherboard, which will in turn entail new memory. Finally, there’s no point having all this fast hardware if my graphics card is bottlenecking it all, so I’ll buy a new one. There will be a tacky CGI woman on the box giving me a look that could either be lust or constipation, and there will be spaceships swooping through explosions behind her. I will feel vaguely disgusted with myself, not least because the graphics card cost approximately the same as El Salvador.
This is how the game looks to a graphics junky.
The first thing I’ll do when I get home is install all the new hardware. And then I’ll uninstall it all again, because I didn’t remove the old device drivers. Then I’ll discover that re-installing the old hardware did not return things to normal, so I will punch various objects that are unable to punch me back, and then I will format the whole fucking lot and start from scratch.
Forty-seven hours later, I’ll finally get to play TTE on “Very High” settings. It will, of course, look fantastic, although to a non-gamer, the changes will be almost imperceptible. I’ll coast through most of the game with the contempt borne of familiarity, just pausing to look at the way the upgraded tears of newly orphaned children glisten in the glow from my flamethrower. Then I’ll think “I wonder what it looks like at a higher resolution!” and I’ll swiftly discover that it makes my new rig wheeze and shudder just like it did before.
Endlessly deferred anti-climax
I’ve completed this lightweight title twice already. I should be bored of the game by now. I actually am bored of it, but I don’t realise this, because I’ve developed some bizarre obsession with making the game look better and better, as if it’ll eventually become indistinguishable from reality, allowing me to switch off the world and just continue inside the game. I am not actually addicted to the game; I’m addicted to thinking about the game. To wanting it. No amount of upgrading will ever quench this thirst. When I finally get a PC that will play Turbo Titblast Excitegasm on maximum settings, I’ll grow swiftly sick of it and drop it like a maggoty sandwich. There’ll be newer games out, games which promise an equally long and fulfilling period of not being able to play them properly.
This man is more well-adjusted than you are.
This is something that a lot of people don’t realise about addiction: much of an addict’s dopamine response is triggered simply by contemplating the object of their desire. Actually attaining it usually ends up in disappointment. If you’ve ever ventured into the exciting world of drugs, you’ll be familiar with “chasing the dragon”; no matter how wrecked you get, you can never recapture the feeling of the first time. But you keep getting wrecked anyway, until your main pleasure is spending your whole week looking forward to the next time.
It’s the same with Turbo Titblast Excitegasm. I’m going to buy this game in order to chase a graphical fidelity that is impossible to attain, then I’ll drop it when I can no longer sustain the belief that I’m only one upgrade away from nirvana.
Unless the multiplayer 0wnz, of course, in which case disregard everything I just said.
I’m interested in hearing your stories about this. Did you ever get unhealthily obsessed with a game because of its graphics? Ever spend way more than you should have spent on hardware you didn’t need? And if you have a console, do you feel the same kind of addiction? Enquiring minds want to know.
I’ve had addiction thinking about games. This was at it’s peak during highschool. While other people decided to do stuff, I was riding the bus back home thinking about how awesome it will be to blow people’s head’s off for 8 hours straight in counter strike source.
It’s a testament to the American Education system that I ended up getting a high enough GPA for a scholarship to pay for my tuition in college.
Either that, or I’m some kind of idiot savant.
You know, that last paragraph about wanting to know about us might actually seem sincere if I didn’t also happen to be a PWOT member who read those ‘The Ferret’ Livejournal links as well.
And also, yes, I in no way needed my $2000 computer and $350 graphics card, but dammit it looks cool.
I must have missed the livejournal you’re talking about, and a search for “the ferret” merely returns a page of links to PWoT members with small furry wildlife protruding from their rectums. Can you send me the link?
What scares me most about being an upgrade junky is how reasonable it all seemed. I convinced myself that I was just future-proofing my system, and it was better to do it now than later because… uh… because I wanted to play Crysis now.
I’m reminded of Edward Norton’s speech in Fight Club about his addiction to possessions and how they gave him a sense of security. No matter what else happened in his life, he had that sofa problem covered. I felt the same thing about my insane upgrades; yeah, this was a huge amount of money, but once I’d spent it, it was out of the way. No matter what else happened in my life, I’d have that upgrade problem covered.
I meant Kathana’s post in the Blog thread In Writers and Readers on PWOT. Here.
She posted two links about an apparently ‘famous’ livejournal writer called ‘theferret’ where he gave tips on blogging. One of them told writers to end their posts on an open note and ask how the reader feels, pretty much the same as how you did there.
Now I feel bad for laughing at your attempt to care about your readers.
I spend an unhealthy amount of time gaming, it’s true, but as my two chief timesappers - even today - are Diablo 2 and Football Manager, I can happily say that this aspect of the addiction hasn’t bothered me for quite some time.
The last time it did, in fact, was when Morrowing came out. I bought it for my PC, and it ran… sort of. Laggy as fuck, and random crashes, all that nonsense. It was okay, though, because I just did what any other balanced individual would do in this situation.
I went out the next day and bought an xbox and my second copy of Morrowind.
Good fucking times.
I remember Morrowind being an absolute hair-tearer because it was very poorly optimised, so it didn’t run properly on any system. A couple of years ago, out of curiosity I installed it on my NinjaBastard rig, and I still got slowdown. However, I soon forgot about the poor framerate when I remembered about the cliff racers.
I swiftly concluded that I would rather stab myself in the eye with an AIDS-tipped crocodile than see one of those squawking fuckers again, and Morrowind disappeared from my hard drive five minutes later.
[VINSTARR] Now I feel bad for laughing at your attempt to care about your readers.
I guess the difference is that TheFerret is doing it in order to make money, whereas I’m doing it because I am a sad, lonely man.
:’-(
Tim, I haven’t had the addiction to the extent that you have, but I’ve been there. Way back in the 90’s, in the heady days that witnessed the birth of the LAN party in lieu of the now ubiquitous high-speed internet connection, I used to host LAN parties for Warcraft 2, Quake, and Doom 2.
There was one fellow there who had the holy grail of video setups: the Voodoo 2 SLI rig. He had spent an entire summer’s wages to purchase this beast, and it showed. Whereas my lowly rig could only muster 25 FPS on Quake, his would push out some 95 FPS on max settings. I had serious video card envy. For some years after that I spent hours planning how I would manage to acquire my own potent electronic drawing machine. I finally started making enough money to buy one, and realized that I simply didn’t care anymore. I looked back at the years of planning and how quickly the new best thing got knocked off the top of the mountain, and realized that if I had purchased all of my planned upgrades on the schedule I imagined, I would be out thousands of dollars and have a pile of unused ‘obsolete’ hardware. Really, you’re trying to dig yourself out of a hole.
I’m not an upgrade junkie (not becasue i dont want to be but becasue i cant afford it) but whenever i do upgrade my rig, i go back to all my old games and see how cool they could have looked. Then i play them for a little while and feel happy that im running them on the max settings while trying to forget that the game is five years old.
Man, I totally lusted after a Voodoo 2 SLI setup. Like you, at the time I had about 48 pence to my name, which was why I lusted so dearly. If I’d had the money, I would have quickly realised that there were many, many better things to spend it on.
Probably would have bought the Voodoo 2’s anyway, but at least I would have done so with no illusions.
[Brandon - "I’m not an upgrade junkie (not becasue i dont want to be but becasue i cant afford it) but whenever i do upgrade my rig, i go back to all my old games and see how cool they could have looked."]
Me too. It’s interesting to see which games still hold up when your PC can thrash them red raw. Deus Ex didn’t, which was a huge surprise. I remember this game being pretty much perfect, but it never ran quite smoothly enough on my Celeron. I went back to it and, despite its gratifying complexity, I found it overlong, with some truly awful voice acting.
Also holy BALLS the original Unreal engine looks ugly now.
Bought myself a good computer a while ago (telling myself I needed it because of some computerscience classes I was taking). But quickly found out new shooters don’t really catch my attention these days and reverted back to old rts and turn-based games. Indie games are real fun, cheap and can run on any computer these days.
Have you ever gone properly old-school and installed an emulator? I went Amiga-crazy a few years ago, replaying all my favourite old games like Cannon Fodder, Populous and Faery Tale Adventure (yes, I am mildly homosexual).
It was gratifying to see how many of them were just as enjoyable then as now, although there seemed to be no rule for which stood the test of time and which didn’t. Alien Breed, my favourite action game at the time, isn’t that great anymore, whereas Cannon Fodder is just as brilliant as it always was.
I sure did install an emulator but since I’m a tad younger I went for the sega one. Sonic still has his moments but platformers like wonderboy III are so advanced for their time. And heroes of might and magic I (they got to IX before going bankrupt) still captures my interest even if it’s just like a text adventure with some giant sprites pasted on them. I remember popolous as being crazy difficult when I was young (probably because you had to play it with a controller) but even then I rejoiced when I got to drown a villager from the other side. Where is the time that bullfrog still made good games and peter molynheux wasn’t frolicking around in a god game nobody is able to run but putting his brains in something worth while like torturing (dungeon keeper) or fighting the mob with lots of violence (syndicate)
Wait, why would my cat be irritated at how badly I’m stroking it?
And how would he know I’m doing it wrong? Self-love is a personal thing, I’m not going to take critiques from someone without opposable thumbs. Fuck that.
I actually can’t engage in acts of onanism with my cat in the room. He stares you out, the supercilious fucker. I feel his eyes on me, damning me, and my once-tumescent manhood wilts in my grasp like a discarded marionette.
“This is the kind of pathetic thing I expect from you”, my cat is saying, “because you are a big fat stupid loser and you know it. Now I shall lick my anus at you.”
And he’s right.
He does lick his anus at me.