FPS Training Is My Mary's Room

Lucie is a washed up gamer who happens to want to play nothing but Kovaaks. Suppose she plays up to Voltaic Diamond Complete, watches EskayOW call things chungus, and drinks Monster Energy Ultra Fantasy Ruby Red. What will happen when she is released from her self-imposed prison? When she experiences the qualia of playing a video game, will she have learned anything?

The skillset contaned in “aiming” is important because people find video games important. Alas, I have no FPS game to call home. Team Fortress 2 isn’t hitting, as I’ve exhausted nearly all the dopamine I could from the market garden in 2400 hours of gameplay. Overwatch 2 never felt like home. The Finals wants my 3060-kun dead. Diabotical is dead, Warfork is dead, Quake Champions is dead, and Quake Live is gay. The only game I’m looking forward to are Deadlock (a MOBA FPS hybrid) and Open Fortress, a casual arena shooter based on TF2. The former requires I commit to 30 to 45 minutes to a single game, and the latter won’t be active until their official Steam release. So there’s the void in my gaming diet. I want an FPS to git good at, but I don’t always have the time to commit to Deadlock and everything else is gay and dead. How am I going to fill the void?

Under no competitive stakes, I’ve slowly upgraded my setup over the years - an Artisan Zero Mid mousepad to replace my generic Taobao one; a used Wooting60HE+ for when FPS gamers discovered 2IPW SOCD; an OP1 8k because wireless mice suck and it’s the shiboleth of the transsexual target-switching specialist cabal. I have nothing to gain from all this, no ranked rewards to chase, no shiny badge at the end of a season. So what is it all for? Do you see it? Pure aim. slavojZizekIdeology.png

I don’t know why I have a drive to boot up Kovaaks every day. But it’s so fucking cool. It has such a messy but functional UI. Everything is customizable to its detriment. And every time I boot it up, I experience the neurochemical signals for git good.

Here are my benchmarks. I ran Viscose’s “easier” benchmarks last week, and Voltaic 5 Beginner this week. Of the two, I like Viscose’s more, as it is designed more like an all-rounder routine playlist. It also puts a lot of trust into the player, having scenes which overlap from between difficulty categories. I can envision myself addicted to running it again and again to chase those rank-ups. Meanwhile, Voltaic’s benchmarks are more like a weekly check-up, intended to give you direction as to what categories you need to improve at and leaving the routine to you. Within a few months, I’d like to go from Arctic Animal tiers to Colourful Spices in Viscose’s benchmarks, and I’m already on pace to escape Voltaic’s beginner benchmarks soon.