Very Early Access: This Painkiller Video Was Dead On Arrival

So nobody really seemed to be clamoring for this based on the last post, but it's also hard to tell what people do and don't want on the internet, given only maybe 10% of an audience actually engages with liking and commenting on things. So you're getting it anyway.

It also turns out that as far as unfinished scripts go, this is the last thing I got for now. Everything else in the tank is basically just a series of notes, sometimes long, sometimes short, unless I deliver you the Sonic-Forces-but-its-not-Sonic-Forces-anymore script. Which I could, but that also still needs its final chapter to be written, and it's been long enough that I think a lot of that needs a general review regardless.

Anyway, here's a strange experiment for you: once upon a time, I had a bad idea where I'd do videos in the style of other Youtubers.

About two months ago, I ran a poll on my tumblr blog about whether or not you read or write in somebody else's voice. That's because, in some circumstances, that's what happens to me. As I'll write, I'll hear, like, Mark Brown from Game Maker's Toolkit, or Campster from Errant Signal, or SomecallmeJohnny reading out my text as I type it, usually because I'm writing about a topic they are known to cover and impostor syndrome (or whatever you want to call it) takes over, making it easier to find the words to keep writing.

The logical conclusion of that would be to do a series of videos where, for each episode, I do a style swap to one of these Youtubers. Sort of like how in the art world, people will often challenge others to draw a picture in somebody else's style.

But when it comes to video essays... I'm not quite sure how well that would have been received. The idea rattled around in my head for many years, and this was the closest I ever got to taking it seriously. I started writing it around Halloween of 2021 under the name "Painkiller, Civvie-style."

Named as such because I believe I'd finally given in and started watching Civvie11, a very funny man who focuses almost exclusively on retro first person shooters. I was in a shooter-y mood and stuck on a laptop that couldn't run anything made after 2009, so Painkiller was the only option outside of replaying something I'd already played to death.

What that basically means is that this script is a little punchier and a little snarkier than most of what ends up in my videos. But part of the reason I consider this to be a bit of a failure is also that at some point it slowly loses its edge and turns back into a normal one of my videos again. I'd wanted to write something more deliberately in his style, where I talk about all the levels one at a time, as I play, but it ended up more in my typical essay style.

This goes for about 15 minutes before the script hits a dead end, and then over the course of today I wrote an outro explaining where I'd planned the rest of the video to go if I managed to keep going with the script.