The Rolling "Saturday" Continues
May. 28th, 2022 12:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickBeen another good, MOSTLY relaxing day -- though I can't really say my videogaming was relaxing. XD See below --
1.Continue writing on "Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland" or edit the personal AU bit: Check to the second, as I’m just going with the flow of the muse and letting my brain reset after some of the tough stuff of the past two weeks. And right now the muse wants hypnokinky times with Victor and Smiler. XD I mean, I’m quite happy with the scene, and it feels good to be productive, but – yeah. This is definitely personal AU stuff. XD
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs and clear out some more Watch Later videos: Check! Got through all of these this evening –
A) Started with the latest from Simmer Erin: “LIVE MODE PREVIEW- ANIMATIONS & EMOTIONS! PARALIVES NEWS & UPDATES 2022!” This was Erin sharing with us the latest public Patreon info from Paralives, along with their new “animations” trailer showing their current walk, jog, and run cycles, plus some of their emotional animations (ranging from “serene” to “scared”). They shared how they’re trying to make these animations generic enough to fit on all Parafolk, and how they’re still tweaking and figuring out how much exaggeration is enough on the emotions and whatnot. It’s good stuff, and I’m liking what I see so far! :)
B) Then it was onto a couple of OX lists:
I. OXtra, “7 Disney Worlds We NEED in Kingdom Hearts 4, or Mickey Gets It” – Kingdom Hearts IV has been announced, and Luke and Ellen have some suggestions about Disney worlds they’d like to see! Ranging from Brave (for its mystical Scottish highlands), to The Great Mouse Detective (for the fun of running around mini-mouse London), to – Finding Nemo? Wait, that HASN’T made it in yet?? Color me surprised. . .well, I guess we’ll see if any of these make it into the game! Apparently there’s already one weirdly realistic setting. . .
II. OXBox, “7 More Genius Ways Games Justified Videogame Mechanics” – Andy and Mike cover another seven ways games can justify their mechanics in-universe! Keeping a player in the play area? Turn the invisible walls into hard-coded programming in Detroit: Become Human! Need to respawn enemies? Throw up a “blood moon” and blame it all on Calamity Ganon in The Legend of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild! Have a HUD? Say the character has that same HUD thanks to their enhanced cybernetic eyes in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided! All very clever, yes – though personally I’m never going to sweat that my Sole Survivor Victor can see his own life bar in Fallout 4. XD
C) Then it was over to the Subs for the latest Fun With Shorts – former Patreon exclusive “Why Willie Was Willing to Wash!” One of those 40s educational shorts about a kid who is extremely dirty, and upon whom the narrator forces a dream so he can see all the good reasons for actually, you know, taking a bath. Josh had some excellent zingers for this one, including “building a wall around your T-zone and making the germs pay for it” and “next we’ll talk about pigmentation, the REAL key to success.” XD Fun times!
D) And finally we had GrayStillPlays and Belt It – a game about figuring out how to properly belt in a crash test dummy so it doesn’t go flying and maybe get a bathtub to the face. XD But yeah, the conceit was that you’re either belting in boxes in the back of a moving van, or a dummy and its various possessions in the front (or possibly the back of a bus; that’s how Gray kept describing it), and you have to find the right combination of belts to keep them from going flying after a sudden stop. It was – surprisingly difficult at times! Especially with small objects that might fly through the belts (like a picture frame), or bouncy objects that might bounce over them (like a basketball). One of the ones that gave him the most problems was finding a way to belt in a particular table lamp that kept flying out from the back of the moving bus. I think he wanted to find a way to pick up that lamp and throw it out the virtual window by the end. XD Genuinely interesting puzzle game combined with grumpy-but-frighteningly determined Gray equals good time!
3. Play Fallout 4 and kill a Mirelurk Queen, then update the Playthrough Progression: Check! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH, but check! XD Oh boy, the Mass State House is HELL for a character who isn’t even level 20 yeah. . . Okay, so, I picked up with the whole mess from the save I made right before opening the doors. I unlocked the terminal, took out the one softshell mirelurk that spawned, removed my rads, and got Victor up to full health. Then I tossed a mine down there to try and get the Queen to emerge. No – didn’t fly as far as it could have. Grenade then?
YEAH THAT WOKE HER UP. I immediately retreated behind radioactive cover as Piper started engaging (and got herself thoroughly soaked in the acid spit, poor girl – I had to stimpack her after a while). She ended up falling in, and I started taking what potshots I could at the Queen while trying to avoid the poison spray and stimpacking myself to hell. I was doing – not great, but I’d gotten the shotgun out and was really starting to wail on her –
And then suddenly, I was being attacked from BEHIND. Because what I didn’t KNOW about this fight is that Queenie is protecting ALL THE MIRELURK HATCHLINGS IN THE WORLD. And they WILL come up through the same route you took to this room, and they WILL wreck your shit. Or, at the very least, be a true annoyance as Mom eventually gets you with the acid spray. *huffs* Victor and I did our best, but we did end up dying. So, what did we learn for take two?
A) Mine the hell out of the entrance to the room so the babies blow themselves up
B) Use Molotovs instead of just regular frag grenades for the extra fire damage – also be sure to grenade the entrance regularly against the babies after the mines explode
C) Use VATS and target the hell out of those spouts! If there’s any chance of crippling them, take it!
D) Frag grenades happen to be good for damaging Mama
E) Oh, and you execute a critical in VATS by pressing X while your character is already firing!
With this knowledge, Victor and I started our second assault! It was rough going – I was constantly swapping guns to use the 10mm against the baby mirelurks, then the shotgun against the Queen; throwing molotovs and frag grenades around to keep the swarms off Victor; got rad poisoning once from all the rad barrels in the room and had to hastily use some Rad-Away; gulped down like FIVE TONS of food and drink (mostly drink, as Stimpacks cause thirst with my version of “Advanced Needs 2”); and did not end the fight in great shape. . .
BUT THE BITCH DIED. IT TOOK FROM 1:44 PM TO 7:12 PM IN GAME, BUT THE MIRELURK QUEEN DIED. I took a screenshot with my handiwork, collected the meat and heavy combat armor she had on her (though I had to pass it over to Piper right away because weight issues), then went through the damn door on the other side!
Of course, this is the door that leads into the raider base, meaning now Victor and Piper had to get through THEM. Fortunately none of them were on the first floor, meaning Victor was free to disarm all their mines, take a poop, attempt to mine the Softshell Jumpscare Mirelurk I knew was coming (broke an arm after the attempt triggered the little bastard to spawn early, but it DID die), look at the terminal in the side room (Frankie was not fond of having to constantly patch up the pipes), and finally go ahead and set up camp for the night in said side room. He and Piper had earned a good night’s sleep, that’s for sure.
Up again bright and early 11/27/2287 in-game, and it was time to head up the stairs and through the raider camp! After watching the Softshell Jumpscare Mirelurk’s jumpscare animations play because Bethesda worked hard on that spooky hallway, damn it. XD Victor disarmed some traps, then was able to slowly and carefully work his way up the stairs, using his trusty 10mm to take out all the raiders with minimal damage to himself and Piper. Even took out the Legendary no problem, though again all he had was the Punishing chest piece. *shrug* After clearing out every raider and the turret on the main stairs, Victor and Piper reached the top, where a couple of workbenches and a locked door to the atrium waited. Fortunately the key was very nearby, and Victor was able to impress Piper with his lockpicking skills busting open ammo boxes along the way to get it. Not so much with his Perfectly Preserved Pie snatching skills though – yeah, one of the buffets was in their base. XD Had to try a couple of times! After not getting his pie and opening the locked door, Victor was able to take out one of the snipers and steal his rifle, then work his way across the bride over the hole in the atrium to the other side of the base, killed an attack dog and started looking for the raiders in that room –
ONE OF THE FUCKERS NOT ONLY HAS A MINI-GUN, BUT IS IN POWER ARMOR. I managed to keep Victor alive for a bit, but he eventually got chewed to pieces by the gun. *sigh* And my attempt to do this by throwing a bottlecap mine out to set a trap ended up with Victor getting exploded when the attack dog showed up and triggered it just as Victor was throwing it. *sigh* I have put him and Piper back on the other side of the bridge to rest and regroup for the moment. Damn, this building is hard – it’s a REALLY good thing “Fallout of Darkness” Victor and Piper have Alice to help them with all of this!
Speaking of which, updated the Playthrough Progression appropriately – and have decided that, given Victor and Piper are very much on a diurnal schedule in my game, one of the early signs that something is weird here can be Alice – still a Malkavian vampire, remember – being able to be awake DURING THE DAY. She still can’t stand sunlight – that’s something she still has to bargain with Ug-Qualtoth directly for – but her potential to free him means the eldritch horror decided to give her “you don’t have to revert to corpse upon daybreak” for free. Look, it just makes things a bit easier while doing the write-ups.
4. Work on tumblr drafts: Another check-in-progress – I’m good on the Victor Luvs Alice side, having found a Song Saturday to reblog (“Monster” by Skillet – I’ve been rereading Victor’s struggles against Thirteen in “Fixing You” a bit), but I’m still getting the ask replies I’ve got on Valice Multiverse sorted. What can I say – some of them take some thinking to figure out what verse they suit best!
5. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, and with a couple of Sims videos this time as is per my tradition now! Started with another mod showcase video from ItsMeTroi, showing off a few mods that came out in May (like a “first crush” add-on for someone’s “pre-teens” mod; Cepzid’s functional Henford-On-Bagley phone booth and shops for the main Finchwick town center; and a “Real Teens” mod that adds new computer options for them to search for and new interactions centering around things like proms), then moved onto a video by Petey Plays It where he – after noticing one of his female vampires with maxed out Vampiric Charm wasn’t affecting one of his gay male Sims – took a look at how sexual orientation works in The Sims 4 by checking out how various different Sims reacted to the Vampiric Charm power of a male and a female vampire respectively depending on who they’d flirted with and how often (conclusion was that Sims start out as straight, turn bisexual after the first flirt with someone of the same sex, and can be coded as gay or lesbian if they consistently keep flirting with their same sex! Also Vampiric Charm needs to have the attraction work both ways for it to charm Sims – the female vampire he was testing couldn’t affect a lesbian couple until she herself went bisexual by flirting with a woman). A nice break from the surprisingly-high-stakes shenanigans of Oxventure lately!
Additionally:
-->Played beanbags despite heavily-increasing clouds this afternoon – beat the rain, and I hit a hot streak with the first three games! :D While poor Mom had a rough day – final scores were me W-W-W-2-3; Dad 2-2-2-W-W; Mom 3-3-3-3-2. Ah well – maybe Sunday, Mom! (Can’t be tomorrow, it’s supposed to rain.)
-->Left a review on that fanfic I linked the other day, “Beneath A Broken Sky” – yay for being a good little reader, I suppose. :p
Pretty busy -- and oh man, that fight with the Mirelurk Queen was ROUGH. But in a good videogamey way. XD And I'm enjoying just taking a few days off to relax, recharge, and do some "less for other people" kind of writing. :p We come to the midpoint of my long weekend tomorrow -- let's set up more to-dos:
1. Work on tumblr drafts
2. Keep up on YouTube Subs and watch the Hitman 3 Rubber Duck OXBox Stream video
3. Play Sims 4 and either get through another day with Smiler Always or do some more building
Keeping it super simple tomorrow! Mostly because a) I really want to spend some time with my Victor Luvs Alice tumblr drafts, and b) that OXBox stream is two hours, so I need to block out a lot of time for that. And since tomorrow is my "official" break day from working out, and is expected to be at least a bit rainy so beanbags are unlikely, it's the best day for it. *nods* So yeah, we'll see how that all pans out. As it is, I'm doing the social thing, and I still have those asks to figure, so au revoir!
1.
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs and clear out some more Watch Later videos: Check! Got through all of these this evening –
A) Started with the latest from Simmer Erin: “LIVE MODE PREVIEW- ANIMATIONS & EMOTIONS! PARALIVES NEWS & UPDATES 2022!” This was Erin sharing with us the latest public Patreon info from Paralives, along with their new “animations” trailer showing their current walk, jog, and run cycles, plus some of their emotional animations (ranging from “serene” to “scared”). They shared how they’re trying to make these animations generic enough to fit on all Parafolk, and how they’re still tweaking and figuring out how much exaggeration is enough on the emotions and whatnot. It’s good stuff, and I’m liking what I see so far! :)
B) Then it was onto a couple of OX lists:
I. OXtra, “7 Disney Worlds We NEED in Kingdom Hearts 4, or Mickey Gets It” – Kingdom Hearts IV has been announced, and Luke and Ellen have some suggestions about Disney worlds they’d like to see! Ranging from Brave (for its mystical Scottish highlands), to The Great Mouse Detective (for the fun of running around mini-mouse London), to – Finding Nemo? Wait, that HASN’T made it in yet?? Color me surprised. . .well, I guess we’ll see if any of these make it into the game! Apparently there’s already one weirdly realistic setting. . .
II. OXBox, “7 More Genius Ways Games Justified Videogame Mechanics” – Andy and Mike cover another seven ways games can justify their mechanics in-universe! Keeping a player in the play area? Turn the invisible walls into hard-coded programming in Detroit: Become Human! Need to respawn enemies? Throw up a “blood moon” and blame it all on Calamity Ganon in The Legend of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild! Have a HUD? Say the character has that same HUD thanks to their enhanced cybernetic eyes in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided! All very clever, yes – though personally I’m never going to sweat that my Sole Survivor Victor can see his own life bar in Fallout 4. XD
C) Then it was over to the Subs for the latest Fun With Shorts – former Patreon exclusive “Why Willie Was Willing to Wash!” One of those 40s educational shorts about a kid who is extremely dirty, and upon whom the narrator forces a dream so he can see all the good reasons for actually, you know, taking a bath. Josh had some excellent zingers for this one, including “building a wall around your T-zone and making the germs pay for it” and “next we’ll talk about pigmentation, the REAL key to success.” XD Fun times!
D) And finally we had GrayStillPlays and Belt It – a game about figuring out how to properly belt in a crash test dummy so it doesn’t go flying and maybe get a bathtub to the face. XD But yeah, the conceit was that you’re either belting in boxes in the back of a moving van, or a dummy and its various possessions in the front (or possibly the back of a bus; that’s how Gray kept describing it), and you have to find the right combination of belts to keep them from going flying after a sudden stop. It was – surprisingly difficult at times! Especially with small objects that might fly through the belts (like a picture frame), or bouncy objects that might bounce over them (like a basketball). One of the ones that gave him the most problems was finding a way to belt in a particular table lamp that kept flying out from the back of the moving bus. I think he wanted to find a way to pick up that lamp and throw it out the virtual window by the end. XD Genuinely interesting puzzle game combined with grumpy-but-frighteningly determined Gray equals good time!
3. Play Fallout 4 and kill a Mirelurk Queen, then update the Playthrough Progression: Check! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH, but check! XD Oh boy, the Mass State House is HELL for a character who isn’t even level 20 yeah. . . Okay, so, I picked up with the whole mess from the save I made right before opening the doors. I unlocked the terminal, took out the one softshell mirelurk that spawned, removed my rads, and got Victor up to full health. Then I tossed a mine down there to try and get the Queen to emerge. No – didn’t fly as far as it could have. Grenade then?
YEAH THAT WOKE HER UP. I immediately retreated behind radioactive cover as Piper started engaging (and got herself thoroughly soaked in the acid spit, poor girl – I had to stimpack her after a while). She ended up falling in, and I started taking what potshots I could at the Queen while trying to avoid the poison spray and stimpacking myself to hell. I was doing – not great, but I’d gotten the shotgun out and was really starting to wail on her –
And then suddenly, I was being attacked from BEHIND. Because what I didn’t KNOW about this fight is that Queenie is protecting ALL THE MIRELURK HATCHLINGS IN THE WORLD. And they WILL come up through the same route you took to this room, and they WILL wreck your shit. Or, at the very least, be a true annoyance as Mom eventually gets you with the acid spray. *huffs* Victor and I did our best, but we did end up dying. So, what did we learn for take two?
A) Mine the hell out of the entrance to the room so the babies blow themselves up
B) Use Molotovs instead of just regular frag grenades for the extra fire damage – also be sure to grenade the entrance regularly against the babies after the mines explode
C) Use VATS and target the hell out of those spouts! If there’s any chance of crippling them, take it!
D) Frag grenades happen to be good for damaging Mama
E) Oh, and you execute a critical in VATS by pressing X while your character is already firing!
With this knowledge, Victor and I started our second assault! It was rough going – I was constantly swapping guns to use the 10mm against the baby mirelurks, then the shotgun against the Queen; throwing molotovs and frag grenades around to keep the swarms off Victor; got rad poisoning once from all the rad barrels in the room and had to hastily use some Rad-Away; gulped down like FIVE TONS of food and drink (mostly drink, as Stimpacks cause thirst with my version of “Advanced Needs 2”); and did not end the fight in great shape. . .
BUT THE BITCH DIED. IT TOOK FROM 1:44 PM TO 7:12 PM IN GAME, BUT THE MIRELURK QUEEN DIED. I took a screenshot with my handiwork, collected the meat and heavy combat armor she had on her (though I had to pass it over to Piper right away because weight issues), then went through the damn door on the other side!
Of course, this is the door that leads into the raider base, meaning now Victor and Piper had to get through THEM. Fortunately none of them were on the first floor, meaning Victor was free to disarm all their mines, take a poop, attempt to mine the Softshell Jumpscare Mirelurk I knew was coming (broke an arm after the attempt triggered the little bastard to spawn early, but it DID die), look at the terminal in the side room (Frankie was not fond of having to constantly patch up the pipes), and finally go ahead and set up camp for the night in said side room. He and Piper had earned a good night’s sleep, that’s for sure.
Up again bright and early 11/27/2287 in-game, and it was time to head up the stairs and through the raider camp! After watching the Softshell Jumpscare Mirelurk’s jumpscare animations play because Bethesda worked hard on that spooky hallway, damn it. XD Victor disarmed some traps, then was able to slowly and carefully work his way up the stairs, using his trusty 10mm to take out all the raiders with minimal damage to himself and Piper. Even took out the Legendary no problem, though again all he had was the Punishing chest piece. *shrug* After clearing out every raider and the turret on the main stairs, Victor and Piper reached the top, where a couple of workbenches and a locked door to the atrium waited. Fortunately the key was very nearby, and Victor was able to impress Piper with his lockpicking skills busting open ammo boxes along the way to get it. Not so much with his Perfectly Preserved Pie snatching skills though – yeah, one of the buffets was in their base. XD Had to try a couple of times! After not getting his pie and opening the locked door, Victor was able to take out one of the snipers and steal his rifle, then work his way across the bride over the hole in the atrium to the other side of the base, killed an attack dog and started looking for the raiders in that room –
ONE OF THE FUCKERS NOT ONLY HAS A MINI-GUN, BUT IS IN POWER ARMOR. I managed to keep Victor alive for a bit, but he eventually got chewed to pieces by the gun. *sigh* And my attempt to do this by throwing a bottlecap mine out to set a trap ended up with Victor getting exploded when the attack dog showed up and triggered it just as Victor was throwing it. *sigh* I have put him and Piper back on the other side of the bridge to rest and regroup for the moment. Damn, this building is hard – it’s a REALLY good thing “Fallout of Darkness” Victor and Piper have Alice to help them with all of this!
Speaking of which, updated the Playthrough Progression appropriately – and have decided that, given Victor and Piper are very much on a diurnal schedule in my game, one of the early signs that something is weird here can be Alice – still a Malkavian vampire, remember – being able to be awake DURING THE DAY. She still can’t stand sunlight – that’s something she still has to bargain with Ug-Qualtoth directly for – but her potential to free him means the eldritch horror decided to give her “you don’t have to revert to corpse upon daybreak” for free. Look, it just makes things a bit easier while doing the write-ups.
4. Work on tumblr drafts: Another check-in-progress – I’m good on the Victor Luvs Alice side, having found a Song Saturday to reblog (“Monster” by Skillet – I’ve been rereading Victor’s struggles against Thirteen in “Fixing You” a bit), but I’m still getting the ask replies I’ve got on Valice Multiverse sorted. What can I say – some of them take some thinking to figure out what verse they suit best!
5. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, and with a couple of Sims videos this time as is per my tradition now! Started with another mod showcase video from ItsMeTroi, showing off a few mods that came out in May (like a “first crush” add-on for someone’s “pre-teens” mod; Cepzid’s functional Henford-On-Bagley phone booth and shops for the main Finchwick town center; and a “Real Teens” mod that adds new computer options for them to search for and new interactions centering around things like proms), then moved onto a video by Petey Plays It where he – after noticing one of his female vampires with maxed out Vampiric Charm wasn’t affecting one of his gay male Sims – took a look at how sexual orientation works in The Sims 4 by checking out how various different Sims reacted to the Vampiric Charm power of a male and a female vampire respectively depending on who they’d flirted with and how often (conclusion was that Sims start out as straight, turn bisexual after the first flirt with someone of the same sex, and can be coded as gay or lesbian if they consistently keep flirting with their same sex! Also Vampiric Charm needs to have the attraction work both ways for it to charm Sims – the female vampire he was testing couldn’t affect a lesbian couple until she herself went bisexual by flirting with a woman). A nice break from the surprisingly-high-stakes shenanigans of Oxventure lately!
Additionally:
-->Played beanbags despite heavily-increasing clouds this afternoon – beat the rain, and I hit a hot streak with the first three games! :D While poor Mom had a rough day – final scores were me W-W-W-2-3; Dad 2-2-2-W-W; Mom 3-3-3-3-2. Ah well – maybe Sunday, Mom! (Can’t be tomorrow, it’s supposed to rain.)
-->Left a review on that fanfic I linked the other day, “Beneath A Broken Sky” – yay for being a good little reader, I suppose. :p
Pretty busy -- and oh man, that fight with the Mirelurk Queen was ROUGH. But in a good videogamey way. XD And I'm enjoying just taking a few days off to relax, recharge, and do some "less for other people" kind of writing. :p We come to the midpoint of my long weekend tomorrow -- let's set up more to-dos:
1. Work on tumblr drafts
2. Keep up on YouTube Subs and watch the Hitman 3 Rubber Duck OXBox Stream video
3. Play Sims 4 and either get through another day with Smiler Always or do some more building
Keeping it super simple tomorrow! Mostly because a) I really want to spend some time with my Victor Luvs Alice tumblr drafts, and b) that OXBox stream is two hours, so I need to block out a lot of time for that. And since tomorrow is my "official" break day from working out, and is expected to be at least a bit rainy so beanbags are unlikely, it's the best day for it. *nods* So yeah, we'll see how that all pans out. As it is, I'm doing the social thing, and I still have those asks to figure, so au revoir!
