The Usual Late Sunday Update
Dec. 4th, 2022 11:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickLook, a lot happens on Sunday evenings, it's not my fault! XD Or not TOTALLY my fault, anyway -- while I could have better time management, I am subject to when certain people I watch on YouTube actually upload their stuff, so. . .here's what I accomplished today:
Tumblr: Again, not exactly a perfect day on here, but I think I did a little better than I did yesterday on my two blogs –
Victor Luvs Alice: Did a successful dash-and-tags catch-up between the post-lunch OXBox list video and Fallout 4 (see below), even putting a nice Corpse Bride photo set I found in the drafts for later. And just this minute I finally finished doing some quick pictures-and-starter-text drafts of this week’s Chill Save. Yeah, apparently if I don’t do the drafts before lunch, I just won’t do them at all. I’m lucky that this week I’m only working every other day, meaning I have some time tomorrow night and Tuesday afternoon to get this update written out properly!
Valice Multiverse: Caught up with this between GrayStillPlays and Jon of Many a True Nerd this evening – two thread replies slapped in the queue. I will take it
Fallout 4: Kept it pretty simple in the nuclear wasteland today, with Victor and Nick winding their way around and hitting a few settlements to check in as they made their way back to Diamond City. Haven’t quite made it back to Graygarden yet, but they’re nearby – let me give you the deets –
A) Started at the Doggo Rocket (aka the Sanctuary Red Rocket, where Dogmeat and Mutt live) and had Nick and Victor head up the bridge to Sanctuary to check in there. Victor used the weapon bench there to upgrade his Two-Shot Combat Rifle with a muzzle brake to help with recoil (once again impressing Codsworth – at some point in the second act I have to travel again with him a bit and pick up his companion perk), then set up an extra turret for some more defense, built a Minutemen flag pole for the entrance by the bridge, built a piano for his house (and then, upon finding Sturges didn’t have an official job, assigned him to it), and gathered up the crops and did a bit of cooking. Pretty simple stuff!
B) Victor finished up his cooking as a thunderstorm game in (seriously, what is it with my games and loving thunderstorms), and I had him and Nick set out again, in the general direction of Graygarden (which, I shall remind you, needs Victor to stop in because it was attacked and the defenses got beat up). This involved going through a bit of Concord – and on the way, I noticed a lamp burning in front of a door labeled “Workhouse.” Curious, I sent Victor and Nick inside, to find a mostly collapsed building with some stairs leading to the very top. I sent Victor up those to find one of Bethesda’s Silly Skeleton Scenes – namely, two guys who died fighting over a safe. Victor was able to crack the safe and get the ammo and nice lighter that was within, yay. :) A little careful scooting over an exposed vent also let him reach the other side of the room, where he dropped down a hole onto another skeleton, raiding the ammo bag and cooler next to it for more ammo and some food. Not a lot of goodies, but hey, more ammo is never to be sneezed at. *nods*
C) The boys exited out the back door near the stairs, passing through an empty house and down to the Random Events Parking Lot – this time, the random event was three mongrels patrolling around, having just killed a raider who was camping there. Victor TRIED to sneak around, but a determined dog spotted him, and he and Nick had to kill the trio. Ah well, good XP and meat. From there it was onto the nearby road past Thicket Excavations, a right at the intersection –
D) Huh. There’s a little campsite over there. I wonder what OH FUCK THERE’S MINES. Fortunately, while Victor was never able to disarm any of them, he only took damage from the first one, and not enough to seriously wound him. He grabbed some bobby pins and ammo out of the nearby suitcase, then availed himself of the cookstation to do some more cooking – mainly some of the special teas I’d modded in. Nick called him to take a look at something near the beginning, but after getting up and finding him just wandering around, I think that was just a random line.
E) With teas freshly brewed, I realized the boys were going to pass right by Starlight Drive-In, and so figured they could stop in there. They followed the road over to the drive-in, with its Random Encounters bridge – and what should I see there but a radscorpion fighting some stingwings! Well, that wouldn’t do so close to one of Victor’s settlements. I had him get out Righteous Authority and take a look –
Oooh, boy – LEGENDARY Radscorpion. Already hurt though – I had him take a few potshots, and he managed to wound it enough to get it to mutate and get its attention. Obviously, the thing turned on Victor, using its burrowing ability to pop up right next to him – but that proved to be the WRONG thing to do, as at such close range, Victor was able to melt it in two shots in VATS. :D Hooray! Anyway, Victor snagged the meat off the corpse – along with a Kneecapper Laser Musket! Hmmm – present for Preston when we next see him?
F) Anyway, with the radscorpion taken care of, Victor and Nick visited Starlight, which was doing pretty well. One settler was unassigned, so I had Victor build a barber chair for them to man to keep them busy and increase general happiness (as the game seemed to insist this was a problem). Victor also gave them another turret for more defense, harvested crops, and did MORE cooking because – thanks to the hunting outpost – this place is MEAT CENTRAL. So much meat. :D Granted, this did put Victor over carry weight, but a quick snack of grilled radstag fixed that mighty quick. XD
G) Another settlement down – just one more to go before Diamond City! Victor and Nick headed back out and found the nearby train tracks, following those down as they would go right past Graygarden. However, they had to diverge from the path when they came across a wrecked train that had been carrying nuclear waste and that was still very radioactive – I sent them up a nearby hill, where they ended up killing a wandering wolf pack before coming across a cabin, which the game said was part of Rocky Narrows Park. As it was getting late (Victor had the Fatigue) and it seemed fairly safe, I had Victor park himself there for the evening, attempting some PipFall (which is rather hard as you have to jump hazards and I’m not always good at that), using his port-a-potty, and setting up camp at 8:55 PM.
And so we ended with Victor up at 5 AM on 12/27/2287, ready to continue exploring the park (having already shot the head off an alarm monkey) and then work his way over to Graygarden. Not particularly exciting, but I am glad at how easily I killed that damn radscorpion. :D Those things can be BITCHES to fight, as poor Jon can tell you.
Writing: Naturally, I wrote up the day’s events in the FO4 Playthrough Progression – Victor visiting Sanctuary and helping set up a turret and fixing up his old piano; the gang investigating the workhouse in Concord (with Victor being very suspicious of Bethesda’s Silly Skeletons – Nick says most people think the raiders pose them); the gang killing the mongrels at the parking lot, investigating the mined campsite, and taking out the radscorpion by Starlight; Victor helping the people at Starlight with building another turret and helping a settler set up a barbering business in the old concession stand; and the gang following the train tracks nearby until a spill of radioactive barrels forces them to detour, leading them to kill a few wolves and spend the night in Rocky Narrows Park. Nothing too special, but then again, we’ll be in the plot stuff again soon enough, so – a couple of quiet days on the road isn’t going to hurt them!
YouTube: Got through all the stuff I hoped to get through, though as usual it took me a little longer than I wanted – on the plus side, at least Kevin’s video wasn’t too long to watch today!
A) Once again, started early (just after lunch – would have been BEFORE lunch but then we had lunch a bit earlier than normal) with that final OXBox list I wanted to get out of the old Watch Later – “7 Rip-Off Games You Thought Were Original!” Mike, Andy, and Jane taking us through those games that are actually pretty closely patterned off earlier titles. Ever heard of arcade game The Outfoxies? Probably not, but its platform-and-environmental-hazards-based gameplay should look pretty familiar to anyone who’s played any of the Super Smash Bros series. How about Sweet Home? A Japanese-only title about a film crew in a haunted mansion, when Capcom lost the license for the movie it was based on, they did a follow-up copying a bunch of key features with an original story – cue the birth of Resident Evil. And Utopia? This was an ancient PvP city-builder in the old “everything is vaguely defined polygons” era of gaming, and was clearly ahead of its time – about seven years ahead, as that’s when the original Sim City came out. Very little is truly original, is what this list tells you – but that shouldn’t stop you from enjoying it. :)
B) Then, between FO4 and my workout, I managed to fit in Call Me Kevin’s upload today – “This mod turns Minecraft into an RPG!” Yes, Kevin was once again experimenting with Minecraft modpacks today, and found one that turns the entire game into a rather complex open-world RPG! There’s loads of different stats to level up (strength, agility, mining, archery, melee combat, etc), loads of different treasures and magical items you can find and wear, waypoint stones to allow you to fast travel, multiple realms you can travel between – your character even starts out with the ability to pre-build a starter house so they’re well-equipped for their initial travels!
Except if you’re Kevin, who plonked a hobbit tree on a beach (stranding a seal in his yard), investigated the mine shaft within, and found himself in the Nether thanks to magical dimensional rift goop within the first few minutes. Where he got murdered by Piglins. Twice. XD He did a little better once he stopped wandering into the Nether accidentally, though he never did get the hang of managing his inventory. XD But he did manage to destroy his hobbit tree for building materials, mostly to make boats to cross the vast oceans; row his way to a village, where he discovered that the priest had the nicest house, so of course he stole it; find an out-of-the-way house with a couple of people living in it and pick up one, Alex, as a companion after giving him food; explore the high seas with Alex, raiding a shipwreck and attacking an Illager pirate ship (it – didn’t go well, though at least in this case he was able to go back to his grave, bobbing in the water, and pick up his stuff); explore a big old cave with Alex and kill a boss with him (the boss got stuck in a doorway, but shhhh); get all sorts of quests ticked off by pretending to read things and by starting a little farm for crops; boost his Agility stat by running in circles; make an awesome paraglider; lose Alex to some mystery skeleton that killed him in broad daylight somehow; recruit his roommate Erling with more food (who wisely refused to follow Kevin anywhere); cheat in some redstone to build a compass to get an adventure map from a Villager ship – and then set the ship alight and watched it burn; go adventuring which led him to a gorgon in a temple – he got turned to stone once, but then found his way back, locked her out of her own house, and killed her and took her head as a weapon; FINALLY get his stuff back from the Nether with the help of a better shield, walling himself off from enemies with blocks, and finding a waypoint to teleport himself out of there fast; and end the episode raiding an airship with mystery skeleton/jelly enemies, and then attempting to paraglide away like a badass, only to run out of stamina and fall into the trees. XD Good times! It looks like a fun mod if you want to have extra RPG adventures in your Minecraft. :D
C) Then, after a quick trip to tumblr (see above), I moved onto today’s GrayStillPlays – “When you go from skinny to satan in 10 minutes!” AKA Gray plays Tough Man, what looks to be a mobile game by the same people who did the Buddy Toss and Lady Toss games. This one is all about lifting more and more ludicrous things – starting at ordinary weights and progressing through heavier weights, to elephants, to airplanes and space shuttles, to buildings and straight-up mountains, to level up your guy and turn him from a fairly average chad into a lava-clad master of hell. XD Gray was utterly delighted with most of the ridiculous “weights” selection, and thoroughly enjoyed turning his guy into a giant Satan magma dude. XD I suppose I would too!
D) And of course, it is Sunday, so we had to have our weekly dose of Jon – “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Part 7 - Slave New World!” Which was basically Jon bouncing back and forth between groups of escaped slaves and the slavers, playing both sides against the middle in an attempt to get all the possible rewards and keep his karma firmly neutral. This proved – trickier than expected. The highlights of the episode –
I. Jon bringing Wanda to Rivet City and talking about how the mod actually adjusted some doors to make more sense with the layout of the ship as it is seen in-game, as apparently the ship itself got moved at one point and its layout shuffled, meaning the doors as they are in vanilla FO3 just don’t make sense with the internal geometry.
II. Jon hitting up the marketplace to buy some guns (to help repair his own guns, mainly) and ammo, then hanging around until a certain Mei Wong, an escaped slave, shows up to ask her her business. Turns out she’s seen a slaver on the ship, Sister, and is scared he’s hunting her – she wants 25 caps to buy a gun so she can protect herself. Jon gives her the 25 caps and gets the location of “the Temple of the Union” (a little secret encampment of escaped slaves), but informs us that she’s actually wrong – while Sister IS on the ship looking for an escaped slave, he’s not looking for Mei. A quick trip to his stateroom reveals that he’s in fact looking for a synth, an escapee from the Commonwealth! (AKA the location of Fallout 4!) However, Jon explains that they shouldn’t actually start this quest (The Replicated Man) yet, because apparently it’s not the best time to do so. So he rewinds time to before he touched the holotape – and, because giving Mei the 25 caps shoved Wanda’s Karma into the “good” zone and thus she is now a target for mercenaries, he then shoots Mei with the Mesmetron and re-enslaves her, sending her back to Paradise Falls. This brings Wanda’s Karma down to neutral, and actual karma kicks in moments later with all the guards in Rivet City shooting at her, forcing Jon to get her off the ship REALLY fast via a dive into the river.
III. Jon heads over to Minefield to get oriented toward finding The Temple Of The Union, but first takes a trip over to the local power plant nearby – or, rather, its outbuilding, as it has a very important schematic – the Railway Rifle. And all the items to create it are nearby, happily (Jon in fact thinks that Minefield is deliberately seeded with all the components you will need to build these cool guns, because you’ll DEFINITELY be coming here if you’re doing Moira’s quests, so it would be easy for any player to find), so John whipped it up and gleefully demonstrated how it can shoot raiders’ heads off and pin them to cliffs even at low condition. XD
IV. Sidequest to get one of the best guns in the game over, Jon heads over to The Temple Of The Union, discovers that it was very easy to get locked out if you didn’t go in the main gate right away, then speaks to the leader of the escaped slaves, Hannibal, promising to protect the people there and asking if Wanda could do anything for them. As it turns out, Hannibal’s keen to move his group to the Lincoln Memorial (given, you know, it’s a monument to the Emancipation Proclamation President), and needs someone to check it out, make sure no super mutants are in it. Also, his friend Caleb wants to properly restore the place, and needs someone to get him a picture of the Memorial in its heyday from the history museum. Jon agreed to both these tasks, because yes, he did feel a little bad about Mei.
V. Jon heads into the DC ruins and heads for the Museum first, with a quick stop at the ghoul city of Underworld as – despite a snippy welcome – the people there ARE willing to deal with “smoothskins,” and the guy who greets you at the door is actually a repairman. Allowing Jon to get his new Railway Rifle up to code, yay. From there, it’s a quick sneak into the museum itself and its Lincoln exhibit, letting the turrets deal with as many of the ghouls as possible and picking up LOADS of Lincoln memorabilia, not just the picture of the Monument. There is stuff ranging from a recording of Lincoln’s voice (something people CLAIM exists, but which has never been found if it did happen), to Lincoln’s hat (a very nice hat indeed, with +1 Int and +5 Speech for the wearer), to an action figure of Lincoln with a sword (causing Jon to recount a bonkers story he discovered about Lincoln trying to smear a political rival by pretending to be some random housewife in a letter to the editor, the rival finding out about it and challenging Lincoln to a duel, and Lincoln picking swords because his height and thus long reach meant he’d have a better chance at beating the guy – the guy backed down, a truce was called, and they became allies in time for him to be on the Union’s side in the Civil War), and most notably Lincoln’s Repeater – the best gun in the game, with incredible damage and PRISTINE condition because, well, it’s been in a case for over two hundred years!
VI. Having gotten all his souvenirs, John heads to the Lincoln Memorial and – well, there are no super mutants. There are a bunch of slavers there, though, ready to hunt down escaped slaves! As he is on a mission to get the maximum amount of rewards here, though, Jon approaches cautiously, gets taken to see the slavers’ leader, Leroy, and tells him that the slaves are hiding in Old Onley, which is a deathclaw nest. He also sells the guy the wanted poster for John Wilkes Booth, as the guy pays the most of anyone willing to buy the Lincoln memorabilia (which includes Leroy, Hannibal himself, and a third guy who runs a museum in Rivet City, Abraham Washington). The slavers moved out, but didn’t even get far out of the ruins, as they ran across a super mutant camp and ended up getting slaughtered. Jon takes out the final mutant still standing once they’re all dead, and frees its captive in exchange for supplies – fortunately all she gives Wanda is a nail board, and her karma remains neutral, so Wanda doesn’t have to shoot her in the back. XD
VII. Slavers dead, Jon (after showing off Abraham Washington as the alternate buyer for Lincoln stuff, though without actually selling anything to him) heads back to the Temple to give the picture to Caleb and the good news to Hannibal, and then sells him all of the Lincoln memorabilia, including the hat and gun, both of which he equips. Hannibal then starts taking his little band of escapees to the memorial, and Jon abuses fast travel fun to make sure that they all get there alive (as Hannibal is about as prepared for the dangers of the Capital Wasteland as the slavers were). They get to the memorial safely, Wanda levels up and gets the nice “Finesse” perk (getting more criticals, I believe) and the schematics for ANOTHER excellent gun, the Dart Gun –
VIII. And then Jon goes and shoots Hannibal with the Mesmetron, because all of this has raised Wanda’s karma levels to dangerous heights, and it’s time to lower them again! Not by enslaving Hannibal and his group again, though, but by using the fact that certain characters cannot be enslaved or killed to frenzy Hannibal into attacking his own comrades (as the Mesmetron has a chance to enslave someone, frenzy them, or kill them with each shot, and if two of those options are available), forcing them to kill him in self defense. And allowing Jon to loot Hannibal’s corpse for the goodies and resell them to Abraham Washington, because he is the only person you can sell them to and then get them back for resale. Things did NOT go fully according to Jon’s plan – the really good gun that Hannibal was using was shot out of his hands at one point and ended up on a different NPC, meaning Jon was briefly terrified it had Bethesedaed out of existence; Jon actually forgot to pick up everything on Hannibal’s corpse when he first looted it (though on the plus side, when he went back for it, random combat armor had spawned on the corpse, so Jon had that as well); and Jon was forced to kill a couple of the NPCs himself because of the aforementioned “really good gun Hannibal was using was shot out of his hands” dealy.
IX. And also all all the murder didn’t actually lower Wanda’s karma enough to put her back in Neutral. Neither did going to Arefu and murdering a few people there (notably Ian, whom Jon DID point out was likely to have another cannibal episode soon, so. . .). STEALING a few things from one of their houses, though, that did the trick. The fuck, Fallout 3.
X. And so the episode ended with Jon selling MOST of the Lincoln Memorial items to Abraham Washington (keeping the gun and the hat), and making plans next week to head back to Megaton and start engaging with the “Two Wastelands” part of the mod. Looks like we’ll be visiting New Vegas next week, folks! I wonder what atrocities Wanda will commit there. XD
Workout: Did get on the bike this afternoon for a mountain ride and a start on James Turner’s High School Years Rags To Riches – Episode 15! The main events of the thirty minutes I’ve watched so far have been –
A) Reginald deciding to cool down his romantic relationship with Sidney (with Sidney asking if they could become boyfriends IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARD), and James directing him into a brief New Year’s fling with Bradley Vatore during his kegger (they spent so much time trying to woohoo in the shower, they missed the countdown)
B) Reginald asking his visiting mother for the Rite of Ascension to become a spellcaster again – not because he intended to do any spellcaster stuff right at the moment, but because getting a broom (or, in his case, a magic mop) was better than a bicycle for navigating the very hilly campus of Foxbury – now he can just take off from his dorm’s balcony and end up right in front of his classroom!
C) Reginald getting the “Incredibly Friendly” trait and using that to combat his social awkwardness and get his latest thrifted outfits properly hyped (well, one of them – the other one for some reason didn’t count when he tried to wear it. I suspect it’s the one that’s literally just a copy of his regular outfit). Also, James fixed the thrift store after someone stole a very necessary couch out of it, and made sure the “Sharing Is Caring” NAP was gone so there would be no more stealing.
D) Reginald finishing his first semester at college with straight As and plunging straight into the second semester – as of this writing, he has already completed his final presentation for one class and is working hard on keeping up with his homework for all the others. Also, he FINALLY made friends with two teammates and got “promoted” in the soccer team, so that’s nice. The main problem is gonna be attending guest lectures, as being on the soccer team means his practice time overlaps with his ability to attend those. . .
Whew! Pretty busy life Reginald is leading, isn’t it? And yet it keeps making me want to do the university gameplay again. . .maybe in another save I can do Victor, Alice, and Smiler all together at uni one day.
And that's that! And now I have to go to bed because I have work tomorrow. For one day. XD But it is still a day, and thus I must get some sleep. Night all!
Tumblr: Again, not exactly a perfect day on here, but I think I did a little better than I did yesterday on my two blogs –
Victor Luvs Alice: Did a successful dash-and-tags catch-up between the post-lunch OXBox list video and Fallout 4 (see below), even putting a nice Corpse Bride photo set I found in the drafts for later. And just this minute I finally finished doing some quick pictures-and-starter-text drafts of this week’s Chill Save. Yeah, apparently if I don’t do the drafts before lunch, I just won’t do them at all. I’m lucky that this week I’m only working every other day, meaning I have some time tomorrow night and Tuesday afternoon to get this update written out properly!
Valice Multiverse: Caught up with this between GrayStillPlays and Jon of Many a True Nerd this evening – two thread replies slapped in the queue. I will take it
Fallout 4: Kept it pretty simple in the nuclear wasteland today, with Victor and Nick winding their way around and hitting a few settlements to check in as they made their way back to Diamond City. Haven’t quite made it back to Graygarden yet, but they’re nearby – let me give you the deets –
A) Started at the Doggo Rocket (aka the Sanctuary Red Rocket, where Dogmeat and Mutt live) and had Nick and Victor head up the bridge to Sanctuary to check in there. Victor used the weapon bench there to upgrade his Two-Shot Combat Rifle with a muzzle brake to help with recoil (once again impressing Codsworth – at some point in the second act I have to travel again with him a bit and pick up his companion perk), then set up an extra turret for some more defense, built a Minutemen flag pole for the entrance by the bridge, built a piano for his house (and then, upon finding Sturges didn’t have an official job, assigned him to it), and gathered up the crops and did a bit of cooking. Pretty simple stuff!
B) Victor finished up his cooking as a thunderstorm game in (seriously, what is it with my games and loving thunderstorms), and I had him and Nick set out again, in the general direction of Graygarden (which, I shall remind you, needs Victor to stop in because it was attacked and the defenses got beat up). This involved going through a bit of Concord – and on the way, I noticed a lamp burning in front of a door labeled “Workhouse.” Curious, I sent Victor and Nick inside, to find a mostly collapsed building with some stairs leading to the very top. I sent Victor up those to find one of Bethesda’s Silly Skeleton Scenes – namely, two guys who died fighting over a safe. Victor was able to crack the safe and get the ammo and nice lighter that was within, yay. :) A little careful scooting over an exposed vent also let him reach the other side of the room, where he dropped down a hole onto another skeleton, raiding the ammo bag and cooler next to it for more ammo and some food. Not a lot of goodies, but hey, more ammo is never to be sneezed at. *nods*
C) The boys exited out the back door near the stairs, passing through an empty house and down to the Random Events Parking Lot – this time, the random event was three mongrels patrolling around, having just killed a raider who was camping there. Victor TRIED to sneak around, but a determined dog spotted him, and he and Nick had to kill the trio. Ah well, good XP and meat. From there it was onto the nearby road past Thicket Excavations, a right at the intersection –
D) Huh. There’s a little campsite over there. I wonder what OH FUCK THERE’S MINES. Fortunately, while Victor was never able to disarm any of them, he only took damage from the first one, and not enough to seriously wound him. He grabbed some bobby pins and ammo out of the nearby suitcase, then availed himself of the cookstation to do some more cooking – mainly some of the special teas I’d modded in. Nick called him to take a look at something near the beginning, but after getting up and finding him just wandering around, I think that was just a random line.
E) With teas freshly brewed, I realized the boys were going to pass right by Starlight Drive-In, and so figured they could stop in there. They followed the road over to the drive-in, with its Random Encounters bridge – and what should I see there but a radscorpion fighting some stingwings! Well, that wouldn’t do so close to one of Victor’s settlements. I had him get out Righteous Authority and take a look –
Oooh, boy – LEGENDARY Radscorpion. Already hurt though – I had him take a few potshots, and he managed to wound it enough to get it to mutate and get its attention. Obviously, the thing turned on Victor, using its burrowing ability to pop up right next to him – but that proved to be the WRONG thing to do, as at such close range, Victor was able to melt it in two shots in VATS. :D Hooray! Anyway, Victor snagged the meat off the corpse – along with a Kneecapper Laser Musket! Hmmm – present for Preston when we next see him?
F) Anyway, with the radscorpion taken care of, Victor and Nick visited Starlight, which was doing pretty well. One settler was unassigned, so I had Victor build a barber chair for them to man to keep them busy and increase general happiness (as the game seemed to insist this was a problem). Victor also gave them another turret for more defense, harvested crops, and did MORE cooking because – thanks to the hunting outpost – this place is MEAT CENTRAL. So much meat. :D Granted, this did put Victor over carry weight, but a quick snack of grilled radstag fixed that mighty quick. XD
G) Another settlement down – just one more to go before Diamond City! Victor and Nick headed back out and found the nearby train tracks, following those down as they would go right past Graygarden. However, they had to diverge from the path when they came across a wrecked train that had been carrying nuclear waste and that was still very radioactive – I sent them up a nearby hill, where they ended up killing a wandering wolf pack before coming across a cabin, which the game said was part of Rocky Narrows Park. As it was getting late (Victor had the Fatigue) and it seemed fairly safe, I had Victor park himself there for the evening, attempting some PipFall (which is rather hard as you have to jump hazards and I’m not always good at that), using his port-a-potty, and setting up camp at 8:55 PM.
And so we ended with Victor up at 5 AM on 12/27/2287, ready to continue exploring the park (having already shot the head off an alarm monkey) and then work his way over to Graygarden. Not particularly exciting, but I am glad at how easily I killed that damn radscorpion. :D Those things can be BITCHES to fight, as poor Jon can tell you.
Writing: Naturally, I wrote up the day’s events in the FO4 Playthrough Progression – Victor visiting Sanctuary and helping set up a turret and fixing up his old piano; the gang investigating the workhouse in Concord (with Victor being very suspicious of Bethesda’s Silly Skeletons – Nick says most people think the raiders pose them); the gang killing the mongrels at the parking lot, investigating the mined campsite, and taking out the radscorpion by Starlight; Victor helping the people at Starlight with building another turret and helping a settler set up a barbering business in the old concession stand; and the gang following the train tracks nearby until a spill of radioactive barrels forces them to detour, leading them to kill a few wolves and spend the night in Rocky Narrows Park. Nothing too special, but then again, we’ll be in the plot stuff again soon enough, so – a couple of quiet days on the road isn’t going to hurt them!
YouTube: Got through all the stuff I hoped to get through, though as usual it took me a little longer than I wanted – on the plus side, at least Kevin’s video wasn’t too long to watch today!
A) Once again, started early (just after lunch – would have been BEFORE lunch but then we had lunch a bit earlier than normal) with that final OXBox list I wanted to get out of the old Watch Later – “7 Rip-Off Games You Thought Were Original!” Mike, Andy, and Jane taking us through those games that are actually pretty closely patterned off earlier titles. Ever heard of arcade game The Outfoxies? Probably not, but its platform-and-environmental-hazards-based gameplay should look pretty familiar to anyone who’s played any of the Super Smash Bros series. How about Sweet Home? A Japanese-only title about a film crew in a haunted mansion, when Capcom lost the license for the movie it was based on, they did a follow-up copying a bunch of key features with an original story – cue the birth of Resident Evil. And Utopia? This was an ancient PvP city-builder in the old “everything is vaguely defined polygons” era of gaming, and was clearly ahead of its time – about seven years ahead, as that’s when the original Sim City came out. Very little is truly original, is what this list tells you – but that shouldn’t stop you from enjoying it. :)
B) Then, between FO4 and my workout, I managed to fit in Call Me Kevin’s upload today – “This mod turns Minecraft into an RPG!” Yes, Kevin was once again experimenting with Minecraft modpacks today, and found one that turns the entire game into a rather complex open-world RPG! There’s loads of different stats to level up (strength, agility, mining, archery, melee combat, etc), loads of different treasures and magical items you can find and wear, waypoint stones to allow you to fast travel, multiple realms you can travel between – your character even starts out with the ability to pre-build a starter house so they’re well-equipped for their initial travels!
Except if you’re Kevin, who plonked a hobbit tree on a beach (stranding a seal in his yard), investigated the mine shaft within, and found himself in the Nether thanks to magical dimensional rift goop within the first few minutes. Where he got murdered by Piglins. Twice. XD He did a little better once he stopped wandering into the Nether accidentally, though he never did get the hang of managing his inventory. XD But he did manage to destroy his hobbit tree for building materials, mostly to make boats to cross the vast oceans; row his way to a village, where he discovered that the priest had the nicest house, so of course he stole it; find an out-of-the-way house with a couple of people living in it and pick up one, Alex, as a companion after giving him food; explore the high seas with Alex, raiding a shipwreck and attacking an Illager pirate ship (it – didn’t go well, though at least in this case he was able to go back to his grave, bobbing in the water, and pick up his stuff); explore a big old cave with Alex and kill a boss with him (the boss got stuck in a doorway, but shhhh); get all sorts of quests ticked off by pretending to read things and by starting a little farm for crops; boost his Agility stat by running in circles; make an awesome paraglider; lose Alex to some mystery skeleton that killed him in broad daylight somehow; recruit his roommate Erling with more food (who wisely refused to follow Kevin anywhere); cheat in some redstone to build a compass to get an adventure map from a Villager ship – and then set the ship alight and watched it burn; go adventuring which led him to a gorgon in a temple – he got turned to stone once, but then found his way back, locked her out of her own house, and killed her and took her head as a weapon; FINALLY get his stuff back from the Nether with the help of a better shield, walling himself off from enemies with blocks, and finding a waypoint to teleport himself out of there fast; and end the episode raiding an airship with mystery skeleton/jelly enemies, and then attempting to paraglide away like a badass, only to run out of stamina and fall into the trees. XD Good times! It looks like a fun mod if you want to have extra RPG adventures in your Minecraft. :D
C) Then, after a quick trip to tumblr (see above), I moved onto today’s GrayStillPlays – “When you go from skinny to satan in 10 minutes!” AKA Gray plays Tough Man, what looks to be a mobile game by the same people who did the Buddy Toss and Lady Toss games. This one is all about lifting more and more ludicrous things – starting at ordinary weights and progressing through heavier weights, to elephants, to airplanes and space shuttles, to buildings and straight-up mountains, to level up your guy and turn him from a fairly average chad into a lava-clad master of hell. XD Gray was utterly delighted with most of the ridiculous “weights” selection, and thoroughly enjoyed turning his guy into a giant Satan magma dude. XD I suppose I would too!
D) And of course, it is Sunday, so we had to have our weekly dose of Jon – “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Part 7 - Slave New World!” Which was basically Jon bouncing back and forth between groups of escaped slaves and the slavers, playing both sides against the middle in an attempt to get all the possible rewards and keep his karma firmly neutral. This proved – trickier than expected. The highlights of the episode –
I. Jon bringing Wanda to Rivet City and talking about how the mod actually adjusted some doors to make more sense with the layout of the ship as it is seen in-game, as apparently the ship itself got moved at one point and its layout shuffled, meaning the doors as they are in vanilla FO3 just don’t make sense with the internal geometry.
II. Jon hitting up the marketplace to buy some guns (to help repair his own guns, mainly) and ammo, then hanging around until a certain Mei Wong, an escaped slave, shows up to ask her her business. Turns out she’s seen a slaver on the ship, Sister, and is scared he’s hunting her – she wants 25 caps to buy a gun so she can protect herself. Jon gives her the 25 caps and gets the location of “the Temple of the Union” (a little secret encampment of escaped slaves), but informs us that she’s actually wrong – while Sister IS on the ship looking for an escaped slave, he’s not looking for Mei. A quick trip to his stateroom reveals that he’s in fact looking for a synth, an escapee from the Commonwealth! (AKA the location of Fallout 4!) However, Jon explains that they shouldn’t actually start this quest (The Replicated Man) yet, because apparently it’s not the best time to do so. So he rewinds time to before he touched the holotape – and, because giving Mei the 25 caps shoved Wanda’s Karma into the “good” zone and thus she is now a target for mercenaries, he then shoots Mei with the Mesmetron and re-enslaves her, sending her back to Paradise Falls. This brings Wanda’s Karma down to neutral, and actual karma kicks in moments later with all the guards in Rivet City shooting at her, forcing Jon to get her off the ship REALLY fast via a dive into the river.
III. Jon heads over to Minefield to get oriented toward finding The Temple Of The Union, but first takes a trip over to the local power plant nearby – or, rather, its outbuilding, as it has a very important schematic – the Railway Rifle. And all the items to create it are nearby, happily (Jon in fact thinks that Minefield is deliberately seeded with all the components you will need to build these cool guns, because you’ll DEFINITELY be coming here if you’re doing Moira’s quests, so it would be easy for any player to find), so John whipped it up and gleefully demonstrated how it can shoot raiders’ heads off and pin them to cliffs even at low condition. XD
IV. Sidequest to get one of the best guns in the game over, Jon heads over to The Temple Of The Union, discovers that it was very easy to get locked out if you didn’t go in the main gate right away, then speaks to the leader of the escaped slaves, Hannibal, promising to protect the people there and asking if Wanda could do anything for them. As it turns out, Hannibal’s keen to move his group to the Lincoln Memorial (given, you know, it’s a monument to the Emancipation Proclamation President), and needs someone to check it out, make sure no super mutants are in it. Also, his friend Caleb wants to properly restore the place, and needs someone to get him a picture of the Memorial in its heyday from the history museum. Jon agreed to both these tasks, because yes, he did feel a little bad about Mei.
V. Jon heads into the DC ruins and heads for the Museum first, with a quick stop at the ghoul city of Underworld as – despite a snippy welcome – the people there ARE willing to deal with “smoothskins,” and the guy who greets you at the door is actually a repairman. Allowing Jon to get his new Railway Rifle up to code, yay. From there, it’s a quick sneak into the museum itself and its Lincoln exhibit, letting the turrets deal with as many of the ghouls as possible and picking up LOADS of Lincoln memorabilia, not just the picture of the Monument. There is stuff ranging from a recording of Lincoln’s voice (something people CLAIM exists, but which has never been found if it did happen), to Lincoln’s hat (a very nice hat indeed, with +1 Int and +5 Speech for the wearer), to an action figure of Lincoln with a sword (causing Jon to recount a bonkers story he discovered about Lincoln trying to smear a political rival by pretending to be some random housewife in a letter to the editor, the rival finding out about it and challenging Lincoln to a duel, and Lincoln picking swords because his height and thus long reach meant he’d have a better chance at beating the guy – the guy backed down, a truce was called, and they became allies in time for him to be on the Union’s side in the Civil War), and most notably Lincoln’s Repeater – the best gun in the game, with incredible damage and PRISTINE condition because, well, it’s been in a case for over two hundred years!
VI. Having gotten all his souvenirs, John heads to the Lincoln Memorial and – well, there are no super mutants. There are a bunch of slavers there, though, ready to hunt down escaped slaves! As he is on a mission to get the maximum amount of rewards here, though, Jon approaches cautiously, gets taken to see the slavers’ leader, Leroy, and tells him that the slaves are hiding in Old Onley, which is a deathclaw nest. He also sells the guy the wanted poster for John Wilkes Booth, as the guy pays the most of anyone willing to buy the Lincoln memorabilia (which includes Leroy, Hannibal himself, and a third guy who runs a museum in Rivet City, Abraham Washington). The slavers moved out, but didn’t even get far out of the ruins, as they ran across a super mutant camp and ended up getting slaughtered. Jon takes out the final mutant still standing once they’re all dead, and frees its captive in exchange for supplies – fortunately all she gives Wanda is a nail board, and her karma remains neutral, so Wanda doesn’t have to shoot her in the back. XD
VII. Slavers dead, Jon (after showing off Abraham Washington as the alternate buyer for Lincoln stuff, though without actually selling anything to him) heads back to the Temple to give the picture to Caleb and the good news to Hannibal, and then sells him all of the Lincoln memorabilia, including the hat and gun, both of which he equips. Hannibal then starts taking his little band of escapees to the memorial, and Jon abuses fast travel fun to make sure that they all get there alive (as Hannibal is about as prepared for the dangers of the Capital Wasteland as the slavers were). They get to the memorial safely, Wanda levels up and gets the nice “Finesse” perk (getting more criticals, I believe) and the schematics for ANOTHER excellent gun, the Dart Gun –
VIII. And then Jon goes and shoots Hannibal with the Mesmetron, because all of this has raised Wanda’s karma levels to dangerous heights, and it’s time to lower them again! Not by enslaving Hannibal and his group again, though, but by using the fact that certain characters cannot be enslaved or killed to frenzy Hannibal into attacking his own comrades (as the Mesmetron has a chance to enslave someone, frenzy them, or kill them with each shot, and if two of those options are available), forcing them to kill him in self defense. And allowing Jon to loot Hannibal’s corpse for the goodies and resell them to Abraham Washington, because he is the only person you can sell them to and then get them back for resale. Things did NOT go fully according to Jon’s plan – the really good gun that Hannibal was using was shot out of his hands at one point and ended up on a different NPC, meaning Jon was briefly terrified it had Bethesedaed out of existence; Jon actually forgot to pick up everything on Hannibal’s corpse when he first looted it (though on the plus side, when he went back for it, random combat armor had spawned on the corpse, so Jon had that as well); and Jon was forced to kill a couple of the NPCs himself because of the aforementioned “really good gun Hannibal was using was shot out of his hands” dealy.
IX. And also all all the murder didn’t actually lower Wanda’s karma enough to put her back in Neutral. Neither did going to Arefu and murdering a few people there (notably Ian, whom Jon DID point out was likely to have another cannibal episode soon, so. . .). STEALING a few things from one of their houses, though, that did the trick. The fuck, Fallout 3.
X. And so the episode ended with Jon selling MOST of the Lincoln Memorial items to Abraham Washington (keeping the gun and the hat), and making plans next week to head back to Megaton and start engaging with the “Two Wastelands” part of the mod. Looks like we’ll be visiting New Vegas next week, folks! I wonder what atrocities Wanda will commit there. XD
Workout: Did get on the bike this afternoon for a mountain ride and a start on James Turner’s High School Years Rags To Riches – Episode 15! The main events of the thirty minutes I’ve watched so far have been –
A) Reginald deciding to cool down his romantic relationship with Sidney (with Sidney asking if they could become boyfriends IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARD), and James directing him into a brief New Year’s fling with Bradley Vatore during his kegger (they spent so much time trying to woohoo in the shower, they missed the countdown)
B) Reginald asking his visiting mother for the Rite of Ascension to become a spellcaster again – not because he intended to do any spellcaster stuff right at the moment, but because getting a broom (or, in his case, a magic mop) was better than a bicycle for navigating the very hilly campus of Foxbury – now he can just take off from his dorm’s balcony and end up right in front of his classroom!
C) Reginald getting the “Incredibly Friendly” trait and using that to combat his social awkwardness and get his latest thrifted outfits properly hyped (well, one of them – the other one for some reason didn’t count when he tried to wear it. I suspect it’s the one that’s literally just a copy of his regular outfit). Also, James fixed the thrift store after someone stole a very necessary couch out of it, and made sure the “Sharing Is Caring” NAP was gone so there would be no more stealing.
D) Reginald finishing his first semester at college with straight As and plunging straight into the second semester – as of this writing, he has already completed his final presentation for one class and is working hard on keeping up with his homework for all the others. Also, he FINALLY made friends with two teammates and got “promoted” in the soccer team, so that’s nice. The main problem is gonna be attending guest lectures, as being on the soccer team means his practice time overlaps with his ability to attend those. . .
Whew! Pretty busy life Reginald is leading, isn’t it? And yet it keeps making me want to do the university gameplay again. . .maybe in another save I can do Victor, Alice, and Smiler all together at uni one day.
And that's that! And now I have to go to bed because I have work tomorrow. For one day. XD But it is still a day, and thus I must get some sleep. Night all!
