Crossover Chick (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
crossover_chick) wrote2023-08-27 11:54 pm
crossover_chick) wrote2023-08-27 11:54 pm
Wrapping Up Fallout Sunday
I didn't have maybe as productive a day as I might have liked (bit of a slow start this morning due to waking up early because I needed the bathroom, then running into problems making my breakfast smoothie because the yogurt we bought wasn't properly sealed and thus we had to chuck it), but I did pretty good, I think --
Tumblr: Managed to be reasonably productive on here –
Victor Luvs Alice – Spent the time before lunch getting ALL of the main text done on all of the posts for this week’s Chill Valicer Save update (though I had to finish off the last paragraph or so on the final post right after lunch). I decided that THIS would be the best use of my time because it means that part is done for ALL of the posts, and thus tomorrow and Tuesday I can focus on doing the tags and the alt-text. I mean, it’s worth a shot, right?
Valice Multiverse – Fortunately REALLY simple today, with no threads or asks – I just queued up my first set of Valicer In The Dark Not-Incorrect Quotes from Victor Luvs Alice to that for Monday. [pause] Did I ever share those with you guys? Let me put up the links just in case – Volume One of VITD Not-Incorrect Quotes; Volume Two of VITD Not-Incorrect Quotes
Fallout 4: Welp, my goal in good old FO4 today was to clear out Hubris Comics and secure the Silver Shroud costume, and I very much did that! However, since I’m desperately fighting being WAAY too verbose in these to-do list write-ups (sometimes it feels like it takes longer to write stuff up than it does to actually DO the stuff), I am only going to give you some basic highlights – especially since this particular playsession was largely just “shoot ghouls and grab junk” –
A) First look at the first floor after all the ghouls were murderlated got me a copy of The Unstoppables (the issue where they visit the Ux-Ron Galaxy, giving me +1% chance an attack will do no damage), a look at the preorders terminal (literally TWO people were reading Manta Man, and even THEY weren’t coming to pick up their preorders by September)), and a look in the back storeroom, where cracking the safe got me a pretty decent laser pistol – unsure if it’s being sold, broken down for parts, or given to a settler yet, but nice to have!
B) Second floor had a manager’s office with a working terminal in it, revealing that said manager was Vivian O’Dell and detailing some of the problems going on behind the scenes of the Silver Shroud TV show – namely, one of the writers, Tina, objected to there being an English butler in the TV show, and to a redheaded actress named Claire Redelle (famous for being a “scream queen”) being hired to play the Mistress of Mystery over the beloved voice of the character on the radio show, Shannon Rivers (who was, as an added bonus, a brunette as the character had always been portrayed as). The saga continued on Tina’s computer and producer Aaron’s computer on the third floor, detailing how Vivian (who’d gotten married recently and was just trying to go on her honeymoon (for at least the SECOND time, as she mentioned not wanting to cancel it AGAIN)) wasn’t prepared to fight the TV people on the butler, but WAS willing to fight for Shannon getting to stay the MoM, and her attempts to talk to Aaron about it – Aaron, for his part, apparently just REALLY liked how Claire looked in the redesigned costume and wanted to snap her up before some other studio did. Apparently the best he and another guy on the show, Peter, could come up with for a compromise was to have Shannon maybe dub over Claire’s lines in post. By the time of the bombs falling, Tina had quit, Vivian had hopefully made it to her honeymoon, and Aaron. . .well, there’s a skeleton absolutely SURROUNDED by beer bottles in the corner of his office once you crack the door, so I think we know what happened to Aaron. XD
C) Also scattered around the building were various dead scavengers, with notes – the one in the first floor bathroom was just complaining about why he even signed up for this stupid job, while the one in the hole in the wall on the second floor (which I suspected of being a jumpscare ghoul at first) had a list of stuff he wanted to come back for later, like Grognak’s axe, more comics, and the backroom safe – you didn’t miss too much, buddy, though the laser pistol WAS nice!
D) Third floor netted me a Legendary Ghoul Reaver, which I managed to kill with a sneak attack in one hit! :D He yielded a Nimble Calibrated Powerful Combat Rifle, which apparently gives +75% faster movement speed while aiming the gun. I’m not sure how useful this is for ME, as I tend to use VATS to line up my shots instead of manual aiming, but I took it anyway – should fetch a decent price if I sell it, at any rate!
E) . . .that being said, I did end up leaning on manual aiming to take out the Glowing One in the studio room, because the darn thing was behind the backdrop and literally all I could see was the bottoms of its feet, which VATS wouldn’t target. XD A few shots down there kept it busy while Ada and Victor cleared the other ghouls, then Ada finished it off with her laser.
F) Along with the Silver Shroud costume, I made sure to get all the other goodies in the place, such as the Silver Shroud signed photo; the shooting script for “Death Becomes You” (Draft 18), the submachine gun prop, the Grognak costume, and (after confirming where the hell it was on my phone – turns out I walked right past it when I entered because it’s on the first floor, right behind the counter) the Grognak Axe. I’m probably not going to use the Grognak stuff personally, but I AM probably gonna have Victor dress up in the costume once for funsies. XD And then maybe display it on a mannequin at either his Red Rocket base or the Castle. XD Also snagged another magazine in the upstairs bathroom – “Astoundingly Awesome Tales: Invasion Of The Zetans!” Which adds +5% damage to the alien blaster! Glad I came here BEFORE doing the Cabot stuff (I intend to use the Blaster during that quest just because Jack Cabot is REALLY into alien tech).
G) Also couldn’t resist playing around with the lights and sounds in the studio after discovering I could – the place is now playing the Silver Shroud theme, and the backdrop has got rainbow lights on it for the chroma key settings. XD
H) Ended the playsession by sneaking straight down the road past Swan’s Pond (picking up the location of the Boylston Club in the process) and through a few side streets to that one cookpot random events location – had to kill a few MORE feral ghouls there who were feasting on the dead scavengers who’d parked themselves there previously. Used the cookpot there, then realized “oh shit, I’m in that spot where I’m BEHIND Goodneighbor and have to figure out how to loop back around to the front of it” and decided to park myself at the pot and just save, rather than spend too much extra time trying to find my way around the streets again. *shakehead* Every time I think I’ve got this sorted. . .
So yeah – pretty solid playsession, all things considered! Now I just have to find my way back to the actual ENTRANCE of Goodneighbor and deliver the costume. :) We’ll do that next Sunday and get this Silver Shroud show on the road!
Writing: Another Sunday, another update to the FO4 Playthrough Progression with today’s storming of Hubris Comics! Not too different from what I actually did in the game for the most part (though I had Victor notice Grognak’s Axe in its display case right away, then be shocked that it was actually a REAL WEAPON), though when they got to the studio floor, I not only had Victor insist on trying on the costume, just for funsies, I also added a Mistress of Mystery costume for Alice to find and try on. And the sight of her in said costume did a few things to Victor, let me tell you. I even had Ada ask if them blushing at each other in their various duds was “human mating behavior,” because Ada IS a bit of a troll. XD I also had Victor react to the “Invasion of the Zetans” comic by going, “Oh, so that’s what those aliens are called” and telling Alice he’ll have to show her the alien spaceship crash. . .though thinking about it, she MAY have been around for that? It’s been a while since that happened, but it DID occur after they got Nick, meaning it occurred after they picked up Alice, but. . . *reviews my notes* Yes, she WAS present for the alien spaceship nonsense and saw the crash – I have thus changed that moment to be Alice being like “how the FUCK did I forget about the crashed alien spaceship we’ve been through too much weird shit together.” XD But yes, left it off with the gang having killed all the ghouls, gotten all the goodies as well as the costumes, and having made their way over to that cookpot stop near the back of Goodneighbor. Next week, hopefully I can actually get them IN Goodneighbor and have Victor learn that Kent has HIM in mind as Silver Shroud material. . .
YouTube: Got both of my usual Sunday two watched, which makes me happy since now I’m not starting the week off behind –
A) Started off with today’s GrayStillPlays – “When you lift the universe itself,” aka Gray plays Arm Wrestling Clicker! This is a mobile game where you start off as a scrub dude training in his shitty garage with tiny pink weights, and through the power of getting haircuts, buying new shirts, occasionally purchasing a FitBit, and lifting until ridiculous amounts of numbers come out, you can become a god among men, lifting multi-ton fidget spinners and defeating the Terminator, Bruce Lee, a werewolf, a shark man, and an elephant man in arm-wrestling competitions. And making it look EASY. XD Gray had a blast upgrading his weights, his power, his stamina, and his criticals until everything was at utterly stupid levels and laughing over the fact that the money so quickly went into “we’re putting random letters of the alphabet after the numbers because even we can’t keep track of how much you’re earning.” Not to mention all the free gems from going on TV and doing thirty reps with your dumbbell of choice, which funded the purchase of all his special multiplier haircuts and shirts. An utterly ridiculous clicker game made so much better by Gray’s refusal to give up until he’d beaten everything. Not even the EMULATOR CRASHING stopped him. XD You go, Gray! Unwind from all those Alex boards by making the numbers go up stupid amounts!
B) And then, of course, we had this week’s Jon of Many A True Nerd’s Fallout Sunday video – “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Part 42 - In The Dead of Nightwear!” Which was an episode focusing on two things –
A) The weirdest quest in all of Fallout 3 – or, rather, the second half of it. Do you remember how, who knows HOW many episodes back now, we did “Grady’s Package,” a quest to retrieve some naughty nightwear for Ronald, the guy attempting to creep on the deeply oblivious Nuka-Cola queen Sierra Petrovita, which involved keeping the nightwear from being stolen by a raider called Lug-Nut (which Wanda did by using her incredible speech)? Well, as it turns out, there is a second, at least semi-linked quest, called “The Sorrowful Suitor” that involves Lug-Nut’s little brother and a second set of nightwear! And you can only do it if you have started “Who Dares Wins,” the final quest and the grand finale of the Broken Steel DLC, because the only way to get to the holotape that triggers the quest is to enter the Presidential Metro, which is just perma-locked until such time as you start “Who Dares Wins.” In fact, you actually have to do most of “Who Dares Wins” to reach it, because it’s actually fairly DEEP into the Presidential Metro. Here’s how Jon and Wanda did it –
I. Reported to Paladin Tristan to hand over the Tesla Coil, get the mission (which is to sneak into Adams Air Force Base via the Metro, then grab a Tesla Cannon from the resupply crate there to fuck up the Enclave there), and get going to the Metro.
II. Went down Penn. Ave South, the chaos street of mutants and Brotherhood, to the BOS base near the smoking radioactive hole where the White House used to be to reach the “Utility” manhole entrance (with Jon taking a moment to be confused over the hotel across the street from the base, which contains one BOS Paladin sleeping on a cot and a Chinese Spec. Ops manual – Jon took the manual as evidence there were Chinese spies very close to the white house, and the comments suggest the Paladin is the radio guy receiving orders from HQ)
III. Went down the initial level, taking out every robot and turret with the power of the murderous pulse gun, and taking a detour near the door into the Presidential Metro proper out the Pennsylvania Avenue door to explore the ruins of the White House proper (which has a couple of Glowing Ones bopping around the wreckage – no problem with the Ghoul Mask on)
IV. Found another gnome-vs-teddy-bears scene, where a gnome had tied a couple of teddy bears to the tracks and was taking a picture of their imminent demise – Wanda saved the teddies, put the gnome on the tracks, then fired a few shots into it with the railway rifle XD
V. Located the AI running the metro – M.A.R.Go.T., a robot who cares not if there has been a war and everything on the surface has been basically wiped out; she is still functioning and thus her primary objective to keep the Metro running smoothly and safely still applies. Though she appreciates Wanda praising her for keeping it up even after 200 years. Wanda used an old senate employee ID card she found on a crashed train to pretend to be a senator (from “Ohidaho,” as per Jon), and got the scoop – the train to Adams Air Force Base is down because of a security breach that has damaged the metro equipment. Said security breach is in fact a bunch of ghouls fighting against M.A.R.Go.T.’s security bots, in Wanda’s case a bunch of Reavers because she is in fact super high level (higher than non-TTW FO3 will let you progress, in fact!). The options here are to help the robots kill all the ghouls, thus freeing up a particular repair bot to actually do the repairs that are needed (plugging some fuses into a certain power box), or to wait until the ghouls have killed that repair bot, grab the fuses off his robotic corpse, and plug them in yourself.
. . .Or, if you’re Wanda, you make one attempt to try and lead the Reavers to the bot to try and force them to kill him, and when that goes badly wrong, kill him yourself with the pulse gun, take the fuses, take out the last of the security bots with the last of the pulse gun ammo, plug in the fuses, and then head to the train. XD Because Wanda is Wanda.
VI. Got the train all ready to go for later, then went back around and up some stairs near where she killed the repair sentry bot to find a skeleton of a woman and a holotape called “Sorry My Darling,” where she tearfully requests whoever find it give it to her lover in the La Maison Beauregard hotel in Georgetown so he knows what became of her, and apologizes to said lover for not living long enough to see the wonderful gift he promised to get her. Trust me, this thing was QUITE emotional for a holotape that starts off a two-step unmarked quest that involves getting fancy nightwear.
VII. Proceeded back to Georgetown North and fought her way through a handful of super mutants over to the hotel, where Lag-Bolt, Lug-Nut’s little brother, had spawned, protecting a suitcase. He’s hostile and will never NOT be hostile (you can’t even give him the damn holotape so he has closure regarding his girlfriend, he will just immediately start shooting if he spots you), meaning under normal circumstances you must kill him (and you get decently rewarded for doing so, as he has unique combat armor AND unique sunglasses, the latter of which actually improve the Sneak and Lockpick skills). BUT – Wanda is so sneaky that she was able to successfully pickpocket him and get the note from Lug-Nut (indicating that he’d gotten this and the other set of nightwear from “The Tailor” in Virginia special-made, and that he hoped Lag-Bolt’s girl liked it) and the key to the suitcase without getting noticed at all. (She did not try to reverse-pickpocket the holotape onto him, though – maybe that’s just not a thing in FO3.) And upon opening the suitcase, she ended the quest and got her reward – the “All-Nighter Nightwear,” which looks the same as the regular nightwear but adds +1 to both Charisma AND Endurance. Which is nice and all, but it is absolutely baffling that this strange little mini-quest, which isn’t even properly marked on the Pip-Boy, would ONLY be available right before you go and do the final mission in the final area for Broken Steel, meaning most people are just gonna straight-up miss it. Jon thinks someone at Bethesda is just WEIRD. (Though not as weird as the F.E.A.R. franchise guy who likes pregnant naked ghosts.)
B) And a trio of little oddities that Jon hadn’t been able to fit in any other video, but still wanted to show off before he went and did that big final mission –
I. The Overlook Drive-In – a pretty simple drive in theater west of Andale, notable for only one reason – there’s a bunch of raiders in there, scattered amongst a whole bunch of cars, which can be blown up in a absolutely massive chain reaction to kill them. Jon admitted that it was just a bit of spectacle, but as cars blowing up in this game makes him happy, he enjoyed it immensely. XD
II. The Car Dealership south of Megaton – a completely nondescript building that has a couple of fancy Corvegas out on the showroom floor inside and some smaller cars up on smaller displays, a few desks, and an old coffee machine. No enemies, no special loot, no reason to ever come here really (it doesn’t even show up as a tick on the compass), but Jon likes it anyway. Mostly because he wonders if it isn’t a secret soft callback to the pre-Bethesda Fallouts, and perhaps specifically that random encounter that you could find in the original Fallout where you might stumble upon Bob’s Car-Mart and have Bob try to sell you an old rusted-out hunk of a car (if it’s not the Wastelander, I’m not interested). Oh, and you can totally blow up the cars in there, which again made him happy. XD
III. And a fixed-spawn event under a bridge west of Grayditch – mole rat racing! Specifically, a bunch of raiders had set up a little course made of barbed wire where they had two apparently-tame mole rats racing each other, with one raider firing off a starter pistol and everything. Jon considered it a delightful little Easter Egg and watched the races for a while. . .then murdered all the raiders so the mole rats could get a break. And then decided to conduct some experiments, mainly waiting around to see if the mole rats actually responded to a hidden timer in the game and would race WITHOUT hearing the starting pistol (they did not, just milling around) and if they would race if anyone else other than the Starting Pistol Raider fired said pistol (they did not, despite Wanda’s best efforts).
So yeah, that was the episode – basically “here is all the weird stuff that I could not show you before now for various reasons.” XD It was a lot of fun, and – if the next episode is the Grand Finale of this series (which it may or may not be, I’m not sure – Jon is going to do the final mission, but I have no idea if that ends the game entirely, or if he will be able to continue on and maybe do some of the other FO3 DLCs), a great way to clean up the last of the goofiest loose ends from this playthrough. :) As it stands, though, next week we show the Enclave what-for – Labor Day weekend is for storming Adams Air Force Base! I am looking forward to it. :)
Workout: Back on the bike today, and in honor of that “Valice/Valicer Haunted Mansion crossover ideas” ask from my friend Satirical Demon on tumblr last week, I watched Theme Park History’s episode on the ride during my ride! And let me tell you, that ride had a bit of a troubled history – damn thing was in development for about TEN YEARS as Disney kept nixing the original designs and storylines (though admittedly, a lot of the original storylines were a lot darker than what actually made it into the ride – stuff like killer pirates and the ghost host openly murdering a bride at her wedding). On the other hand, when it DID open, the damn thing ended up setting an attendance record for most guests served in one day, so I guess all that production time was worth it! It was a lot of fun to see the history behind the ride and its various iterations in Disneyland, Disney World, and Disneyland Tokyo (and the similarly-themed spin-offs Phantom Manor in Disneyland Paris and Mystic Manor in Disneyland Hong Kong), and to go on a sort of ride-along as TPH took you through how the ride works in the present day. It does look like a very cool, very fun ride – it’s just a shame that Disney parks are SO FUCKING EXPENSIVE. There are reasons why we always went to Universal on our theme park vacations when I was younger. Still, glad I watched the episode and got to at least kind of experience it from TPH’s description and video of the ride. :) Tomorrow, though, it’s back to the Hobbyhorses as we catch up with Edvard, Zillah, and Kasimir in “Foundry No. 12!”
Other: The weather being a bit better (less hot and humid mainly) meant that we did get a chance to play beanbags – though the game was a bit derailed near the end by a very friendly cat wandering onto our yard and paying us a visit. XD I had a fairly lousy day overall, with Mom doing better than usual and Dad definitely taking champ – BUT, importantly, we did all win once, so that’s something. :) Final scores were me 3-3-W-2-3; Dad W-2-2-W-W; Mom 2-W-3-3-2 – not perfect, but I will take it!
*nods* Not too shabby -- I'm glad to have all the text done on those Chill Valicer Save update posts! Hopefully that will streamline the process of getting them done at least a little...we'll find out. And I'm really working on being less rambly about stuff, like videos and my video gaming playsessions, going forward, just to try and claw a little more time back out of my day. We'll see how well that goes, but I am going to TRY. *nods* As it stands, though, I've got to hit the sheets -- night all!
Tumblr: Managed to be reasonably productive on here –
Victor Luvs Alice – Spent the time before lunch getting ALL of the main text done on all of the posts for this week’s Chill Valicer Save update (though I had to finish off the last paragraph or so on the final post right after lunch). I decided that THIS would be the best use of my time because it means that part is done for ALL of the posts, and thus tomorrow and Tuesday I can focus on doing the tags and the alt-text. I mean, it’s worth a shot, right?
Valice Multiverse – Fortunately REALLY simple today, with no threads or asks – I just queued up my first set of Valicer In The Dark Not-Incorrect Quotes from Victor Luvs Alice to that for Monday. [pause] Did I ever share those with you guys? Let me put up the links just in case – Volume One of VITD Not-Incorrect Quotes; Volume Two of VITD Not-Incorrect Quotes
Fallout 4: Welp, my goal in good old FO4 today was to clear out Hubris Comics and secure the Silver Shroud costume, and I very much did that! However, since I’m desperately fighting being WAAY too verbose in these to-do list write-ups (sometimes it feels like it takes longer to write stuff up than it does to actually DO the stuff), I am only going to give you some basic highlights – especially since this particular playsession was largely just “shoot ghouls and grab junk” –
A) First look at the first floor after all the ghouls were murderlated got me a copy of The Unstoppables (the issue where they visit the Ux-Ron Galaxy, giving me +1% chance an attack will do no damage), a look at the preorders terminal (literally TWO people were reading Manta Man, and even THEY weren’t coming to pick up their preorders by September)), and a look in the back storeroom, where cracking the safe got me a pretty decent laser pistol – unsure if it’s being sold, broken down for parts, or given to a settler yet, but nice to have!
B) Second floor had a manager’s office with a working terminal in it, revealing that said manager was Vivian O’Dell and detailing some of the problems going on behind the scenes of the Silver Shroud TV show – namely, one of the writers, Tina, objected to there being an English butler in the TV show, and to a redheaded actress named Claire Redelle (famous for being a “scream queen”) being hired to play the Mistress of Mystery over the beloved voice of the character on the radio show, Shannon Rivers (who was, as an added bonus, a brunette as the character had always been portrayed as). The saga continued on Tina’s computer and producer Aaron’s computer on the third floor, detailing how Vivian (who’d gotten married recently and was just trying to go on her honeymoon (for at least the SECOND time, as she mentioned not wanting to cancel it AGAIN)) wasn’t prepared to fight the TV people on the butler, but WAS willing to fight for Shannon getting to stay the MoM, and her attempts to talk to Aaron about it – Aaron, for his part, apparently just REALLY liked how Claire looked in the redesigned costume and wanted to snap her up before some other studio did. Apparently the best he and another guy on the show, Peter, could come up with for a compromise was to have Shannon maybe dub over Claire’s lines in post. By the time of the bombs falling, Tina had quit, Vivian had hopefully made it to her honeymoon, and Aaron. . .well, there’s a skeleton absolutely SURROUNDED by beer bottles in the corner of his office once you crack the door, so I think we know what happened to Aaron. XD
C) Also scattered around the building were various dead scavengers, with notes – the one in the first floor bathroom was just complaining about why he even signed up for this stupid job, while the one in the hole in the wall on the second floor (which I suspected of being a jumpscare ghoul at first) had a list of stuff he wanted to come back for later, like Grognak’s axe, more comics, and the backroom safe – you didn’t miss too much, buddy, though the laser pistol WAS nice!
D) Third floor netted me a Legendary Ghoul Reaver, which I managed to kill with a sneak attack in one hit! :D He yielded a Nimble Calibrated Powerful Combat Rifle, which apparently gives +75% faster movement speed while aiming the gun. I’m not sure how useful this is for ME, as I tend to use VATS to line up my shots instead of manual aiming, but I took it anyway – should fetch a decent price if I sell it, at any rate!
E) . . .that being said, I did end up leaning on manual aiming to take out the Glowing One in the studio room, because the darn thing was behind the backdrop and literally all I could see was the bottoms of its feet, which VATS wouldn’t target. XD A few shots down there kept it busy while Ada and Victor cleared the other ghouls, then Ada finished it off with her laser.
F) Along with the Silver Shroud costume, I made sure to get all the other goodies in the place, such as the Silver Shroud signed photo; the shooting script for “Death Becomes You” (Draft 18), the submachine gun prop, the Grognak costume, and (after confirming where the hell it was on my phone – turns out I walked right past it when I entered because it’s on the first floor, right behind the counter) the Grognak Axe. I’m probably not going to use the Grognak stuff personally, but I AM probably gonna have Victor dress up in the costume once for funsies. XD And then maybe display it on a mannequin at either his Red Rocket base or the Castle. XD Also snagged another magazine in the upstairs bathroom – “Astoundingly Awesome Tales: Invasion Of The Zetans!” Which adds +5% damage to the alien blaster! Glad I came here BEFORE doing the Cabot stuff (I intend to use the Blaster during that quest just because Jack Cabot is REALLY into alien tech).
G) Also couldn’t resist playing around with the lights and sounds in the studio after discovering I could – the place is now playing the Silver Shroud theme, and the backdrop has got rainbow lights on it for the chroma key settings. XD
H) Ended the playsession by sneaking straight down the road past Swan’s Pond (picking up the location of the Boylston Club in the process) and through a few side streets to that one cookpot random events location – had to kill a few MORE feral ghouls there who were feasting on the dead scavengers who’d parked themselves there previously. Used the cookpot there, then realized “oh shit, I’m in that spot where I’m BEHIND Goodneighbor and have to figure out how to loop back around to the front of it” and decided to park myself at the pot and just save, rather than spend too much extra time trying to find my way around the streets again. *shakehead* Every time I think I’ve got this sorted. . .
So yeah – pretty solid playsession, all things considered! Now I just have to find my way back to the actual ENTRANCE of Goodneighbor and deliver the costume. :) We’ll do that next Sunday and get this Silver Shroud show on the road!
Writing: Another Sunday, another update to the FO4 Playthrough Progression with today’s storming of Hubris Comics! Not too different from what I actually did in the game for the most part (though I had Victor notice Grognak’s Axe in its display case right away, then be shocked that it was actually a REAL WEAPON), though when they got to the studio floor, I not only had Victor insist on trying on the costume, just for funsies, I also added a Mistress of Mystery costume for Alice to find and try on. And the sight of her in said costume did a few things to Victor, let me tell you. I even had Ada ask if them blushing at each other in their various duds was “human mating behavior,” because Ada IS a bit of a troll. XD I also had Victor react to the “Invasion of the Zetans” comic by going, “Oh, so that’s what those aliens are called” and telling Alice he’ll have to show her the alien spaceship crash. . .though thinking about it, she MAY have been around for that? It’s been a while since that happened, but it DID occur after they got Nick, meaning it occurred after they picked up Alice, but. . . *reviews my notes* Yes, she WAS present for the alien spaceship nonsense and saw the crash – I have thus changed that moment to be Alice being like “how the FUCK did I forget about the crashed alien spaceship we’ve been through too much weird shit together.” XD But yes, left it off with the gang having killed all the ghouls, gotten all the goodies as well as the costumes, and having made their way over to that cookpot stop near the back of Goodneighbor. Next week, hopefully I can actually get them IN Goodneighbor and have Victor learn that Kent has HIM in mind as Silver Shroud material. . .
YouTube: Got both of my usual Sunday two watched, which makes me happy since now I’m not starting the week off behind –
A) Started off with today’s GrayStillPlays – “When you lift the universe itself,” aka Gray plays Arm Wrestling Clicker! This is a mobile game where you start off as a scrub dude training in his shitty garage with tiny pink weights, and through the power of getting haircuts, buying new shirts, occasionally purchasing a FitBit, and lifting until ridiculous amounts of numbers come out, you can become a god among men, lifting multi-ton fidget spinners and defeating the Terminator, Bruce Lee, a werewolf, a shark man, and an elephant man in arm-wrestling competitions. And making it look EASY. XD Gray had a blast upgrading his weights, his power, his stamina, and his criticals until everything was at utterly stupid levels and laughing over the fact that the money so quickly went into “we’re putting random letters of the alphabet after the numbers because even we can’t keep track of how much you’re earning.” Not to mention all the free gems from going on TV and doing thirty reps with your dumbbell of choice, which funded the purchase of all his special multiplier haircuts and shirts. An utterly ridiculous clicker game made so much better by Gray’s refusal to give up until he’d beaten everything. Not even the EMULATOR CRASHING stopped him. XD You go, Gray! Unwind from all those Alex boards by making the numbers go up stupid amounts!
B) And then, of course, we had this week’s Jon of Many A True Nerd’s Fallout Sunday video – “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Part 42 - In The Dead of Nightwear!” Which was an episode focusing on two things –
A) The weirdest quest in all of Fallout 3 – or, rather, the second half of it. Do you remember how, who knows HOW many episodes back now, we did “Grady’s Package,” a quest to retrieve some naughty nightwear for Ronald, the guy attempting to creep on the deeply oblivious Nuka-Cola queen Sierra Petrovita, which involved keeping the nightwear from being stolen by a raider called Lug-Nut (which Wanda did by using her incredible speech)? Well, as it turns out, there is a second, at least semi-linked quest, called “The Sorrowful Suitor” that involves Lug-Nut’s little brother and a second set of nightwear! And you can only do it if you have started “Who Dares Wins,” the final quest and the grand finale of the Broken Steel DLC, because the only way to get to the holotape that triggers the quest is to enter the Presidential Metro, which is just perma-locked until such time as you start “Who Dares Wins.” In fact, you actually have to do most of “Who Dares Wins” to reach it, because it’s actually fairly DEEP into the Presidential Metro. Here’s how Jon and Wanda did it –
I. Reported to Paladin Tristan to hand over the Tesla Coil, get the mission (which is to sneak into Adams Air Force Base via the Metro, then grab a Tesla Cannon from the resupply crate there to fuck up the Enclave there), and get going to the Metro.
II. Went down Penn. Ave South, the chaos street of mutants and Brotherhood, to the BOS base near the smoking radioactive hole where the White House used to be to reach the “Utility” manhole entrance (with Jon taking a moment to be confused over the hotel across the street from the base, which contains one BOS Paladin sleeping on a cot and a Chinese Spec. Ops manual – Jon took the manual as evidence there were Chinese spies very close to the white house, and the comments suggest the Paladin is the radio guy receiving orders from HQ)
III. Went down the initial level, taking out every robot and turret with the power of the murderous pulse gun, and taking a detour near the door into the Presidential Metro proper out the Pennsylvania Avenue door to explore the ruins of the White House proper (which has a couple of Glowing Ones bopping around the wreckage – no problem with the Ghoul Mask on)
IV. Found another gnome-vs-teddy-bears scene, where a gnome had tied a couple of teddy bears to the tracks and was taking a picture of their imminent demise – Wanda saved the teddies, put the gnome on the tracks, then fired a few shots into it with the railway rifle XD
V. Located the AI running the metro – M.A.R.Go.T., a robot who cares not if there has been a war and everything on the surface has been basically wiped out; she is still functioning and thus her primary objective to keep the Metro running smoothly and safely still applies. Though she appreciates Wanda praising her for keeping it up even after 200 years. Wanda used an old senate employee ID card she found on a crashed train to pretend to be a senator (from “Ohidaho,” as per Jon), and got the scoop – the train to Adams Air Force Base is down because of a security breach that has damaged the metro equipment. Said security breach is in fact a bunch of ghouls fighting against M.A.R.Go.T.’s security bots, in Wanda’s case a bunch of Reavers because she is in fact super high level (higher than non-TTW FO3 will let you progress, in fact!). The options here are to help the robots kill all the ghouls, thus freeing up a particular repair bot to actually do the repairs that are needed (plugging some fuses into a certain power box), or to wait until the ghouls have killed that repair bot, grab the fuses off his robotic corpse, and plug them in yourself.
. . .Or, if you’re Wanda, you make one attempt to try and lead the Reavers to the bot to try and force them to kill him, and when that goes badly wrong, kill him yourself with the pulse gun, take the fuses, take out the last of the security bots with the last of the pulse gun ammo, plug in the fuses, and then head to the train. XD Because Wanda is Wanda.
VI. Got the train all ready to go for later, then went back around and up some stairs near where she killed the repair sentry bot to find a skeleton of a woman and a holotape called “Sorry My Darling,” where she tearfully requests whoever find it give it to her lover in the La Maison Beauregard hotel in Georgetown so he knows what became of her, and apologizes to said lover for not living long enough to see the wonderful gift he promised to get her. Trust me, this thing was QUITE emotional for a holotape that starts off a two-step unmarked quest that involves getting fancy nightwear.
VII. Proceeded back to Georgetown North and fought her way through a handful of super mutants over to the hotel, where Lag-Bolt, Lug-Nut’s little brother, had spawned, protecting a suitcase. He’s hostile and will never NOT be hostile (you can’t even give him the damn holotape so he has closure regarding his girlfriend, he will just immediately start shooting if he spots you), meaning under normal circumstances you must kill him (and you get decently rewarded for doing so, as he has unique combat armor AND unique sunglasses, the latter of which actually improve the Sneak and Lockpick skills). BUT – Wanda is so sneaky that she was able to successfully pickpocket him and get the note from Lug-Nut (indicating that he’d gotten this and the other set of nightwear from “The Tailor” in Virginia special-made, and that he hoped Lag-Bolt’s girl liked it) and the key to the suitcase without getting noticed at all. (She did not try to reverse-pickpocket the holotape onto him, though – maybe that’s just not a thing in FO3.) And upon opening the suitcase, she ended the quest and got her reward – the “All-Nighter Nightwear,” which looks the same as the regular nightwear but adds +1 to both Charisma AND Endurance. Which is nice and all, but it is absolutely baffling that this strange little mini-quest, which isn’t even properly marked on the Pip-Boy, would ONLY be available right before you go and do the final mission in the final area for Broken Steel, meaning most people are just gonna straight-up miss it. Jon thinks someone at Bethesda is just WEIRD. (Though not as weird as the F.E.A.R. franchise guy who likes pregnant naked ghosts.)
B) And a trio of little oddities that Jon hadn’t been able to fit in any other video, but still wanted to show off before he went and did that big final mission –
I. The Overlook Drive-In – a pretty simple drive in theater west of Andale, notable for only one reason – there’s a bunch of raiders in there, scattered amongst a whole bunch of cars, which can be blown up in a absolutely massive chain reaction to kill them. Jon admitted that it was just a bit of spectacle, but as cars blowing up in this game makes him happy, he enjoyed it immensely. XD
II. The Car Dealership south of Megaton – a completely nondescript building that has a couple of fancy Corvegas out on the showroom floor inside and some smaller cars up on smaller displays, a few desks, and an old coffee machine. No enemies, no special loot, no reason to ever come here really (it doesn’t even show up as a tick on the compass), but Jon likes it anyway. Mostly because he wonders if it isn’t a secret soft callback to the pre-Bethesda Fallouts, and perhaps specifically that random encounter that you could find in the original Fallout where you might stumble upon Bob’s Car-Mart and have Bob try to sell you an old rusted-out hunk of a car (if it’s not the Wastelander, I’m not interested). Oh, and you can totally blow up the cars in there, which again made him happy. XD
III. And a fixed-spawn event under a bridge west of Grayditch – mole rat racing! Specifically, a bunch of raiders had set up a little course made of barbed wire where they had two apparently-tame mole rats racing each other, with one raider firing off a starter pistol and everything. Jon considered it a delightful little Easter Egg and watched the races for a while. . .then murdered all the raiders so the mole rats could get a break. And then decided to conduct some experiments, mainly waiting around to see if the mole rats actually responded to a hidden timer in the game and would race WITHOUT hearing the starting pistol (they did not, just milling around) and if they would race if anyone else other than the Starting Pistol Raider fired said pistol (they did not, despite Wanda’s best efforts).
So yeah, that was the episode – basically “here is all the weird stuff that I could not show you before now for various reasons.” XD It was a lot of fun, and – if the next episode is the Grand Finale of this series (which it may or may not be, I’m not sure – Jon is going to do the final mission, but I have no idea if that ends the game entirely, or if he will be able to continue on and maybe do some of the other FO3 DLCs), a great way to clean up the last of the goofiest loose ends from this playthrough. :) As it stands, though, next week we show the Enclave what-for – Labor Day weekend is for storming Adams Air Force Base! I am looking forward to it. :)
Workout: Back on the bike today, and in honor of that “Valice/Valicer Haunted Mansion crossover ideas” ask from my friend Satirical Demon on tumblr last week, I watched Theme Park History’s episode on the ride during my ride! And let me tell you, that ride had a bit of a troubled history – damn thing was in development for about TEN YEARS as Disney kept nixing the original designs and storylines (though admittedly, a lot of the original storylines were a lot darker than what actually made it into the ride – stuff like killer pirates and the ghost host openly murdering a bride at her wedding). On the other hand, when it DID open, the damn thing ended up setting an attendance record for most guests served in one day, so I guess all that production time was worth it! It was a lot of fun to see the history behind the ride and its various iterations in Disneyland, Disney World, and Disneyland Tokyo (and the similarly-themed spin-offs Phantom Manor in Disneyland Paris and Mystic Manor in Disneyland Hong Kong), and to go on a sort of ride-along as TPH took you through how the ride works in the present day. It does look like a very cool, very fun ride – it’s just a shame that Disney parks are SO FUCKING EXPENSIVE. There are reasons why we always went to Universal on our theme park vacations when I was younger. Still, glad I watched the episode and got to at least kind of experience it from TPH’s description and video of the ride. :) Tomorrow, though, it’s back to the Hobbyhorses as we catch up with Edvard, Zillah, and Kasimir in “Foundry No. 12!”
Other: The weather being a bit better (less hot and humid mainly) meant that we did get a chance to play beanbags – though the game was a bit derailed near the end by a very friendly cat wandering onto our yard and paying us a visit. XD I had a fairly lousy day overall, with Mom doing better than usual and Dad definitely taking champ – BUT, importantly, we did all win once, so that’s something. :) Final scores were me 3-3-W-2-3; Dad W-2-2-W-W; Mom 2-W-3-3-2 – not perfect, but I will take it!
*nods* Not too shabby -- I'm glad to have all the text done on those Chill Valicer Save update posts! Hopefully that will streamline the process of getting them done at least a little...we'll find out. And I'm really working on being less rambly about stuff, like videos and my video gaming playsessions, going forward, just to try and claw a little more time back out of my day. We'll see how well that goes, but I am going to TRY. *nods* As it stands, though, I've got to hit the sheets -- night all!