Also Busy Sunday
Sep. 3rd, 2023 11:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickBecause that's my life, busy busy even on days off. XD But fortunately it was the good sort of busy where I got stuff done --
Tumblr: Had a more productive day over here, I’m glad to say –
Victor Luvs Alice – Spent the time before lunch and the bit between lunch and Fallout 4 getting all six of my Chill Valicer Save posts for this week sorted with pictures and the main text! So that’s all good. Tomorrow the focus will be on getting as many posts sorted with tags and picture alt text as I can! Fingers crossed that’s a lot!
Valice Multiverse – Just the one ask reply for the queue tonight, featuring Smiler revealing they’re not a fan of jokes with depressing premises! Interesting little factoid to learn. . .still have to do the write-up for Valicer In The Dark as an RP universe over there. Maybe tomorrow sometime, if I can fit it in. . .
Fallout 4: Well, it wasn’t AS productive a day in old FO4 as I might have liked, but I still managed to accomplish what I hoped to accomplish today! To whit –
A) I managed to make it back to Goodneighbor from the cookpot rest stop that I saved at at the end of last session – turns out, after zooming in farther on the Pip-Boy map, I was finally able to see that the stop is in fact under the ramp up to the elevated highway that’s near Goodneighbor, and not that far from the Old Granary Burial Grounds. So all I had to do was loop out of there through the nearby side doorway, find the bus in front of the Grounds, then proceed up the road, past the super-mutant-infested diner and the actual offramp to the highway to Goodneighbor’s front door! Now all I have to do is actually remember that the next time I end up there. We’ll see if that happens. XD
B) I turned in the Silver Shroud stuff to Kent and took on the role of the Shroud for him! :D Kent very generously paid Victor 125 caps for the costume and 120 caps for all the memorabilia, then explained to him that he didn’t feel like he personally was actually Shroud material – I had Victor tell him not to sell himself short, because they’re two fellow fanboys, and we like Kent. :) I also had him ask why him when Kent said that he wanted Victor to take up the mantle (citing his already-kinda-superheroey backstory as the Sole Survivor) – Kent explained that it was at least partly because Victor helped him without laughing at him, aww. Also that Victor is from the same time period, and knows SOMETHING has to be done to combat the crime on Goodneighbor’s streets. Victor cheerfully said yes after that, and got the Silver Shroud Armor (which has the “Assassin’s” effect in that it reduces damage coming in from humans by 15%), the Silver Submachine Gun (which – I guess is a decent gun, but I think Victor should be able to upgrade the HELL out of this thing), and a bunch of calling cards to leave at the scenes of his crime-stopping. All nice stuff, though I had to give the Silver Submachine Gun to Ada to carry around for the moment, as it was making poor Victor overweight (couldn’t have her take the costume – though since that’s a quest item at the moment, hopefully it’s actually weightless so we CAN carry it around without issue). I’ll have to put it on in the nearish future and see how Victor looks!
C) I officially followed the Freedom Trail to – well, not QUITE to Railroad HQ, but I am at the Old North Church! I had to do this in two parts, though – I’d INTENDED to follow the trail from the beginning by Boston Common right after dropping off the suit at Kent’s and just stop and sleep at the Old North Church once I got there (with Victor chugging a Nuka-Cola to help keep himself awake, as he’d started yawning midway through the convo with Kent), but – well. I got to the beginning of the trail (after a stop to raid a Nuka-Cola machine that was absolutely full of colas. . .then another stop to scrap some spare leather armor on my person, cook some meat, and have a snack since Victor was overweight AGAIN), chatted a bit with the Tour Protectron there (who told Victor about the various landmarks he’d see along the trail), then started from the fountain with 7-A, followed the line to the New State House (4-L), took a quick bathroom break and then doubled back along the line over to the Old Granary Burial Yard (2-A), back to Goodneighbor (which I’d already established was 6-O) –
Only for a radstorm to blow in. I quickly had Victor duck back inside Goodneighbor and go rent a room from Clair at the Rexford for a night, because yeah, can’t be out during a radstorm! He got a nice eight hours from 10 PM to 6 AM, and awoke refreshed and ready to go –
Only for the damn radstorm to be still going. Annoyed, I had him run over to Daisy’s and tried to have him wait an hour in one of the chair’s there – nope, still going. And the stupid game wouldn’t let me wait again. >( Annoyed, I had Victor wander around Daisy’s shop/house for a bit, then had him take some Rad-X and Radaway to up his rad resistance and clear the rads he’d already picked up before doing a little bartering with her (trading a bunch of bloodbug steaks, some antibiotics, and a bunch of berry and grape mentats for a couple of UTI cures, some purified water, some duct tape, and an aluminum TV dinner tray). And then, with nothing else to do, I had him sit down and play some “Red Menace” on his Pip-Boy (it’s one of the mini-games you can pick up in the world, which plays like the very first Mario game, back when he was known as Jumpman and trying to save Pauline from the early version of Kong. I’m not very good at it). The weather FINALLY cleared up around 8:30 AM in-game, allowing me and Victor to FINALLY leave town and continue following the trail, over to the Old Corner Bookstore (3-I), then around to Faneuil Hall (5-R), down and around that and the big old flooded puddle nearby to Paul Revere’s House (8-D), and finally left to the Old North Church (1-R). Along the way, Victor found an Advanced locked door in the wooden wall beside Faneuil Hall (which he unlocked pretty easily – just led to a side alley which MIGHT be inside a raider base; I didn’t explore it very far, wanting to stay on track); a cap stash that also contained a bunch of cigarettes and some handcuffs (SOMEONE was planning for a fun night in before they presumably got got by super mutants); and another old super mutant camp right across from Paul Revere’s place, which fortunately only contained a couple of hounds – easily taken out by the Two-Shot. I left it with Victor and Ada inside the Old North Church itself (having cleared out the main room – Victor took one nasty hit, but eh, he’ll be fine – and checked out the creepy dark room at the very back – turns out it’s just the stairs up to the steeple, I’l check that out later), preparing to actually head down into the belly of the building and find the Railroad. So that’ll be our goal next week – nice! :)
Writing: Another Sunday, another update to the FO4 Playthrough Progression with Victor, Alice, and currently Ada’s adventures in the Commonwealth! Their version of adventures was much like the ones I described above, with the most major change being Victor doesn’t have the costume yet – since this is a more “realistic” universe, Kent actually needs a day or two to upgrade it into actual armor (I have him as already knowing the secret of ballistic weave to justify how he does this). Oh, and since I gave Alice a Mistress of Mystery dress to play around with in this world, he offered to upgrade that too, saying Victor and his “girlfriend” could go out together! Leading to some rather embarrassed blushing and stammering about how they’re not dating from Alice and Victor. XD They’ll wise up eventually. . . But yes, other than that, pretty much the same as what I described above, complete with the rad storm rolling in while the gang was trying to follow the Freedom Trail and Victor being really annoyed when it hadn’t abated by the time he got up in the morning. And spending his time until it finally cleared up (or, well, transitioned into just plain rain) playing “Red Menace” badly (with Alice and Ada backseat-gaming him XD). They’re currently very cautiously approaching the entrance to the tunnels that will lead them to Railroad HQ, because there’s an erratic light in there that Victor thinks is indicative of a Glowing One ghoul. We’ll see how that works out for them next week!
YouTube: Got through my usual Sunday two, despite my internet’s best efforts –
A) First up, from the Subs, we had GrayStillPlays and “When you play life on easy mode,” aka Gray plays Save The Guy! This is one of those weird mobile “puzzle” games where you’re presented with situations and have to make a choice on how to resolve it, and generally the weirder the option, the more likely it was to be correct. This particular run-through was all about breaking a guy out of prison, getting him through the city to the local bank so he could rob it, escaping through the sewers, and finally getting to the top of an apartment building so he could steal the helicopter up there and fly away. Along the way, Gray discovered that the best way to appease a fellow cellmate was to give him a fidget spinner; the best ways to get past cops were to either use a slingshot to destroy the light above them or throw on a sheet and pretend to be a ghost; the best way to deal with a beautiful woman was to scare her half to death with a rat; the best way to get out of a seedy bar was to do loads of bicep curls and then smash your way through the door; the best way to deal with a giant mole in your path was to LITERALLY ERASE IT; the best way to deal with a gap in the earth was a pogo stick; the best way to deal with a cobra was by tricking it into thinking a necktie was a lady cobra; the best way to deal with a sturdy wooden bank door was to get a beaver to chew through it; the best way to deal with a giant mutant rat in the sewers was to watch a video and use a raygun on it to shrink it; and the best way to learn how to pilot a helicopter was APPARENTLY TO ASK GOD DIRECTLY. XD Basically, this game made no sense, meaning it was perfect for the channel. XD Maybe we’ll see another story from it another time!
B) And second up, from Jon of Many A True Nerd, we had “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Grand Finale - You Can Leave Your Hat On!” Yes, today WAS indeed the Grand Finale of the series, with Wanda taking on Adams Air Force Base to complete “Who Dares Wins” and defeat the Enclave once and for all! Unfortunately I DID have to fight with my stupid internet to actually WATCH the video (it was one of those nights where the buffering was going SUPER SLOW), but I did get through it in the end. Here are the highlights for your approval –
A) First up, Wanda was going into a place with lots of robots and people in power armor, so naturally Jon wanted plenty of ammo for his pulse gun to waste them. And where is the best place to find the energy cells for the pulse gun? Why, in the underbelly of the National Archives, of course! For some reason, almost every ammo box down there has nothing BUT energy cells in them. Perhaps because the place was entirely staffed by robots – Jon’s not sure, but he took FULL advantage of it!
B) After that, it was back to the Presidential Metro to actually travel to Adams Air Force Base – but first, Jon had to clear up a slight, pedantic misconception. Now, if you know ONE “Fun Fact” about Fallout 3, it’s probably that this particular subway train is not actually a working train – when you switch it on and it starts moving, it turns into a hat stuck to the head of an NPC that runs along in the void underneath the world to get you to where you’re going. It’s basically impossible to ever see this NPC in action, because when the train is in “hat” mode, you’re stuck in first person cutscene mode – but, as the “train hat” asset exists in the game, you can give it to your character and equip it yourself. So that’s what Jon did, using the console to give Wanda the train carriage and then stick it on her head. So what’s the slight, pedantic misconception that showing us this cleared up?
That the “train hat” is not TECHNICALLY a hat – it’s ARMOR. Meaning it doesn’t take up the hat slot, it instead takes up the BODY slots. It totally rests on your head, yes, and blocks your view in third-person mode, but you could clearly see Wanda’s beloved beret underneath it when Jon showed it off. So yeah, TECHNICALLY the “train hat” is a “train bodysuit” that just rests on your head. XD The more you know!
C) Anyway, after taking the Presidential Metro Bodysuit while wearing her own Presidential Metro Bodysuit, Wanda arrived at Adams Air Force Base and managed to sneak around and find the BOS supply crate, which contained her orders – namely, get to the air control tower, use the terminal in there to crack open the mobile crawler with the satellite controller, and then get in there and use said controller to blow up the base and destroy the Enclave – and a new weapon, the Tesla Cannon Prototype. A gun that basically VAPORIZES vertibirds. O.O Like, seriously, Wanda hits a vertibird with this thing, it is just GONE. No more. Finito. It’s incredible. And, in a way, it’s also the source of the name of the quest – “Who Dares, Wins” is the motto of the British SAS, which was formed in World War II to sneak behind enemy lines and destroy their aircraft! So yeah, makes sense as a name for a mission where you’re sneaking behind enemy lines and get a big-ass energy gun that can destroy their aircraft. :)
D) With that in hand, Wanda started across the base to the main air control tower, and along the way Jon showed off a few interesting bits and pieces that you could find while skulking around –
I. The BOS have set up some artillery switches in certain spots to help take out Enclave soldiers in your way – however, it’s INCREDIBLY weak artillery, and Jon honestly had more luck with just using a stealth boy to sneak around them and using the Tesla Cannon to utterly fry their power armor. Preston Garvey and Ronnie Shaw would be ASHAMED.
II. Past the first artillery point is a hanger that just so happens to have some deathclaw cages in it – if you’ve got enough lockpick and know to stay out of the deathclaws’ way afterward, you can have them take out some enemies for you! Plus, if you scout around, you’ll find a nest with eggs inside one cage (showing that the Enclave has got a breeding program going on), and an upper catwalk with giblets and buckets, showing how the deathclaws were fed through the repulsion fields on the tops of their cages (as no one was going to open the DOOR to feed them!). Nice little attention to detail there.
III. After the hangar, if you go to the left to take out the guys at the main gate you need to get through, you’ll find not only the high ground and the second artillery switch, but also, down a side alley, a dead Enclave soldier with health kits full of drugs and a very confusing audio log in which he rants about how much he hates “Prime” – Jon can’t decide if he was the guy who gave the order to hit Liberty Prime with an orbital strike at the beginning of the DLC, or if he was just super-high on Psycho and ranting about nothing. Maybe both? :p
IV. By contrast, if you go to the right, you’ll find a warehouse with a dead female scientist in it, with a key on her and an audio log from her big brother, who hid a bunch of flamer fuel for her in a secret stash behind some barrels, due west of the radio tower you can see when you leave the warehouse (though he said that it was up to HER to get a flamethrower). And you can go and loot all that flamer fuel for yourself! Why would you want it? We’ll get to that in juuust a bit. . .
V. And, once you get to the top of the Air Control Tower, you get a flyby of three vertibirds coming in to try and missile you to death – you can either run away to avoid being blown up, or you can try to be cool and blow THEM up with the Tesla Cannon. Jon tried to be cool, but due to not knowing the angle they were coming in at, got missiled and died in very many bits and pieces. XD Fortunately, on his SECOND attempt, he was able to successfully be cool and take them all out one right after the other. Nice. :D Oh, and in case you thought you could use the Air Control Tower to, you know, maybe control the air and try and ground the vertibirds – no dice, they’re on radio silence if you try to pick the option in the terminal you have to break into to open up the mobile crawler’s loading ramp so you can get inside. Nice to know they at least included the option, though! And it is WAY more fun to vaporize the vertibirds as you go along anyway. XD
E) Okay, mobile crawler was open (and not looking particularly mobile, despite the treads on its “feet” – Jon suspects that the developers PLANNED to make it mobile, but then couldn’t figure out how (maybe the NPC found it too heavy to wear as a bodysuit/hat)) – time to go inside and make it go boom, right? No – before heading inside, Jon had to show us something – a secret area just past where the BOS were fighting the Enclave (Wanda helped out the best she could with her pulse gun along the way). This area was Adams Storage Facility, a little factory on the edge of the base with a lot of old barricades in it; a lot of old skeletons in it –
And the Rapid-Torch Flamer in it. One of two unique flamethrowers that you can find in this area, and undoubtedly the worse one, because its only advantage over the standard flamethrower is that it fires EVER so slightly faster. Like, maybe a half-second faster. Jon was NOT impressed.
F) Okay, NOW into the mobile crawler with Wanda – AFTER Jon cheated in a specific perk for her. Because if you HAVE this specific perk, getting through the mobile crawler is pretty damn easy. All you have to do is go up the ramp, get past the repulsion field blocking the main entrance (you can try smashing the console, but the resultant explosion will hurt you, and the field won’t actually go DOWN, it’ll just weaken so you can pass through while taking damage; you can set a timed charge with Explosives 50 and move away, avoiding the explosion damage but still ending up with a weakened field that can hurt you; or you can do the smart thing, get up to Science 80, and just turn the field off), then sneak around to the right to the repair station, where you will meet Stiggs the robot repair guy. Stiggs is very eager to be helpful so you don’t hurt him (he knows which way the wind is blowing, and he was planning on evacuating with his robot buddies anyway), and will happily volunteer information about where you need to go and the dangers you will face on the way (such as deathclaws and robots). Now, normally, once he tells you about the mainframe, you can sneak in there and use that mainframe to turn all the robots off.
However, if you have the perk Jon cheated to get, Robotics Expert, then you can talk mainframes with Stigg, and that gets you the option to use the mainframe to turn all the robots (which consist mainly of sentry bots) against the Enclave. You DO need either an officer’s key or Lockpick 100 to break the lock to get into the mainframe, but once you’re there, it’s the matter of a few clicks on the various computers to unlock all the various doors inside and out (so you can pop into the armory if you’re so inclined) and turn the robots against their masters. And let me tell you, they do a REALLY good job clearing out your enemies – Jon took the time to take down the repulsion fields on the deathclaw cages as well to optimize the chaos, and the deathclaws ended up fighting the robots because there were just no humans left for them to kill. XD Basically, if you’ve specialized in Science and taken the right perks, this whole area is a total breeze. Which Jon likes, because he doesn’t believe the last level in the game has to be the hardest – it just has to be interesting. :)
G) Oh, and while Jon was in the area, he had Wanda visit the Sensitive Electronics area above the deathclaw pens, because that was where the second unique flamethrower in this level was – the Slo-Burn Flamer! Which was far superior to the Rapid-Torch Flamer as it both had slightly better stats than the normal flamer, AND did more burning damage per second – eight points instead of the usual two. Wanda cheerfully used it to set a few people on fire, before getting murdered by a Hellfire trooper and having to reload. XD
H) Okay, after that, it was time to start wrapping things up by getting to the Satellite Control Tower, using the side stairs to avoid enemies and letting the sentry bots roaming around murder those few in her way. She hacked the control computer, opened it up, checked the payloads, and checked the targets – and discovered five potential targets listed. Three of them – Megaton, Rivet City, and Project Purity – could NOT actually be targeted because the satellite was not in the right position. The only two options that COULD be targeted were Adams Air Force Base –
AND THE BROTHERHOOD CITADEL. Now, Jon was a BIT tempted to actually nuke the Citadel, because that was the only way to get access to the BOS Armory and one of the best guns in the game, Callahan’s Magnum – a Dirty Harry reference gun with power damn near equal to that of some of the better energy rifles. But he decided that Wanda should do the RIGHT thing for her final action in this LP, swallow the +1,000 Karma, and actually nuke Adams Air Force Base.
He was immediately punished for not going as evil as possible by getting exploded, and then the game breaking because I don’t think it could tell at what point in the game he was at anymore (it kept trying to direct him outside through a locked door he didn’t have the key for). Fortunately reloading an earlier save got things back on track, and Wanda was correctly rescued by the captured vertibird, watched the mobile crawler blow up under the orbital bombardment (with Jon remarking, “you know, we could have just taken it for ourselves instead of exploding it”), and then brought back to the Citadel to receive the world’s most ironic “thanks for helping us” from Elder Lyons (given he mentioned not being sure about Wanda until she helped with Project Purity – her help, may we remind you, involved forcing Sarah Lyons to kill herself in the irradiated main room and then poisoning the water supply).
And so the series ended with Wanda safe in the knowledge that the Brotherhood would keep shipping her poisoned water far and wide, slowly killing off the Wasteland all around her! All while being one of the best people in the game thanks to the karma dumped on her by that final mission decision. XD Jon thanked everyone for joining him on this journey to show off the best of Fallout 3 (in its rather enhanced form, thanks to being run with New Vegas with the TTW mod), and explained that, while he does intend to eventually cover The Pitt and Operation Anchorage DLCs (he’s not fond of Mothership Zeta, so he’s not planning on doing that one), he’s not interested in doing so with Wanda – at this point, she’s too high level, and nothing would be a challenge. Instead, he hopes to come back at a later point with an extremely LOW-level character and see how THEY handle those two DLCs. So that’ll be fun. XD But next week, we return to the world of my personal Fallout, Fallout 4, for a new series in Boston! I’m looking forward to seeing what he’s got planned. :)
Workout: Back on the bike today, with the two James Turner build videos I said I would watch today with my ride –
A) “I trashed and gutted this warehouse” – James’s video on the almost-starter home he made for Breanne in the High School Years LP out of the karaoke bar Waterside Warble! Basically, he really liked the shell of the build, which looks like an old warehouse, so his initial hope was just to strip everything out of it and see if that made it cheap enough for Breanne to afford. That didn’t work, even when he removed pretty much everything both outside and in (including interior walls) and replaced the windows and doors and floors with cheaper versions, so he went, “fine, we’ll take some time and earn the money to buy it a little later – so let’s make this place look nice and trashy with the help of debug items!” XD So yeah, he stuck a lot of debug trash clutter outside (plus a weird machine thing inside, just for looks), put a lot of stains and cobwebs about, and generally made it seem like an old warehouse or factory that’s been abandoned for a while. Though he also took a moment to make a small one-stall bathroom and a kitchenette under the stairs he added in one corner so Breanne would have a way to, you know, SURVIVE when she bought the place. And then used one of the many Agnes Crumplebottom clones he has running about his save to test and make sure everything worked. XD Everything did, and now Breanne just has to earn the required $27,000 to actually buy the place! Which I believe she does in the next episode of HSY. . .we’ll see!
B) “I finally built a cemetery for my Sims” – James’s video on finally completing the Bigwallet Cemetery on the island in Brindleton Bay, inspired by LilSimsie’s video about making a cemetery for HER legacy save. James spent some time getting the layout just right with decorative headstones – making a big circle with a slight hill in the middle of the lot and planting a big B on it in rose bushes; terrain painting paths from that circle to the main and side entrances and a little sitting spot; and making four distinct graveyard sections, with the original Lady Bigwallet and her husband getting their own special section with fancy platform graves, the Seasons family getting another slightly less fancy section with custom graves, and everyone else going in the remaining two sections on a diagonal with no custom crypts at all – and then (after uploading THAT version to the Gallery) – getting all the actual Bigwallet tombstones and putting them into place in the little park! He even has plans to make a custom content sign for the outside, and custom content photographs so each grave has a headshot of who is buried there. XD Fun stuff, and it came out really, really pretty, I have to say. :) Very impressive, James!
Other: Weather DID end up getting hotter and more humid, but it was still nice enough to play beanbags in the afternoon (with some bug spray to ward off the mosquitoes). I unfortunately had a pretty poor day, though I did climb my way back from a 1 start in the fourth game to win, while Dad had his usual excellent game and Mom managed to pull out two wins in the end – which, good for her! Final scores were me 3-2-3-W-3; Dad W-W-2-2-2; Mom 2-3-W-3-W. We’ll see what happens tomorrow – it’s supposed to be even hotter and more humid, sooo. . . *waggles hand*
So yeah -- lot going on today, but I'm happy with what I accomplished! And now it's time to hit the sheets so I can hopefully accomplish more on my extra day off. Gonna try and get as many Chill Valicer Save posts sorted on Victor Luvs Alice as I can; play Sims 4 and get the Van Liddelton Groceries store open; write some more on my Valicer In The Dark snippets; and start "Magic, Ghosts, Danger, and Death" with my workout. :) Hopefully all doable without stressing me out too much. Night all!
Tumblr: Had a more productive day over here, I’m glad to say –
Victor Luvs Alice – Spent the time before lunch and the bit between lunch and Fallout 4 getting all six of my Chill Valicer Save posts for this week sorted with pictures and the main text! So that’s all good. Tomorrow the focus will be on getting as many posts sorted with tags and picture alt text as I can! Fingers crossed that’s a lot!
Valice Multiverse – Just the one ask reply for the queue tonight, featuring Smiler revealing they’re not a fan of jokes with depressing premises! Interesting little factoid to learn. . .still have to do the write-up for Valicer In The Dark as an RP universe over there. Maybe tomorrow sometime, if I can fit it in. . .
Fallout 4: Well, it wasn’t AS productive a day in old FO4 as I might have liked, but I still managed to accomplish what I hoped to accomplish today! To whit –
A) I managed to make it back to Goodneighbor from the cookpot rest stop that I saved at at the end of last session – turns out, after zooming in farther on the Pip-Boy map, I was finally able to see that the stop is in fact under the ramp up to the elevated highway that’s near Goodneighbor, and not that far from the Old Granary Burial Grounds. So all I had to do was loop out of there through the nearby side doorway, find the bus in front of the Grounds, then proceed up the road, past the super-mutant-infested diner and the actual offramp to the highway to Goodneighbor’s front door! Now all I have to do is actually remember that the next time I end up there. We’ll see if that happens. XD
B) I turned in the Silver Shroud stuff to Kent and took on the role of the Shroud for him! :D Kent very generously paid Victor 125 caps for the costume and 120 caps for all the memorabilia, then explained to him that he didn’t feel like he personally was actually Shroud material – I had Victor tell him not to sell himself short, because they’re two fellow fanboys, and we like Kent. :) I also had him ask why him when Kent said that he wanted Victor to take up the mantle (citing his already-kinda-superheroey backstory as the Sole Survivor) – Kent explained that it was at least partly because Victor helped him without laughing at him, aww. Also that Victor is from the same time period, and knows SOMETHING has to be done to combat the crime on Goodneighbor’s streets. Victor cheerfully said yes after that, and got the Silver Shroud Armor (which has the “Assassin’s” effect in that it reduces damage coming in from humans by 15%), the Silver Submachine Gun (which – I guess is a decent gun, but I think Victor should be able to upgrade the HELL out of this thing), and a bunch of calling cards to leave at the scenes of his crime-stopping. All nice stuff, though I had to give the Silver Submachine Gun to Ada to carry around for the moment, as it was making poor Victor overweight (couldn’t have her take the costume – though since that’s a quest item at the moment, hopefully it’s actually weightless so we CAN carry it around without issue). I’ll have to put it on in the nearish future and see how Victor looks!
C) I officially followed the Freedom Trail to – well, not QUITE to Railroad HQ, but I am at the Old North Church! I had to do this in two parts, though – I’d INTENDED to follow the trail from the beginning by Boston Common right after dropping off the suit at Kent’s and just stop and sleep at the Old North Church once I got there (with Victor chugging a Nuka-Cola to help keep himself awake, as he’d started yawning midway through the convo with Kent), but – well. I got to the beginning of the trail (after a stop to raid a Nuka-Cola machine that was absolutely full of colas. . .then another stop to scrap some spare leather armor on my person, cook some meat, and have a snack since Victor was overweight AGAIN), chatted a bit with the Tour Protectron there (who told Victor about the various landmarks he’d see along the trail), then started from the fountain with 7-A, followed the line to the New State House (4-L), took a quick bathroom break and then doubled back along the line over to the Old Granary Burial Yard (2-A), back to Goodneighbor (which I’d already established was 6-O) –
Only for a radstorm to blow in. I quickly had Victor duck back inside Goodneighbor and go rent a room from Clair at the Rexford for a night, because yeah, can’t be out during a radstorm! He got a nice eight hours from 10 PM to 6 AM, and awoke refreshed and ready to go –
Only for the damn radstorm to be still going. Annoyed, I had him run over to Daisy’s and tried to have him wait an hour in one of the chair’s there – nope, still going. And the stupid game wouldn’t let me wait again. >( Annoyed, I had Victor wander around Daisy’s shop/house for a bit, then had him take some Rad-X and Radaway to up his rad resistance and clear the rads he’d already picked up before doing a little bartering with her (trading a bunch of bloodbug steaks, some antibiotics, and a bunch of berry and grape mentats for a couple of UTI cures, some purified water, some duct tape, and an aluminum TV dinner tray). And then, with nothing else to do, I had him sit down and play some “Red Menace” on his Pip-Boy (it’s one of the mini-games you can pick up in the world, which plays like the very first Mario game, back when he was known as Jumpman and trying to save Pauline from the early version of Kong. I’m not very good at it). The weather FINALLY cleared up around 8:30 AM in-game, allowing me and Victor to FINALLY leave town and continue following the trail, over to the Old Corner Bookstore (3-I), then around to Faneuil Hall (5-R), down and around that and the big old flooded puddle nearby to Paul Revere’s House (8-D), and finally left to the Old North Church (1-R). Along the way, Victor found an Advanced locked door in the wooden wall beside Faneuil Hall (which he unlocked pretty easily – just led to a side alley which MIGHT be inside a raider base; I didn’t explore it very far, wanting to stay on track); a cap stash that also contained a bunch of cigarettes and some handcuffs (SOMEONE was planning for a fun night in before they presumably got got by super mutants); and another old super mutant camp right across from Paul Revere’s place, which fortunately only contained a couple of hounds – easily taken out by the Two-Shot. I left it with Victor and Ada inside the Old North Church itself (having cleared out the main room – Victor took one nasty hit, but eh, he’ll be fine – and checked out the creepy dark room at the very back – turns out it’s just the stairs up to the steeple, I’l check that out later), preparing to actually head down into the belly of the building and find the Railroad. So that’ll be our goal next week – nice! :)
Writing: Another Sunday, another update to the FO4 Playthrough Progression with Victor, Alice, and currently Ada’s adventures in the Commonwealth! Their version of adventures was much like the ones I described above, with the most major change being Victor doesn’t have the costume yet – since this is a more “realistic” universe, Kent actually needs a day or two to upgrade it into actual armor (I have him as already knowing the secret of ballistic weave to justify how he does this). Oh, and since I gave Alice a Mistress of Mystery dress to play around with in this world, he offered to upgrade that too, saying Victor and his “girlfriend” could go out together! Leading to some rather embarrassed blushing and stammering about how they’re not dating from Alice and Victor. XD They’ll wise up eventually. . . But yes, other than that, pretty much the same as what I described above, complete with the rad storm rolling in while the gang was trying to follow the Freedom Trail and Victor being really annoyed when it hadn’t abated by the time he got up in the morning. And spending his time until it finally cleared up (or, well, transitioned into just plain rain) playing “Red Menace” badly (with Alice and Ada backseat-gaming him XD). They’re currently very cautiously approaching the entrance to the tunnels that will lead them to Railroad HQ, because there’s an erratic light in there that Victor thinks is indicative of a Glowing One ghoul. We’ll see how that works out for them next week!
YouTube: Got through my usual Sunday two, despite my internet’s best efforts –
A) First up, from the Subs, we had GrayStillPlays and “When you play life on easy mode,” aka Gray plays Save The Guy! This is one of those weird mobile “puzzle” games where you’re presented with situations and have to make a choice on how to resolve it, and generally the weirder the option, the more likely it was to be correct. This particular run-through was all about breaking a guy out of prison, getting him through the city to the local bank so he could rob it, escaping through the sewers, and finally getting to the top of an apartment building so he could steal the helicopter up there and fly away. Along the way, Gray discovered that the best way to appease a fellow cellmate was to give him a fidget spinner; the best ways to get past cops were to either use a slingshot to destroy the light above them or throw on a sheet and pretend to be a ghost; the best way to deal with a beautiful woman was to scare her half to death with a rat; the best way to get out of a seedy bar was to do loads of bicep curls and then smash your way through the door; the best way to deal with a giant mole in your path was to LITERALLY ERASE IT; the best way to deal with a gap in the earth was a pogo stick; the best way to deal with a cobra was by tricking it into thinking a necktie was a lady cobra; the best way to deal with a sturdy wooden bank door was to get a beaver to chew through it; the best way to deal with a giant mutant rat in the sewers was to watch a video and use a raygun on it to shrink it; and the best way to learn how to pilot a helicopter was APPARENTLY TO ASK GOD DIRECTLY. XD Basically, this game made no sense, meaning it was perfect for the channel. XD Maybe we’ll see another story from it another time!
B) And second up, from Jon of Many A True Nerd, we had “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Grand Finale - You Can Leave Your Hat On!” Yes, today WAS indeed the Grand Finale of the series, with Wanda taking on Adams Air Force Base to complete “Who Dares Wins” and defeat the Enclave once and for all! Unfortunately I DID have to fight with my stupid internet to actually WATCH the video (it was one of those nights where the buffering was going SUPER SLOW), but I did get through it in the end. Here are the highlights for your approval –
A) First up, Wanda was going into a place with lots of robots and people in power armor, so naturally Jon wanted plenty of ammo for his pulse gun to waste them. And where is the best place to find the energy cells for the pulse gun? Why, in the underbelly of the National Archives, of course! For some reason, almost every ammo box down there has nothing BUT energy cells in them. Perhaps because the place was entirely staffed by robots – Jon’s not sure, but he took FULL advantage of it!
B) After that, it was back to the Presidential Metro to actually travel to Adams Air Force Base – but first, Jon had to clear up a slight, pedantic misconception. Now, if you know ONE “Fun Fact” about Fallout 3, it’s probably that this particular subway train is not actually a working train – when you switch it on and it starts moving, it turns into a hat stuck to the head of an NPC that runs along in the void underneath the world to get you to where you’re going. It’s basically impossible to ever see this NPC in action, because when the train is in “hat” mode, you’re stuck in first person cutscene mode – but, as the “train hat” asset exists in the game, you can give it to your character and equip it yourself. So that’s what Jon did, using the console to give Wanda the train carriage and then stick it on her head. So what’s the slight, pedantic misconception that showing us this cleared up?
That the “train hat” is not TECHNICALLY a hat – it’s ARMOR. Meaning it doesn’t take up the hat slot, it instead takes up the BODY slots. It totally rests on your head, yes, and blocks your view in third-person mode, but you could clearly see Wanda’s beloved beret underneath it when Jon showed it off. So yeah, TECHNICALLY the “train hat” is a “train bodysuit” that just rests on your head. XD The more you know!
C) Anyway, after taking the Presidential Metro Bodysuit while wearing her own Presidential Metro Bodysuit, Wanda arrived at Adams Air Force Base and managed to sneak around and find the BOS supply crate, which contained her orders – namely, get to the air control tower, use the terminal in there to crack open the mobile crawler with the satellite controller, and then get in there and use said controller to blow up the base and destroy the Enclave – and a new weapon, the Tesla Cannon Prototype. A gun that basically VAPORIZES vertibirds. O.O Like, seriously, Wanda hits a vertibird with this thing, it is just GONE. No more. Finito. It’s incredible. And, in a way, it’s also the source of the name of the quest – “Who Dares, Wins” is the motto of the British SAS, which was formed in World War II to sneak behind enemy lines and destroy their aircraft! So yeah, makes sense as a name for a mission where you’re sneaking behind enemy lines and get a big-ass energy gun that can destroy their aircraft. :)
D) With that in hand, Wanda started across the base to the main air control tower, and along the way Jon showed off a few interesting bits and pieces that you could find while skulking around –
I. The BOS have set up some artillery switches in certain spots to help take out Enclave soldiers in your way – however, it’s INCREDIBLY weak artillery, and Jon honestly had more luck with just using a stealth boy to sneak around them and using the Tesla Cannon to utterly fry their power armor. Preston Garvey and Ronnie Shaw would be ASHAMED.
II. Past the first artillery point is a hanger that just so happens to have some deathclaw cages in it – if you’ve got enough lockpick and know to stay out of the deathclaws’ way afterward, you can have them take out some enemies for you! Plus, if you scout around, you’ll find a nest with eggs inside one cage (showing that the Enclave has got a breeding program going on), and an upper catwalk with giblets and buckets, showing how the deathclaws were fed through the repulsion fields on the tops of their cages (as no one was going to open the DOOR to feed them!). Nice little attention to detail there.
III. After the hangar, if you go to the left to take out the guys at the main gate you need to get through, you’ll find not only the high ground and the second artillery switch, but also, down a side alley, a dead Enclave soldier with health kits full of drugs and a very confusing audio log in which he rants about how much he hates “Prime” – Jon can’t decide if he was the guy who gave the order to hit Liberty Prime with an orbital strike at the beginning of the DLC, or if he was just super-high on Psycho and ranting about nothing. Maybe both? :p
IV. By contrast, if you go to the right, you’ll find a warehouse with a dead female scientist in it, with a key on her and an audio log from her big brother, who hid a bunch of flamer fuel for her in a secret stash behind some barrels, due west of the radio tower you can see when you leave the warehouse (though he said that it was up to HER to get a flamethrower). And you can go and loot all that flamer fuel for yourself! Why would you want it? We’ll get to that in juuust a bit. . .
V. And, once you get to the top of the Air Control Tower, you get a flyby of three vertibirds coming in to try and missile you to death – you can either run away to avoid being blown up, or you can try to be cool and blow THEM up with the Tesla Cannon. Jon tried to be cool, but due to not knowing the angle they were coming in at, got missiled and died in very many bits and pieces. XD Fortunately, on his SECOND attempt, he was able to successfully be cool and take them all out one right after the other. Nice. :D Oh, and in case you thought you could use the Air Control Tower to, you know, maybe control the air and try and ground the vertibirds – no dice, they’re on radio silence if you try to pick the option in the terminal you have to break into to open up the mobile crawler’s loading ramp so you can get inside. Nice to know they at least included the option, though! And it is WAY more fun to vaporize the vertibirds as you go along anyway. XD
E) Okay, mobile crawler was open (and not looking particularly mobile, despite the treads on its “feet” – Jon suspects that the developers PLANNED to make it mobile, but then couldn’t figure out how (maybe the NPC found it too heavy to wear as a bodysuit/hat)) – time to go inside and make it go boom, right? No – before heading inside, Jon had to show us something – a secret area just past where the BOS were fighting the Enclave (Wanda helped out the best she could with her pulse gun along the way). This area was Adams Storage Facility, a little factory on the edge of the base with a lot of old barricades in it; a lot of old skeletons in it –
And the Rapid-Torch Flamer in it. One of two unique flamethrowers that you can find in this area, and undoubtedly the worse one, because its only advantage over the standard flamethrower is that it fires EVER so slightly faster. Like, maybe a half-second faster. Jon was NOT impressed.
F) Okay, NOW into the mobile crawler with Wanda – AFTER Jon cheated in a specific perk for her. Because if you HAVE this specific perk, getting through the mobile crawler is pretty damn easy. All you have to do is go up the ramp, get past the repulsion field blocking the main entrance (you can try smashing the console, but the resultant explosion will hurt you, and the field won’t actually go DOWN, it’ll just weaken so you can pass through while taking damage; you can set a timed charge with Explosives 50 and move away, avoiding the explosion damage but still ending up with a weakened field that can hurt you; or you can do the smart thing, get up to Science 80, and just turn the field off), then sneak around to the right to the repair station, where you will meet Stiggs the robot repair guy. Stiggs is very eager to be helpful so you don’t hurt him (he knows which way the wind is blowing, and he was planning on evacuating with his robot buddies anyway), and will happily volunteer information about where you need to go and the dangers you will face on the way (such as deathclaws and robots). Now, normally, once he tells you about the mainframe, you can sneak in there and use that mainframe to turn all the robots off.
However, if you have the perk Jon cheated to get, Robotics Expert, then you can talk mainframes with Stigg, and that gets you the option to use the mainframe to turn all the robots (which consist mainly of sentry bots) against the Enclave. You DO need either an officer’s key or Lockpick 100 to break the lock to get into the mainframe, but once you’re there, it’s the matter of a few clicks on the various computers to unlock all the various doors inside and out (so you can pop into the armory if you’re so inclined) and turn the robots against their masters. And let me tell you, they do a REALLY good job clearing out your enemies – Jon took the time to take down the repulsion fields on the deathclaw cages as well to optimize the chaos, and the deathclaws ended up fighting the robots because there were just no humans left for them to kill. XD Basically, if you’ve specialized in Science and taken the right perks, this whole area is a total breeze. Which Jon likes, because he doesn’t believe the last level in the game has to be the hardest – it just has to be interesting. :)
G) Oh, and while Jon was in the area, he had Wanda visit the Sensitive Electronics area above the deathclaw pens, because that was where the second unique flamethrower in this level was – the Slo-Burn Flamer! Which was far superior to the Rapid-Torch Flamer as it both had slightly better stats than the normal flamer, AND did more burning damage per second – eight points instead of the usual two. Wanda cheerfully used it to set a few people on fire, before getting murdered by a Hellfire trooper and having to reload. XD
H) Okay, after that, it was time to start wrapping things up by getting to the Satellite Control Tower, using the side stairs to avoid enemies and letting the sentry bots roaming around murder those few in her way. She hacked the control computer, opened it up, checked the payloads, and checked the targets – and discovered five potential targets listed. Three of them – Megaton, Rivet City, and Project Purity – could NOT actually be targeted because the satellite was not in the right position. The only two options that COULD be targeted were Adams Air Force Base –
AND THE BROTHERHOOD CITADEL. Now, Jon was a BIT tempted to actually nuke the Citadel, because that was the only way to get access to the BOS Armory and one of the best guns in the game, Callahan’s Magnum – a Dirty Harry reference gun with power damn near equal to that of some of the better energy rifles. But he decided that Wanda should do the RIGHT thing for her final action in this LP, swallow the +1,000 Karma, and actually nuke Adams Air Force Base.
He was immediately punished for not going as evil as possible by getting exploded, and then the game breaking because I don’t think it could tell at what point in the game he was at anymore (it kept trying to direct him outside through a locked door he didn’t have the key for). Fortunately reloading an earlier save got things back on track, and Wanda was correctly rescued by the captured vertibird, watched the mobile crawler blow up under the orbital bombardment (with Jon remarking, “you know, we could have just taken it for ourselves instead of exploding it”), and then brought back to the Citadel to receive the world’s most ironic “thanks for helping us” from Elder Lyons (given he mentioned not being sure about Wanda until she helped with Project Purity – her help, may we remind you, involved forcing Sarah Lyons to kill herself in the irradiated main room and then poisoning the water supply).
And so the series ended with Wanda safe in the knowledge that the Brotherhood would keep shipping her poisoned water far and wide, slowly killing off the Wasteland all around her! All while being one of the best people in the game thanks to the karma dumped on her by that final mission decision. XD Jon thanked everyone for joining him on this journey to show off the best of Fallout 3 (in its rather enhanced form, thanks to being run with New Vegas with the TTW mod), and explained that, while he does intend to eventually cover The Pitt and Operation Anchorage DLCs (he’s not fond of Mothership Zeta, so he’s not planning on doing that one), he’s not interested in doing so with Wanda – at this point, she’s too high level, and nothing would be a challenge. Instead, he hopes to come back at a later point with an extremely LOW-level character and see how THEY handle those two DLCs. So that’ll be fun. XD But next week, we return to the world of my personal Fallout, Fallout 4, for a new series in Boston! I’m looking forward to seeing what he’s got planned. :)
Workout: Back on the bike today, with the two James Turner build videos I said I would watch today with my ride –
A) “I trashed and gutted this warehouse” – James’s video on the almost-starter home he made for Breanne in the High School Years LP out of the karaoke bar Waterside Warble! Basically, he really liked the shell of the build, which looks like an old warehouse, so his initial hope was just to strip everything out of it and see if that made it cheap enough for Breanne to afford. That didn’t work, even when he removed pretty much everything both outside and in (including interior walls) and replaced the windows and doors and floors with cheaper versions, so he went, “fine, we’ll take some time and earn the money to buy it a little later – so let’s make this place look nice and trashy with the help of debug items!” XD So yeah, he stuck a lot of debug trash clutter outside (plus a weird machine thing inside, just for looks), put a lot of stains and cobwebs about, and generally made it seem like an old warehouse or factory that’s been abandoned for a while. Though he also took a moment to make a small one-stall bathroom and a kitchenette under the stairs he added in one corner so Breanne would have a way to, you know, SURVIVE when she bought the place. And then used one of the many Agnes Crumplebottom clones he has running about his save to test and make sure everything worked. XD Everything did, and now Breanne just has to earn the required $27,000 to actually buy the place! Which I believe she does in the next episode of HSY. . .we’ll see!
B) “I finally built a cemetery for my Sims” – James’s video on finally completing the Bigwallet Cemetery on the island in Brindleton Bay, inspired by LilSimsie’s video about making a cemetery for HER legacy save. James spent some time getting the layout just right with decorative headstones – making a big circle with a slight hill in the middle of the lot and planting a big B on it in rose bushes; terrain painting paths from that circle to the main and side entrances and a little sitting spot; and making four distinct graveyard sections, with the original Lady Bigwallet and her husband getting their own special section with fancy platform graves, the Seasons family getting another slightly less fancy section with custom graves, and everyone else going in the remaining two sections on a diagonal with no custom crypts at all – and then (after uploading THAT version to the Gallery) – getting all the actual Bigwallet tombstones and putting them into place in the little park! He even has plans to make a custom content sign for the outside, and custom content photographs so each grave has a headshot of who is buried there. XD Fun stuff, and it came out really, really pretty, I have to say. :) Very impressive, James!
Other: Weather DID end up getting hotter and more humid, but it was still nice enough to play beanbags in the afternoon (with some bug spray to ward off the mosquitoes). I unfortunately had a pretty poor day, though I did climb my way back from a 1 start in the fourth game to win, while Dad had his usual excellent game and Mom managed to pull out two wins in the end – which, good for her! Final scores were me 3-2-3-W-3; Dad W-W-2-2-2; Mom 2-3-W-3-W. We’ll see what happens tomorrow – it’s supposed to be even hotter and more humid, sooo. . . *waggles hand*
So yeah -- lot going on today, but I'm happy with what I accomplished! And now it's time to hit the sheets so I can hopefully accomplish more on my extra day off. Gonna try and get as many Chill Valicer Save posts sorted on Victor Luvs Alice as I can; play Sims 4 and get the Van Liddelton Groceries store open; write some more on my Valicer In The Dark snippets; and start "Magic, Ghosts, Danger, and Death" with my workout. :) Hopefully all doable without stressing me out too much. Night all!
