Quick Late Sunday Entry

It was a bit of a lazier Sunday than I might have liked, but I probably needed that a bit after yesterday. Just wish I didn't have to go to work tomorrow. . . Anyway, let's see how I did on the to-do list --

1. Watch the two videos in my Watch Later, Call Me Kevin's latest, and Jon's FO4 YOLO episode: Check! Wasn't sure if I would actually have time for Kevin, but I managed to squeeze him in.

A) Started with a quick visit to RTGame’s channel to watch some highlights of a stream where he and Kevin played Phogs! This is a cutesy game where you platform and solve puzzles as a two-headed noodle dog – RT was blue collar, Kevin was red. Naturally there were some – issues with coordinating the two halves as they tried to climb walls, navigate machinery, and collect glowing moons in a sleep-based level. Namely with Kevin falling off things and RT being constantly distracted by BONES. XD Also, Kevin apparently ripped his fire alarm out of the ceiling when it wouldn’t stop beeping thanks to continual small power outages. O.o Kevin is secretly Jim Pickens confirmed?

B) Then it was time for a real treat – a return to Hitman 3 – Three Ways To Play, the Chongqin level! We rejoined Andy, Jane, and Mike as they prepared to take down their second target and leak the secrets of the ICA to the world at large! And, as usual, we got a lovely look at each of their distinctive playstyles:

Andy found his way to one of the mission stories, where he had to impersonate someone taking a tour of the secret ICA facility beneath the noodle shop. He expertly poisoned the guy, stole his clothes, got the form he was missing, and infiltrated the facility. There was one nerve-wracking moment where he had a minute to hack a computer to let his hacker friend, Olivia, make sure his identity wasn’t compromised, but he pulled it off and got through the tour. Which included meeting his target, who basically, as part of her demonstration on how well she knew her employees, told 47, “Hey, fire these three people in this order, and it should set up a situation where I’ll be in the data core when a safety mechanism fails and get burned to death.” Andy followed her advice, she got burned to death. He got the pleasure of showcasing the dramatic cutscene of revealing the ICA to the world (after deleting 47 and Diana’s files, of course), then escaped via the skin of his teeth, expertly dodging witnesses and the like before leaving by subway. Unfortunately, two accident deaths with visible bodies means he only got 4 stars and “Clean ICA Agent,” but still!

Jane, already in possession of the code to get into the facility, snuck in as a “chef” and happily made her way through a bunch of basic employee checkpoints (including getting her vitals scanned) before hacking her way into a high-tech vent and stealing an analyst's suit. This got her access to the Tier 2 areas, including the break room and a bunch of workstations. She turned off the workstations to prompt a bunch of people to take a break, leading her target to go yell at them to go back to work, then linger in the break room complaining about how she deserved a break. Jane happily used some lethal pills she found earlier to poison the air conditioning system in there, eliminating her target. . .

And everyone else nearby, as Jane forgot to use her special hacky camera to black out the room’s windows and everyone kept going to investigate the rapidly-growing pile of bodies by the doorway. XD Jane managed to clear out some of the initial ones stuck in the doorway, dumping them far out of sight, then closed the doors, found herself a tier 3 dongle, managed to hack the door to the data core, and hacked the core itself. And then, during her escape, more people somehow noticed the bodies in the room and started going in and dying. Not to mention she stuck out like a sore thumb among all the evacuated people, and was caught red-handed trying to get a new disguise. She managed to leg it and get onto the subway too, but STILL. No stars, and the “Black Cat” moniker, which – yeah, fit with how this run went for her.

Mike took a moment to watch as previous target Hush was dragged to a quiet room, then legged it out and came across some rude guards by a courtyard. Mike promptly lured them around a corner, used Extinguishy the extinguisher to knock them unconscious, and stole one’s clothes for a fresh disguise. He also found a rusty “scrap sword” just hanging about in a nearby dumpster, which he cheerfully added to his kit. He did not find way into the ICA facility, though –

That is, until some random civilian saw the bodies and RAN INSIDE THE SECRET BASE to try and alert the guards there. Mike followed them in and knocked them unconscious. . .and then let ANOTHER civilian alert the guards by the door to get them to leave so he could sneak in past THEM, and so started The Weirdest Stealth Run Ever. Basically Mike spent a lot of time sneaking into places on the heels of other people, knocking people unconscious with his fire extinguisher, and refusing to give up his scrap sword. He actually found the same break room Jane did and caused a ruckus in there by knocking out ALL the people (at least he didn’t kill them!) and finally stealing a guard uniform while causing a target lockdown. He got into Tier 3 by making the guard come investigate him and knocking him out, then got himself a fresh disguise from the clean room people he knocked out there, then found a vent, popped it open with a screwdriver, and accidentally managed to sneak into the data core. Just minutes before the target herself came in. He threw the scrap sword into her head, hid from her bodyguard as he dragged the body away through a SEPARATE exit, hacked the core, made his escape through the vents (remarking that his fire extinguisher wasn’t allowed to do its actual job of FIGHTING FIRES as he dodged flames from the overheating core), made it outside again, and sped off on an unattended motorbike. One star, and “Master Melee Assassin,” a title he took happily.

Lesson of today’s episode? Trust a fire extinguisher over poisoned air conditioning. XD

C) Grabbed Kevin’s latest this evening – TasteMaker: Restaurant Simulator! After a very echoey intro, Kevin set up his latest venture – a nuggets-and-fries restaurant! Started as a tiny little open-plan box, with customers eating free nuggets around the fryer and Thomas the sole employee trying his best to handle everything; ended as a much bigger box with something resembling an actual kitchen, dirt and rat parts everywhere, a long line of tables for customers, a slot machine, and everything being handled by Thomas and his army of clones – who still could only use one cutting board to prepare the food. The whole thing ended at least fifteen thousand in the red, and Kevin never did add a bathroom to the place. XD Not as deadly as Jim’s famous pufferfish restaurants, but probably inflicted the same amount of torture on people, soooo. . .

D) And then it was time for Jon’s Fallout 4 YOLO episode! Which can be mainly summed up as “Jon panics a lot while wandering around the Commonwealth looking for stealth magazines, and also the game is buggy as fuck.” Poor guy scared himself really early on kicking a piece of wood after clearing out some respawned raiders in front of Back Street Apparel – he thought it was a gunshot and nearly bolted. He and Finalley also:

I. Went to the USS Constitution, intent on just stealing Captain Ironsides’s Covert Ops manual – except it was behind a Master locked door, and Finalley doesn’t have Lockpicking because Jon hasn’t been prioritizing it. And Jon didn’t want to do the quest, because – well, it’s long, it’s multi-part, and it involves quite a few firefights. So that one had to stay where it was!

II. Got the Covert Ops manual from the Revere station, then got embroiled in a fight with a pack of dogs and nearly blown up when the nearby Brotherhood Knights who had been dropped off in the area tried to help and hit the car beside the one Finalley was standing on for a height advantage (she SOMEHOW flung herself clear before the explosion could get her)

III. Took a TON of random rads fleeing from a Mirelurk Killclaw; Jon had no idea where they came frome and was sour

IV. Killed another Mirelurk on the beach – only for the game to claim it was a Mr. Handy when he went to collect the meat. Jon’s response was to turn around and walk away

V. Just barely avoided the notice of a Legendary Assaultron Intimidator to and from Libertalia, the raider city made up of boats and homemade bridges – he was hoping some nearby Brotherhood would kill it, but no such luck

VI. Collected the Libertalia Covert Ops mag with the help of the Brotherhood, however – especially the teleporting knight. According to Jon, Fallout 4 was in a funny mood today.

VII. Hit Goodneighbor to do the Memory Den and finish up “Dangerous Minds,” and then Diamond City to upgrade Finalley’s gear – including a new Cunning arm piece that Jon decided was better for her build than the Assassin’s gear she was wearing. (The only good Legendary she got today, btw!)

So yeah, busy and glitchy day on the FO4 YOLO front. Next time, Jon promises a trip to the Glowing Sea. We’ll see how it goes! :D

2. Either organize some of my notes documents or write another random snippet: Eh, not really a check, but I did make an attempt at the former with my “Fallout of Darkness” notes document. Not going very smoothly at the moment, though – I’m trying to figure out what needs to be changed into a header and of what size so I can use the Navigator pane to quickly skip to sections. (Because that’s always been my biggest problem with my “notes” documents – navigation. Scrolling to try and find something can be a pain in the butt! The Google Docs doc I made for Valice Multiverse is a lot easier to navigate with the sidebar showing all the headers even with the length, but I don’t want to use Google Docs for everything, I like LibreOffice. . .) But I did actually have a queue to do this evening on Valice Multiverse, so that's gotta count on the writing side, right?

3. Play some A:MR and see about finishing up the Hatter's Domain: Check! As I suspected, I’d left off right before entering Hare’s engine room – got poor Alice smashed a couple of times going through the stompy hands, and had to take a moment to remember what you pressed to access Hysteria in the subsequent fight, but I have kept up my streak of Alice not getting killed in combat! And I did successfully complete Hatter’s Domain – in full too, 100% completion on that chapter! I’m currently working my way through Tundraful in Chapter 2 – I’ve just finished the first Radula Room, and I’m 24% complete overall according to the game stats. Fun times!

4. Get in a workout: Check! Back on the bike today, so back with Jon’s Fallout 4 Survival Playthrough! I caught up with Grills as he stimpacked himself up after his fight with the ghoulified remains of Elisa’s family. He gathered the supplies in the little bunker, then found a note from the father asking Nathan (one of the brothers) to move the supplies from the East Dock shed to the bunker – which apparently he never did. Grills and Jon were intrigued and found their way to said shed, killing a Bloodrage Mirelurk and a Mirelurk King along the way. What was inside made everything – getting sick, getting badly irradiated, all of it – worth it to Jon: SHELVES UPON SHELVES WORTH OF PRE-WAR SUPPLIES. Including SO MANY boxes of screws. Jon was thrilled and loaded up, happily declaring this to be a good trip.

He was even more pleased when the third island of the bunch had an old campsite and a broken-down house with a water pump and a sleeping bag! There was also a Pale Fog Crawler, but a shot from the good old Gauss Rifle took care of that quite quick. He hydrated up, dropped a save, then swam back to the Children of Atom to get a rad scrub and a proper sleep in the Command Center bunk. He’d earned it!

That finished off episode 58 – episode 59 opened with Grills swimming his way over to the Vim! Pop factory for a couple of quests (DiMA having something hidden away inside, and the Children of Atom needing one of the pump regulators) and an Easter Egg he apparently missed as Bacon. He spent quite a bit of time wandering around the exterior, carefully (and not-so-carefully) killing Super Mutants so he could explore in peace. I left off with him in the R&D department, having picked up a bunch of recipes for the pop at a terminal and looking into how one of the employees went about giving the soda the “taste of Maine. . .” From what I’ve seen so far, it may involve copious amounts of fish. XD

So yeah, at least I got most of what I intended to get done, done! And the Valice Multiverse queue is sorted, along with my comments on here -- time to answer the RP comment and then zoom off to bed. Another five-day work week, yay. . .at least this one won't be followed by me needing to clean my room and do my taxes. *deep sigh* Night all!