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Almost The End of 2022. . .
Dec. 30th, 2022 11:44 pmAnd I have kept good and busy today --
Tumblr: Did the dash-and-tags catch-up on Victor Luvs Alice, finished off the last bits of that Valicer headcanon post I was working on in my drafts, and took a moment to get all the pictures ready for the upcoming Chill Save update next Wednesday (the one where Alice lost her promotion thanks to an overdose of Fury), all before lunch! Nice. :) And then, this evening, came back on Victor Luvs Alice to reblog Moose’s latest story, and get a notice up on Valice Multiverse that I won’t be available tomorrow due to the movie marathon we’re having for the New Year. I do have an ask that needs answering, but it involves a guest at a party, which isn’t something most of my normal cast over there does. . .
Smiler, on the other hand. . .I HAVE been meaning to add them! Something to do for New Year’s Day, perhaps! We’ll see how the timing works out.
Fallout 4: Played this right after lunch, and achieved my stated goal of getting Victor and Nick to Goodneighbor! Though, admittedly, it took a little doing –
A) Picked up where I’d left off, with Victor and Nick outside the Combat Zone on a foggy morning. I took a moment to make sure Victor had all his gear, then reoriented him toward Goodneighbor and hopped off the platform they’d camped out on and down a side street –
B) Where he and Nick promptly ran into some super mutants. Figures. XD The first one didn’t even see them, though – I was able to have Victor swap to his Mighty Sniper and take him out without issue, then he and Nick took care of his friend and his dog. Took a moment to loot the bodies and explore their little camp – proved to be outside a place called Pearwood Residences. I declined to go in and investigate, but checking the makeshift bridges and balconies revealed that going straight would put Victor and Nick STRAIGHT into the World’s Most Radioactive Pothole. So instead I went right – which brought them through some barricades right up to the side of a Gunner camp. Fortunately, the guard didn’t notice them or didn’t care, and when he walked away, Victor and Nick cut left down a narrow side alley that brought them to Hub 360 – which had a mutant hound sleeping outside. Fortunately, it also didn’t care about Victor and Nick, and they were able to sneak away farther into the ruins, turning left again near one of the many “either an office building or a parking garage” wrecks. . .
C) Which sandwiched them between some softshell mirelurks and a raider camp. And put Victor in front of a mine I noticed JUST IN TIME. He was able to successfully disarm it, and – after a bit of thought – I decided he’d have the best luck with the mirelurks and started attacking them. He and Nick managed to kill the lot –
D) But the gunfire got the attention of the raiders – and their turret. Which fired on a nearby car and, uh, made it explode. Fortunately, Victor did NOT die, sparing me from having to reload a save, but he DID suffer a broken arm and leg and thus needed a stimpack post-haste. And then some water to deal with the thirst stimpacks bring. On the other hand, the exploding car did the RAIDERS no favors either, and Victor – having swapped to Kellogg’s pistol so I could properly try it out – was able to take care of the stragglers with little trouble. He and Nick proceeded into the camp – which was by the Shamrock Taphouse, hooray for having a new location marked on the map – and looted the bodies, and Victor took care of the two remaining combatants on the other side of the camp before using their little guard platform to scrap down some old armor and guns he’d picked up and take a potty break.
E) This brought them to midday as a rain shower moved in – I had Victor do a little inventory management with Nick, disarm another mine outside the camp, then quicksaved and headed out, once again trying to reorient him toward Goodneighbor –
Only to have him step on a mine I hadn’t noticed. >.< As I’d JUST quicksaved, I just reloaded that and avoided it. They made their way up a little to 35 Court, where they were set upon by another group of raiders (easily taken care of with Kellogg’s Pistol and Nick’s shotgun) and a couple of turrets (which seemed to have ALREADY taken care of quite a lot of robots, if the bodies scattered around were any indication!) I had Victor loot what corpses he could, and in making sure I’d found all the raiders he’d killed, came across a dead brahmin. Now, one of my food mods allows you to milk brahmin, and thanks to quirks in the code, it doesn’t care if they’re alive or not. So I had Victor grab a bunch of milk along with the meat and hide. A bit gross, yes, but food is food!
F) With that sorted, the boys continued onward, past 35 Court and over a bunch of junk near a super mutant camp before arriving by Water Street Apartments. Around this time, the sky started turning an unpleasantly familiar green, so I had Victor and Nick duck inside to wait the radstorm out. There was nobody home at the time (though I THINK this location is actually one you visit during the Silver Shroud quests, and then it has people), so I had Victor pick up some goodies, then set up his portable workbench for a bit more scrapping, a bit of cooking (namely, turning some of his milk into butter), and giving the Kneecapper Laser Musket a nice full stock. Good use of the time!
G) Around 4:30 PM in-game, I had Victor and Nick venture out again – to my relief, the radstorm was over, yay! To my annoyance, there were a couple of super mutants nearby, boo! Neither of them were armed with anything particularly dangerous, though – Nick took out one, Victor took out the other, it was all good. Once they were all sorted, I had Victor reorient himself again and start in what I felt was the right direction. . .
H) And lo and behold, I came across a bunch of dead scavengers at a very familiar camp! In fact, I recognized the plank wall nearby as the back of Goodneighbor! Pleased that I was indeed on the right track, I had Victor loot the bodies, do a skoosh more cooking, then (after trying to figure out which way was better) – head toward the back wall, killing a raider psycho on the chunk of highway above them in the process. Followed that around to where I’d had that standoff with the raiders before with Piper. . .
And then realized – wait a minute, if I go over the little “bridge” the raiders were on before, would THAT take me around to the front? So I had Victor and Nick find the ramp onto the chunk of highway and follow that around (stopping to loot the raider psycho corpse), and –
I) Success! There was Goodneighbor’s front door! :D Right as Victor was starting to feel tired too. I decided that it was probably too late to go to the Memory Den, so instead had the boys go inside and hit up the shops! And KLE0 proved to be selling something of interest to me – a Night Vision Overcharged Laser Sniper Rifle! AKA a gun with EXACTLY the capacitor mod I needed for Righteous Authority! I decided to give Daisy a chance to sell me the gold I needed first, though, but she only had the one gold-plated flip lighter (plus some duct tape). I gave her some drugs, some vodka, a bunch of old mac and cheese, a bunch of mirelurk meat (both raw and cooked), some squirrel on a stick, some stew meat, and some wolf meat in exchange, then headed back to KLE0 and bought the gun for 186 caps, a mini nuke, and a bunch of spare ammo I wasn’t using. Then, after getting all the cameras I needed off Nick, it was over to the weapons bench to slap the Overcharged Capacitor on Righteous Authority, and give it a recon scope for good measure! Plus a bracketed long barrel for the Kneecaper Laser Musket. Might as well, right?
J) And with that, I figured I’d done enough for the day, both in-game and out (and oh hey, just remembered that it was 12/30 in the game too today XD). Had Victor head over to the Hotel Rexford to rent a room (he doesn’t often get to sleep in an “owned bed”), and bunk down for the night around 10 PM. He was up at 6 AM, and I saved and quit after parking him in front of the Memory Den. :) Sunday, we’ll get through “Dangerous Minds” and the trip through Kellogg’s brain, and then – well, I think after THAT, we have to meet back up with Preston and take the Castle. Mostly because I have a LOT of mines in my inventory that need exploding. . .
Writing: Wrote up all the above adventures for the FO4 Playthrough Progression! It’s pretty much the same as what actually happened in-game, only with Alice and somewhat more realistic consequences (for example, Victor getting an arm and a leg broken in the explosion of the car meant that Nick had to cover him with his shotgun while Alice helped Victor set and stimpack the limbs so they’d heal right) – APART from their little trip to Water Street Apartments. Because I suddenly saw an opportunity there to have Alice FINALLY retrieve her beloved Tal’Mehe’Ra blade by saying she stayed there before the bombs dropped and hid the sword in her room (she hadn’t thought she’d NEED it the night she was chased into the state house). So I had her go upstairs and get it while Victor and Nick raided the first floor. . .and established that Victor can at least touch it, because the cryogenic freezing put him like at the EDGE of being “undead” enough to wield it (as I have a headcanon only the undead and actually dead – like vampires and ghosts – can do so, due to it being forged by vampires living in the Shadowlands). As you might imagine, he feels a bit weird about this information. :p But yeah, other than that, just them wandering the wasteland, taking out raiders and turrets and mirelurks and super mutants before finally making their way to Goodneighbor and setting up in the Hotel Rexford for the night. We’ll see if I make any changes to the Kellogg’s memories sequence for this on Sunday!
YouTube: Just two videos today, but they were both fairly long and fairly good, so I’m happy enough with that –
A) Started after the Playthrough Progression (and another quick check of tumblr) with “What the Hell Just Happened: So You Think You Know 2022? - Quiz of the Year!” from OXBox! As is tradition, Andy wrote the quiz, and Jane and Mike went head to head to answer his questions. And, as per tradition, we had five rounds of competition –
1: Complete the Eurogamer Headline – 5 headlines where Jane and Mike had to fill in the blanks! Final scores were Mike 3, Jane 2 – Mike got a question about EA rebanding the FIFA games to “Football Club” that Jane missed.
2: Elden Ring Boss or Black Metal Band? – 8 baffling names where Jane and Mike had to guess if they were an Elden Ring boss (minus their title) or a Black Metal band. Both struggled a bit, but final scores were Mike 4, Jane 3, Mike having managed to successfully identify one boss that Jane thought was a band.
3: Sequel Subtitles – 7 franchise titles where Jane and Mike had to recall the subtitle of the sequel released in 2022. They did better in this round, and final scores were Mike 5, Jane 6 – Jane remembered that there were THREE Pokemon games this year, not two, with Pokemon Legends Arcerus releasing at the start of 2022 (and THAT’S the game Kevin must have been playing in the rewind!) and Scarlet/Violet at the end.
4: The Music Round – 7 video themes where Jane and Mike had to guess the game! Again, the pair struggled, and final scores were Mike 3, Jane 4 (it would have been Mike 2 or 2.5, but he was allowed to have the Monkey Island theme despite thinking the game’s title was Escape To Monkey Island instead of RETURN to Monkey Island). Funnily enough, I actually got one of the ones they both missed, identifying a certain jazzy theme as having Cuphead vibes – turns out the DLC “The Delicious Last Course” came out this year, so yay me. XD
5: Lightning Round – 10 general knowledge video game questions for Jane and Mike! They both did well this round, and final scores were Mike 9, Jane 9 (would have been Jane 8, but she was allowed to have a name of a game developer who got a cameo in Return To Monkey Island that was ALMOST right on the basis of it was close enough – a “verbal typo,” as she put it).
Meaning the final scores were Mike 24 – and Jane 24! Tie game! Both were pleased enough with this result and made a victory speech, with Jane jokingly declaring quizmaster Andy the winner and Mike promising more good videos from the channel in 2023. :)
B) And then, after BTTF Monopoly (see “Other”), I was able to fit in today’s only Subs upload – GrayStillPlays and “When you hit a ball at light speed!” Which was Gray playing the mobile game Golf Orbit: Oneshot Golf and holy HELL did things get really wacky real fast. XD This is a game where you have a golfer, and you have to hit holes of a certain distance away in order to unlock new golfers (ranging from regular golf pros, to clowns, to seahorses in environment suits, to Santa Claus, to off-brand Mario) and eventually new PLANETS. You can increase your golfer’s strength, the speed of the ball, and how high the ball bounces, and you get money for how far you’ve managed to go and how close to one of the greens you were. And let me tell you, the numbers get ridiculous QUICKLY, because you can get all sorts of fun multipliers on your score if you’re careful. . .not to mention there’s a jackpot multiplier that comes up every so often as you fill the bar with more and more incredible shots. Gray had a lot of fun just BLASTING the ball right around the curvature of the Earth (and later the lava planet and the rainbow planet), unlocking new golfers and getting super excited every time he got a birdie (land on the green then putt/chip the ball in), eagle (land directly in the hole with one of your super-powerful shots), and the one time he got an albatross (I’m not sure WHAT that was but I THINK it was a perfect shot into the exact hole he needed – not going super-far past it or anything). And oh, if you get a “perfect” shot, your ball goes so fast that it BLASTS through anything in its path – birds, trees, houses, rainbows. . . It’s a delightfully ridiculous and colorful and fun-looking game, and Gray clearly had a blast playing it. XD Good times!
Workout: A final night on the bike in 2022, and another night with the Call Me Kevin “Rewind 2022” video! Finished off the “Sometimes Games Are WEIRD” section (featuring Kevin playing through Route 96 and managing to get out of being arrested thanks to a friendly cop, and trying out Electrician Simulator: First Shock and electrocuting himself repeatedly) and I’m now most of the way into the “Nostalgic Games” section (featuring Kevin playing Red Dead Redemption and tying thieves to train tracks (and getting his horse run over by the train as well), GTA IV and stealing cop cars while everyone else struggles with doors, and – when I left off – Octodad: Dadliest Catch). I’m officially 2 hours and 43 minutes into this, meaning we only have two hours to go! Should finish it up next week to start the New Year.
Other: Mom wanted to have a “game night” with the BTTF Monopoly tonight, so we all had chicken wings and deviled eggs and stuff like that (which turned out to be a bit of a mistake, given how greasy the former was – Mom admitted she should have made something more like pigs-in-blankets instead) and played a round. And in the space of a couple of hours, I ended up absolutely crushing my parents. XD I credit my success mainly to getting an early monopoly on the Jones Manure Hauling Businesses, seeing how cheap they were to upgrade, and getting them all the way up to a “Plutonium Case” (game’s equivalent of hotels) each. They’re actually fairly easy to land on, so my parents were paying me a lot of money fairly quickly. By contrast, the two Clock Towers, the most expensive spaces on the board, were snagged by Mom, but we landed on them so infrequently she was never able to earn the cash to build them up. Couple that with me getting both “utilities” (Flux Capacitor and Mr. Fusion) and Dad not getting a lot of hits on his four “Conveyances” (Biff’s Car, the Time Train, the Skateboard, and the Hoverboard – the railroads, basically), and – yeah. It was a slaughter. XD At least we’re the kind of family who sees it all as good fun!
Yeah, I'm pretty happy with that! :) Of course, tomorrow is going to be a very different kind of day, given that it's a) a Cleaning Saturday and b) New Year's Eve, meaning we're starting a movie marathon around 5 PM. Meaning I am going to have a VERY SMALL window to do things on the computer! As such, I do have a short but specific to-do list for Saturday, beyond cleaning:
1. Finish Director's Commentary Superliminal
2. Get the rough draft of Moose's birthday fic done (birthday is the 10th, so best to start that now!)
3. Answer my friend Ace's FF.net PM
If I can fit in any YouTube or tumblr around that, I will, but I suspect I will not have the time. Sunday and Monday are gonna be all about the catch-up, I think! At least I have the extra day after New Year's. . . As it stands right now, though, I'm doing the social thing, so I'd best be off -- night all!
Tumblr: Did the dash-and-tags catch-up on Victor Luvs Alice, finished off the last bits of that Valicer headcanon post I was working on in my drafts, and took a moment to get all the pictures ready for the upcoming Chill Save update next Wednesday (the one where Alice lost her promotion thanks to an overdose of Fury), all before lunch! Nice. :) And then, this evening, came back on Victor Luvs Alice to reblog Moose’s latest story, and get a notice up on Valice Multiverse that I won’t be available tomorrow due to the movie marathon we’re having for the New Year. I do have an ask that needs answering, but it involves a guest at a party, which isn’t something most of my normal cast over there does. . .
Smiler, on the other hand. . .I HAVE been meaning to add them! Something to do for New Year’s Day, perhaps! We’ll see how the timing works out.
Fallout 4: Played this right after lunch, and achieved my stated goal of getting Victor and Nick to Goodneighbor! Though, admittedly, it took a little doing –
A) Picked up where I’d left off, with Victor and Nick outside the Combat Zone on a foggy morning. I took a moment to make sure Victor had all his gear, then reoriented him toward Goodneighbor and hopped off the platform they’d camped out on and down a side street –
B) Where he and Nick promptly ran into some super mutants. Figures. XD The first one didn’t even see them, though – I was able to have Victor swap to his Mighty Sniper and take him out without issue, then he and Nick took care of his friend and his dog. Took a moment to loot the bodies and explore their little camp – proved to be outside a place called Pearwood Residences. I declined to go in and investigate, but checking the makeshift bridges and balconies revealed that going straight would put Victor and Nick STRAIGHT into the World’s Most Radioactive Pothole. So instead I went right – which brought them through some barricades right up to the side of a Gunner camp. Fortunately, the guard didn’t notice them or didn’t care, and when he walked away, Victor and Nick cut left down a narrow side alley that brought them to Hub 360 – which had a mutant hound sleeping outside. Fortunately, it also didn’t care about Victor and Nick, and they were able to sneak away farther into the ruins, turning left again near one of the many “either an office building or a parking garage” wrecks. . .
C) Which sandwiched them between some softshell mirelurks and a raider camp. And put Victor in front of a mine I noticed JUST IN TIME. He was able to successfully disarm it, and – after a bit of thought – I decided he’d have the best luck with the mirelurks and started attacking them. He and Nick managed to kill the lot –
D) But the gunfire got the attention of the raiders – and their turret. Which fired on a nearby car and, uh, made it explode. Fortunately, Victor did NOT die, sparing me from having to reload a save, but he DID suffer a broken arm and leg and thus needed a stimpack post-haste. And then some water to deal with the thirst stimpacks bring. On the other hand, the exploding car did the RAIDERS no favors either, and Victor – having swapped to Kellogg’s pistol so I could properly try it out – was able to take care of the stragglers with little trouble. He and Nick proceeded into the camp – which was by the Shamrock Taphouse, hooray for having a new location marked on the map – and looted the bodies, and Victor took care of the two remaining combatants on the other side of the camp before using their little guard platform to scrap down some old armor and guns he’d picked up and take a potty break.
E) This brought them to midday as a rain shower moved in – I had Victor do a little inventory management with Nick, disarm another mine outside the camp, then quicksaved and headed out, once again trying to reorient him toward Goodneighbor –
Only to have him step on a mine I hadn’t noticed. >.< As I’d JUST quicksaved, I just reloaded that and avoided it. They made their way up a little to 35 Court, where they were set upon by another group of raiders (easily taken care of with Kellogg’s Pistol and Nick’s shotgun) and a couple of turrets (which seemed to have ALREADY taken care of quite a lot of robots, if the bodies scattered around were any indication!) I had Victor loot what corpses he could, and in making sure I’d found all the raiders he’d killed, came across a dead brahmin. Now, one of my food mods allows you to milk brahmin, and thanks to quirks in the code, it doesn’t care if they’re alive or not. So I had Victor grab a bunch of milk along with the meat and hide. A bit gross, yes, but food is food!
F) With that sorted, the boys continued onward, past 35 Court and over a bunch of junk near a super mutant camp before arriving by Water Street Apartments. Around this time, the sky started turning an unpleasantly familiar green, so I had Victor and Nick duck inside to wait the radstorm out. There was nobody home at the time (though I THINK this location is actually one you visit during the Silver Shroud quests, and then it has people), so I had Victor pick up some goodies, then set up his portable workbench for a bit more scrapping, a bit of cooking (namely, turning some of his milk into butter), and giving the Kneecapper Laser Musket a nice full stock. Good use of the time!
G) Around 4:30 PM in-game, I had Victor and Nick venture out again – to my relief, the radstorm was over, yay! To my annoyance, there were a couple of super mutants nearby, boo! Neither of them were armed with anything particularly dangerous, though – Nick took out one, Victor took out the other, it was all good. Once they were all sorted, I had Victor reorient himself again and start in what I felt was the right direction. . .
H) And lo and behold, I came across a bunch of dead scavengers at a very familiar camp! In fact, I recognized the plank wall nearby as the back of Goodneighbor! Pleased that I was indeed on the right track, I had Victor loot the bodies, do a skoosh more cooking, then (after trying to figure out which way was better) – head toward the back wall, killing a raider psycho on the chunk of highway above them in the process. Followed that around to where I’d had that standoff with the raiders before with Piper. . .
And then realized – wait a minute, if I go over the little “bridge” the raiders were on before, would THAT take me around to the front? So I had Victor and Nick find the ramp onto the chunk of highway and follow that around (stopping to loot the raider psycho corpse), and –
I) Success! There was Goodneighbor’s front door! :D Right as Victor was starting to feel tired too. I decided that it was probably too late to go to the Memory Den, so instead had the boys go inside and hit up the shops! And KLE0 proved to be selling something of interest to me – a Night Vision Overcharged Laser Sniper Rifle! AKA a gun with EXACTLY the capacitor mod I needed for Righteous Authority! I decided to give Daisy a chance to sell me the gold I needed first, though, but she only had the one gold-plated flip lighter (plus some duct tape). I gave her some drugs, some vodka, a bunch of old mac and cheese, a bunch of mirelurk meat (both raw and cooked), some squirrel on a stick, some stew meat, and some wolf meat in exchange, then headed back to KLE0 and bought the gun for 186 caps, a mini nuke, and a bunch of spare ammo I wasn’t using. Then, after getting all the cameras I needed off Nick, it was over to the weapons bench to slap the Overcharged Capacitor on Righteous Authority, and give it a recon scope for good measure! Plus a bracketed long barrel for the Kneecaper Laser Musket. Might as well, right?
J) And with that, I figured I’d done enough for the day, both in-game and out (and oh hey, just remembered that it was 12/30 in the game too today XD). Had Victor head over to the Hotel Rexford to rent a room (he doesn’t often get to sleep in an “owned bed”), and bunk down for the night around 10 PM. He was up at 6 AM, and I saved and quit after parking him in front of the Memory Den. :) Sunday, we’ll get through “Dangerous Minds” and the trip through Kellogg’s brain, and then – well, I think after THAT, we have to meet back up with Preston and take the Castle. Mostly because I have a LOT of mines in my inventory that need exploding. . .
Writing: Wrote up all the above adventures for the FO4 Playthrough Progression! It’s pretty much the same as what actually happened in-game, only with Alice and somewhat more realistic consequences (for example, Victor getting an arm and a leg broken in the explosion of the car meant that Nick had to cover him with his shotgun while Alice helped Victor set and stimpack the limbs so they’d heal right) – APART from their little trip to Water Street Apartments. Because I suddenly saw an opportunity there to have Alice FINALLY retrieve her beloved Tal’Mehe’Ra blade by saying she stayed there before the bombs dropped and hid the sword in her room (she hadn’t thought she’d NEED it the night she was chased into the state house). So I had her go upstairs and get it while Victor and Nick raided the first floor. . .and established that Victor can at least touch it, because the cryogenic freezing put him like at the EDGE of being “undead” enough to wield it (as I have a headcanon only the undead and actually dead – like vampires and ghosts – can do so, due to it being forged by vampires living in the Shadowlands). As you might imagine, he feels a bit weird about this information. :p But yeah, other than that, just them wandering the wasteland, taking out raiders and turrets and mirelurks and super mutants before finally making their way to Goodneighbor and setting up in the Hotel Rexford for the night. We’ll see if I make any changes to the Kellogg’s memories sequence for this on Sunday!
YouTube: Just two videos today, but they were both fairly long and fairly good, so I’m happy enough with that –
A) Started after the Playthrough Progression (and another quick check of tumblr) with “What the Hell Just Happened: So You Think You Know 2022? - Quiz of the Year!” from OXBox! As is tradition, Andy wrote the quiz, and Jane and Mike went head to head to answer his questions. And, as per tradition, we had five rounds of competition –
1: Complete the Eurogamer Headline – 5 headlines where Jane and Mike had to fill in the blanks! Final scores were Mike 3, Jane 2 – Mike got a question about EA rebanding the FIFA games to “Football Club” that Jane missed.
2: Elden Ring Boss or Black Metal Band? – 8 baffling names where Jane and Mike had to guess if they were an Elden Ring boss (minus their title) or a Black Metal band. Both struggled a bit, but final scores were Mike 4, Jane 3, Mike having managed to successfully identify one boss that Jane thought was a band.
3: Sequel Subtitles – 7 franchise titles where Jane and Mike had to recall the subtitle of the sequel released in 2022. They did better in this round, and final scores were Mike 5, Jane 6 – Jane remembered that there were THREE Pokemon games this year, not two, with Pokemon Legends Arcerus releasing at the start of 2022 (and THAT’S the game Kevin must have been playing in the rewind!) and Scarlet/Violet at the end.
4: The Music Round – 7 video themes where Jane and Mike had to guess the game! Again, the pair struggled, and final scores were Mike 3, Jane 4 (it would have been Mike 2 or 2.5, but he was allowed to have the Monkey Island theme despite thinking the game’s title was Escape To Monkey Island instead of RETURN to Monkey Island). Funnily enough, I actually got one of the ones they both missed, identifying a certain jazzy theme as having Cuphead vibes – turns out the DLC “The Delicious Last Course” came out this year, so yay me. XD
5: Lightning Round – 10 general knowledge video game questions for Jane and Mike! They both did well this round, and final scores were Mike 9, Jane 9 (would have been Jane 8, but she was allowed to have a name of a game developer who got a cameo in Return To Monkey Island that was ALMOST right on the basis of it was close enough – a “verbal typo,” as she put it).
Meaning the final scores were Mike 24 – and Jane 24! Tie game! Both were pleased enough with this result and made a victory speech, with Jane jokingly declaring quizmaster Andy the winner and Mike promising more good videos from the channel in 2023. :)
B) And then, after BTTF Monopoly (see “Other”), I was able to fit in today’s only Subs upload – GrayStillPlays and “When you hit a ball at light speed!” Which was Gray playing the mobile game Golf Orbit: Oneshot Golf and holy HELL did things get really wacky real fast. XD This is a game where you have a golfer, and you have to hit holes of a certain distance away in order to unlock new golfers (ranging from regular golf pros, to clowns, to seahorses in environment suits, to Santa Claus, to off-brand Mario) and eventually new PLANETS. You can increase your golfer’s strength, the speed of the ball, and how high the ball bounces, and you get money for how far you’ve managed to go and how close to one of the greens you were. And let me tell you, the numbers get ridiculous QUICKLY, because you can get all sorts of fun multipliers on your score if you’re careful. . .not to mention there’s a jackpot multiplier that comes up every so often as you fill the bar with more and more incredible shots. Gray had a lot of fun just BLASTING the ball right around the curvature of the Earth (and later the lava planet and the rainbow planet), unlocking new golfers and getting super excited every time he got a birdie (land on the green then putt/chip the ball in), eagle (land directly in the hole with one of your super-powerful shots), and the one time he got an albatross (I’m not sure WHAT that was but I THINK it was a perfect shot into the exact hole he needed – not going super-far past it or anything). And oh, if you get a “perfect” shot, your ball goes so fast that it BLASTS through anything in its path – birds, trees, houses, rainbows. . . It’s a delightfully ridiculous and colorful and fun-looking game, and Gray clearly had a blast playing it. XD Good times!
Workout: A final night on the bike in 2022, and another night with the Call Me Kevin “Rewind 2022” video! Finished off the “Sometimes Games Are WEIRD” section (featuring Kevin playing through Route 96 and managing to get out of being arrested thanks to a friendly cop, and trying out Electrician Simulator: First Shock and electrocuting himself repeatedly) and I’m now most of the way into the “Nostalgic Games” section (featuring Kevin playing Red Dead Redemption and tying thieves to train tracks (and getting his horse run over by the train as well), GTA IV and stealing cop cars while everyone else struggles with doors, and – when I left off – Octodad: Dadliest Catch). I’m officially 2 hours and 43 minutes into this, meaning we only have two hours to go! Should finish it up next week to start the New Year.
Other: Mom wanted to have a “game night” with the BTTF Monopoly tonight, so we all had chicken wings and deviled eggs and stuff like that (which turned out to be a bit of a mistake, given how greasy the former was – Mom admitted she should have made something more like pigs-in-blankets instead) and played a round. And in the space of a couple of hours, I ended up absolutely crushing my parents. XD I credit my success mainly to getting an early monopoly on the Jones Manure Hauling Businesses, seeing how cheap they were to upgrade, and getting them all the way up to a “Plutonium Case” (game’s equivalent of hotels) each. They’re actually fairly easy to land on, so my parents were paying me a lot of money fairly quickly. By contrast, the two Clock Towers, the most expensive spaces on the board, were snagged by Mom, but we landed on them so infrequently she was never able to earn the cash to build them up. Couple that with me getting both “utilities” (Flux Capacitor and Mr. Fusion) and Dad not getting a lot of hits on his four “Conveyances” (Biff’s Car, the Time Train, the Skateboard, and the Hoverboard – the railroads, basically), and – yeah. It was a slaughter. XD At least we’re the kind of family who sees it all as good fun!
Yeah, I'm pretty happy with that! :) Of course, tomorrow is going to be a very different kind of day, given that it's a) a Cleaning Saturday and b) New Year's Eve, meaning we're starting a movie marathon around 5 PM. Meaning I am going to have a VERY SMALL window to do things on the computer! As such, I do have a short but specific to-do list for Saturday, beyond cleaning:
1. Finish Director's Commentary Superliminal
2. Get the rough draft of Moose's birthday fic done (birthday is the 10th, so best to start that now!)
3. Answer my friend Ace's FF.net PM
If I can fit in any YouTube or tumblr around that, I will, but I suspect I will not have the time. Sunday and Monday are gonna be all about the catch-up, I think! At least I have the extra day after New Year's. . . As it stands right now, though, I'm doing the social thing, so I'd best be off -- night all!
