![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Which, next weekend isn't gonna help, because it's a cleaning Saturday but it's ALSO the three-day MLK Jr Day weekend, so. . . But yeah, ended up staying up too late on TV Tropes again last night AND spending the morning on it because I happened to spot an interesting movie while trolling tumblr (The Menu, a recent Horror/Thriller/Black Comedy about a woman who must survive a night at a deadly restaurant with a chef who does NOT like the guests he invited to this very special dinner -- believe it's currently on HBO Max?) and felt the need to read its TV Tropes page VERY thoroughly. Just had to get it out of my system, you know? (Also didn't help that I had a lot of trouble sleeping last night, which I suspect is at least somewhat PMS-relatesd. . .) But despite that, I still managed to get a good amount of things done --
Tumblr: Well, as mentioned, my morning was taken up going through The Menu’s TV Tropes page, because if I didn’t, my brain wouldn’t leave me alone, but I did get in tumbling –
A) Immediately AFTER lunch, having finished my TV Tropes bullshit, I did a proper dash-and-tags catch-up on Victor Luvs Alice – even putting a fun reblog from the “fallout 4” tag into my drafts!
B) Then, after doing my FO4 Playthrough Progression write-up (see below), I decided that I should sacrifice my workout for a good cause, that good cause being “making sure I don’t stress myself out too much trying to cram drafting a six-post Chill Save update into Monday evening after work.” So I did starter drafts of all the posts with pictures and starter text, and finished the full text on the first two posts before having my shower. Progress!
C) And then, just now, I ended up reblogging my Smiler Creation Day post (aka the “Smiler Look Book post”) on Valice Multiverse as I had no asks or thread replies, and I couldn’t find any good fandom reblogs either. It serves as a good way to show off what Smiler looks like over there, anyway!
Fallout 4: I set out to complete the “Last Voyage of the USS Constitution” quest today, and I did just that! :) Let me take you through how it went –
A) Started at the gates of Goodneighbor, where I had Victor slap on his synth helmet before heading out with Nick and his Two-Shot onto the wild streets of Boston! Almost immediately I heard gunfire, followed by a big explosion like that you’d get from a Fat Man. If THAT isn’t an ominous omen. . . XD Victor and Nick didn’t let it get to them, however, and I directed them along the main wall and down one of the blocked streets over to the Old Corner Bookstore and the nearby raider camp. From there, it was up the stairs to the right, following the line of the Freedom Trail, since I knew the Old North Church was roughly where I needed to go. Discovered a couple of feral ghouls, which went down pretty easily to the Two-Shot, some raider and scavenger corpses, and what looked like an old food mart of sorts. Raided all the corpses and the food available, then took a moment with the old portable workbench to break down some of the armor and guns Victor had picked up. Scrap, scrap, scrap all the things~
B) With that sorted, I had Victor and Nick proceed onward, down the steps and up to a familiar sight – Fanueil Hall! Had Victor check some of the meat bags and newstands and whatnot nearby for any goodies he might have missed, then he and Nick snuck around the side. . .
Just in time to meet a couple of super mutants! Again, they fell pretty quickly to the Two-Shot, and I decided that it was worth poking around the back to see what goodies were available. A few meat bags with stuff like mole rat teeth, and around the other side, some stairs leading up to a platform with a whole load of ammo! Nice. :) I had Victor raid it and then start back down –
Only to move too far to the side to try and get out of Nick’s way, and end up stuck in a spot between the stairs and some of the environmental junk that I couldn’t jump out of. >.< Time to reload a save!
C) Fortunately, I’d quicksaved VERY recently, so it was just a matter of going back up the stairs and getting the ammo again, then going down by jumping off the opposite side and working back UNDER the stairs. Now free to continue exploring, Victor and Nick started carefully creeping down the road in the general direction of the Old North Church, ears pricked because they’d been put into [CAUTION] a couple of times around the back of Fanueil Hall, and I kept hearing these grunts like a Yao Guai was around. . .no bear appeared, though, and they made it around to the Church, then over to the river/ocean’s edge, where the docks were (also a small super mutant/raider camp – Victor stole a little mirelurk meat from a meat bag). One red boat in particular looked like it might have something on it, so I had Victor investigate – nope, completely empty. And then when he tried to get off, he fell into the water and took a bunch of rads while he was swimming back to shore. *sigh* At least some mutant hound meat took care of a chunk of those!
D) With the boats determined to be uninteresting, Victor and Nick proceeded up the boardwalk, passing by little parking lots full of wrecked cars and wrecked boats in the water (and a few non-hostile garbage squirrels). The USS Constitution came into view as they proceeded, proving they were going the right way, and I could see on the map there was a bridge nearby, so all they had to do was keep following the water’s edge! They passed Pickman’s Gallery, and made it to that raider restaurant that Victor cleared out, where he found a bunch of goodies in the various trash cans and such outside, and a couple more useful things in the attached bombed-out wreck of a house. They eventually reached the bridge that would take them over to the USS Constitution’s side, and – after killing the raider psycho on it – headed across. I made a note that Bunker Hill was directly ahead of them (I will have to visit that place eventually, but not yet), then turned right toward the ship! Walk was largely quiet except for one raider opening fire on the boys – Victor exploded their head with the Two-Shot, snuck past the scavengers to raid the body – then had to take a quick potty break behind the anchor in the little pseudo-roundabout nearby. XD He also took the opportunity to clear all his rads and heal up before getting onto the actual boat –
E) Cue for some reason Victor suddenly getting +3 rads a second as a radstorm blew up. >( I was utterly baffled as to what was going on until I noticed the sky turning green and realized this particular storm had to be a bad one. I had Victor go up top and get inside as quickly as he could, then RE-clear the damn rads and hang out inside while waiting for the damn storm to stop. As the ship proved to have a chem bench on it, I had him grab all the various bone bits he was storing on Nick and use them to make some cutting fluid (extra oil never a bad thing), then had him open up the Captain’s Quarters that he’d gotten the key for last time and check them out. As per a known bug, most of the stuff in there was marked as owned and thus could only be stolen, but there was a stash of bottlecaps and a copy of US Covert Ops (the magazine that permanently boosts your ability to sneak) in there, which Victor happily took. The turbopump assembly was also in there, curiously enough – as Nick amused himself sitting at the table, Victor installed the new bearings and got the assembly all sorted! Hooray!
F) With that sorted, and it nearly being 6 PM, I decided to risk sending Victor back up top to talk to Ironsides – fortunately, the radstorm was dying off when he came upstairs, transitioning to just regular rain. Ironsides thanked Victor for all his help (Victor saying it was his pleasure), and that they were just about ready to take their maiden voyage off the blasted Savings & Loan and toward the Atlantic –
When the final scavenger attack commenced! Poor Victor got rather beat up trying to get a good firing point and get the cannons going, getting both arms broken by a grenade, but once he’d stimpacked up and drunk some water, he was good to go, using Righteous Authority to snipe down as many of the scavengers as possible and turn them into ash piles. He also did get to fire the cannons on them, to my delight. :p Eventually, the attack was repelled, though I had Victor go downstairs just to make sure none of the scavengers had gotten inside. They hadn’t, so he took the opportunity to have some Cram and eggs before heading back up top to get more thanks from Ironsides and his final command – to head up to the top of the Royal Arms Apartments and hit the auxiliary generator so they’d have enough power to launch! Though not before getting his reward of the Broadsider. XD I don’t usually use heavy guns, but I think I’m gonna have to have Victor use this at LEAST once before putting it up on the wall on the Red Rocket or something. XD
G) With that sorted, Victor and Nick headed down to street level (after killing off the sole survivor of the original attack, Davies), where Victor started raiding all the corpses he could (some of the ash piles no longer had bodies attached). This also involved finding Mandy Stiles, head scavenger, still alive outside her headquarters – Victor took her out before she could take him out. Raiding went well, though he did get overencumbered again – BUT he also found a Staggering Automatic Laser Rifle on a random scavenger! I’d had no idea any of these guys were Legendary! :D So that’s a nice find – maybe use that as a fast-firing pistol? However, as the night wore on, another radstorm blew up – I had Victor and Nick duck into the Royal Arms’s lowest level, had Victor scrap some armor and guns he’d picked up, then – after a quick poke into the upper levels – set up camp for the night, going to bed at 11 PM.
H) And then, bright and early the next morning, it was up to the top of the building to listen to Ironsides prepare the ship, hit the switch, and watch as the USS Constitution gloriously sailed away. . .into another building. XD I did make sure to take some screenshots of it flying through the sky, though! Ironsides happily declared they were closer to their goal than ever, and the quest completed. . .
I) Bringing Victor all the way up to level 29! :D I promptly checked out what was available to him and pondered some of my options. . .but while Awareness Level 2 was tempting for the extra VATS hit chance and damage, in the end, I had to go with Strong Back Level 2, giving Victor even more carry capacity and making all of his equipped clothes weightless. :D Hahaha, he can carry ALL the things now!
And that’s where I ended things, on the roof looking at the USS Constitution in its new home. XD Next time, we start the journey over to the Castle so we can get THAT quest out of the way!
Writing: Naturally, did the FO4 Playthrough Progression write-up of the day’s events right after my playsession. It was pretty much identical to what happened in my game above, the trio working their way through Boston and killing a few enemies before making it to the boat, kitting it out, repulsing the final scavenger attack, spending the night getting the goodies, and launching the ship the next morning, only with Victor trying to give the scavvers one last chance to turn back when they launch their assault (because he’s a good guy and just doesn’t want them hurting the robots), and letting the remaining ones flee when he manages to kill both Mandy and Davies in the resultant scrap (I of course cut them all down for the XP because none of them ran away). Oh, and Alice and Nick just cracking up over how happy Ironsides is with how everything turned out despite the fact the boat is now stuck in ANOTHER building HIGHER UP, and Victor just – facepalming over it all. XD Good times!
YouTube: The OXtra “garfield.wmv” video still eludes me, but I got the others for today –
A) Started with Call Me Kevin and “I played Naughty Bear so you don't have to” – which is what it says on the tin, really. XD Yes, after two almost 15-minute episodes dedicated to the game in his “short form content” days, he went in and did a proper playthrough of Naughty Bear over 45 minutes for us. Well, SORT OF a proper playthrough – what he did mostly was bounce through a bunch of the levels and challenges (such as doing a speed run, driving everyone insane, and not hitting anyone at all) so he could unlock those that he hadn’t seen yet. And boy, did that just prove what a bizarre and twisted game this is – you go from the tutorial level, which is Naughty fucking everyone up over not being invited to a birthday party (like you do), to stuff like the rise of the living dead (a level Kevin really liked because the zombie bears and the regular bears fighting and killing each other got HIM points), X-Bear superheroes showing up to try and take out Naughty (they proved to be anything but super), and vampire bears running around and being asked to try and take out Naughty (again, they weren’t really up to Naughty’s level. In fact, Kevin made a point of killing the special Unibear twice on this level after killing it once on the former level to prove he was three times as bad as the “Vampricorn” bear). Kevin really got into doing stuff like laying down traps (and then running into them himself), screaming at bears multiple times to drive them insane and make them kill themselves (useful for those “don’t hit anyone” challenges), and just committing vast amounts of “defluffication” (as the game puts it). Hopefully his scratches his video-game-murder itch for a while! XD (Who are we kidding, we know it won’t.)
B) Then it was over to GrayStillPlays and “Any challenge you draw comes to life in Ramp Car Jumping!” Again, exactly what it says on the tin – well, sort of. Ramp Car Jumping is of course a silly mobile game, but it is a mobile game in two parts – regular “use a car to go down a ramp and hit a specific target, saving up money to buy more and more boosts and more and more cars” levels, and “draw your own ridiculous ramp to hit this bullseye” levels. Gray of course had a lot of fun in the latter, drawing ramps that either just led STRAIGHT to the target because they were so long, or sent the car to space. Or an infinite loop-de-loop. The former, though – well, the former proved to be a challenge, as the farther you got in the game, the more ridiculous the distance, and the more ridiculous the board. Gray went from jumping concerts in your standard sports car to leaping through a downtown with loads of skybridges in a turbine dressed as a car top driving straight up a mountain in a space shuttle to circumnavigating the globe spelling “congratulations” as a gold-plated plane. All with the help (and hindrance, as Gray had a real talent for overshooting the target and smashing against a wall or a penguin) of his engine and boosts. He got it in the end, but it took some doing! Good thing he’s GrayStillPlays!
C) And of course, as it is Fallout Sunday, we ended with Jon and “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Part 11 - A Big Deal!” A slightly shorter episode than normal, which covered:
I. The Other Thing You Can Do In Canterbury Commons – which is talk to Uncle Roe and get him to organize the traders! Which generally needs a speech check, but Wanda is already used to using her wiles to get what she wants, lest we forget Mr. Burke. XD More importantly, though, doing this allows you to invest caps in the traders – 200 to improve and expand their inventories, and 500 for a special thing that isn’t obvious – jacking up their repair skills to 100, the highest they can go, meaning they can fix ANYTHING up to full condition, which is what Jon REALLY wanted. And as he had the caps, giving Roe those investments was easy peasy. :) Even better, doing this prompts all the traders to give you a little gift when you encounter them, and while most of them just give you nice generic goods, the armor merchant, Crow, gives you his unique Eyebot helmet! Which is – super-heavy at 10 lbs and doesn’t even protect you that much, but Jon is making a habit of getting things that are FUN, not necessarily USEFUL.
II. The Mechanist Easter Egg – it turns out that, if you get the Mechanist armor and wear it when talking to Moira about the next part of the Wasteland Survival Guide and utilizing old technology, your character gets a special line about how it won’t be difficult for. . .The Mechanist! And Moira squees a little and says she feels like she’s sending you on a super hero quest. :p Very simple, but it is very cute. Worth murdering the guy in cold blood for his outfit. XD
III. The Brotherhood Outcasts And Their Terrible Weapon – who are the Brotherhood Outcasts? Those in the Brotherhood of Steel who objected to Elder Lyons doing things like “letting in local wastelanders” and “sometimes helping people instead of just hoarding technology” and split off into their own “true” BOS group to secure technology from the idiot locals and study it. They’re holed up in Fort Independence, and as you might imagine, they’re not exactly friendly to the Lone Wanderer when you first rock up. However, Jon showed how to befriend them – first, instead of just hopping their fence, go around to the front and help out the guard there with a raider. Then ask said guard about gathering technology for them. She points you in the direction of the Proctor, their local leader, and he indicates he’s willing to give you caps, ammo, stimpacks, or chems in exchange for any technology you can find – in particular, power armor, laser weaponry, sensors, and scrap metal. There’s a hidden “points” system in play with the stuff you give him, though you can’t ever see how many points you’ve got or how much any particular thing is worth (you’ll need the wiki for that). But, get 50 or more points from giving him the items he seeks (best option is to head into DC, loot BOS corpses, and hang around BOS vs super mutant battles to either get the BOS armor or the super mutant laser weapons, though the robot repair center nearby also has some stuff), and he’ll call you a friend, and you can enter the base. (Well, enter it without lockpicking your way inside and getting shot at.) And what’s in the base? Well, some Outcasts studying technology, a whole bank of computers with details on how certain guns and such in the game would actually WORK in sciencey terms, a holotape giving you some info on a hidden weapons stash in a nearby raider base, set up in the Fairfield metro station (or rather, in the utility tunnels nearby), and a big old weapons vault you can crack open –
For the Miss Launcher. A missile launcher that someone was trying to make more accurate, and accidentally broke into a sort of horrible grenade launcher that spits out the missile and just has it bounce a bit. Another horrible thing that Jon got just for the funsies, he broke it out a couple of times when he went raiding the Fairfield raiders and was absolutely ASTONISHED when he actually managed to hurt people with it. XD (People running down narrow gaps/corridors where a bouncing missile COULD actually do damage, but still.) Also, the raiders have the world’s worst grate trap on their building, because it dumps you into their utility tunnels right next to the weapon stash. Jon wondered if they were just very sporting and giving trapped people a fair shot of getting through the tunnels to the ladder back out. XD (To be fair, Jon also insisted on showing off the better “grenade through the cooling pipe” trap they’d set up nearby, and blew himself up a bit as a result, sooo. . .)
IV. More Wasteland Survival Guide – doing the “utilizing old technology” bit of the next bit of the Guide! Not in the Mechanist suit, but still. Moira gave Wanda a gadget to plug into the Robco factory mainframe to see what happened – if she’d get herself a robot army or just a lot of angry robots. Wanda (after her detour to befriend the Outcasts) did so, and discovered that unless your hacking skill is high enough, yes, you would just get a lot of angry robots. Fortunately, thanks to levels and skill books, she was more than able to hack the mainframe and get them to calm down from “Total Liquidation” to just “Pest Control” (thus focusing their killer efforts on the radroaches and mole rats infesting the place). She went back to Moira to report it was carnage, but carnage she controlled, so it was okay, and got herself some pulse grenades, nice.
And that’s where Jon ended it for the week, as the final bit of this chapter of the Guide covers local history – and that means finally going to Rivet City and possibly finally advancing the main plot by talking to Madison Li! Though more likely Jon is going to start doing all the sidequests again, because sidequests fun. XD We’ll see how that goes next Sunday!
*shrugs* Yeah, keeping up with the writing, keeping up with the Subs, have enough of my next big Chill Save update done not to be too stressed out tonight. . .honestly, not a bad Sunday. But now it's time to hit the sheets before heading back to work tomorrow. *sigh* Hopefully it won't be too bad. Night all!
Tumblr: Well, as mentioned, my morning was taken up going through The Menu’s TV Tropes page, because if I didn’t, my brain wouldn’t leave me alone, but I did get in tumbling –
A) Immediately AFTER lunch, having finished my TV Tropes bullshit, I did a proper dash-and-tags catch-up on Victor Luvs Alice – even putting a fun reblog from the “fallout 4” tag into my drafts!
B) Then, after doing my FO4 Playthrough Progression write-up (see below), I decided that I should sacrifice my workout for a good cause, that good cause being “making sure I don’t stress myself out too much trying to cram drafting a six-post Chill Save update into Monday evening after work.” So I did starter drafts of all the posts with pictures and starter text, and finished the full text on the first two posts before having my shower. Progress!
C) And then, just now, I ended up reblogging my Smiler Creation Day post (aka the “Smiler Look Book post”) on Valice Multiverse as I had no asks or thread replies, and I couldn’t find any good fandom reblogs either. It serves as a good way to show off what Smiler looks like over there, anyway!
Fallout 4: I set out to complete the “Last Voyage of the USS Constitution” quest today, and I did just that! :) Let me take you through how it went –
A) Started at the gates of Goodneighbor, where I had Victor slap on his synth helmet before heading out with Nick and his Two-Shot onto the wild streets of Boston! Almost immediately I heard gunfire, followed by a big explosion like that you’d get from a Fat Man. If THAT isn’t an ominous omen. . . XD Victor and Nick didn’t let it get to them, however, and I directed them along the main wall and down one of the blocked streets over to the Old Corner Bookstore and the nearby raider camp. From there, it was up the stairs to the right, following the line of the Freedom Trail, since I knew the Old North Church was roughly where I needed to go. Discovered a couple of feral ghouls, which went down pretty easily to the Two-Shot, some raider and scavenger corpses, and what looked like an old food mart of sorts. Raided all the corpses and the food available, then took a moment with the old portable workbench to break down some of the armor and guns Victor had picked up. Scrap, scrap, scrap all the things~
B) With that sorted, I had Victor and Nick proceed onward, down the steps and up to a familiar sight – Fanueil Hall! Had Victor check some of the meat bags and newstands and whatnot nearby for any goodies he might have missed, then he and Nick snuck around the side. . .
Just in time to meet a couple of super mutants! Again, they fell pretty quickly to the Two-Shot, and I decided that it was worth poking around the back to see what goodies were available. A few meat bags with stuff like mole rat teeth, and around the other side, some stairs leading up to a platform with a whole load of ammo! Nice. :) I had Victor raid it and then start back down –
Only to move too far to the side to try and get out of Nick’s way, and end up stuck in a spot between the stairs and some of the environmental junk that I couldn’t jump out of. >.< Time to reload a save!
C) Fortunately, I’d quicksaved VERY recently, so it was just a matter of going back up the stairs and getting the ammo again, then going down by jumping off the opposite side and working back UNDER the stairs. Now free to continue exploring, Victor and Nick started carefully creeping down the road in the general direction of the Old North Church, ears pricked because they’d been put into [CAUTION] a couple of times around the back of Fanueil Hall, and I kept hearing these grunts like a Yao Guai was around. . .no bear appeared, though, and they made it around to the Church, then over to the river/ocean’s edge, where the docks were (also a small super mutant/raider camp – Victor stole a little mirelurk meat from a meat bag). One red boat in particular looked like it might have something on it, so I had Victor investigate – nope, completely empty. And then when he tried to get off, he fell into the water and took a bunch of rads while he was swimming back to shore. *sigh* At least some mutant hound meat took care of a chunk of those!
D) With the boats determined to be uninteresting, Victor and Nick proceeded up the boardwalk, passing by little parking lots full of wrecked cars and wrecked boats in the water (and a few non-hostile garbage squirrels). The USS Constitution came into view as they proceeded, proving they were going the right way, and I could see on the map there was a bridge nearby, so all they had to do was keep following the water’s edge! They passed Pickman’s Gallery, and made it to that raider restaurant that Victor cleared out, where he found a bunch of goodies in the various trash cans and such outside, and a couple more useful things in the attached bombed-out wreck of a house. They eventually reached the bridge that would take them over to the USS Constitution’s side, and – after killing the raider psycho on it – headed across. I made a note that Bunker Hill was directly ahead of them (I will have to visit that place eventually, but not yet), then turned right toward the ship! Walk was largely quiet except for one raider opening fire on the boys – Victor exploded their head with the Two-Shot, snuck past the scavengers to raid the body – then had to take a quick potty break behind the anchor in the little pseudo-roundabout nearby. XD He also took the opportunity to clear all his rads and heal up before getting onto the actual boat –
E) Cue for some reason Victor suddenly getting +3 rads a second as a radstorm blew up. >( I was utterly baffled as to what was going on until I noticed the sky turning green and realized this particular storm had to be a bad one. I had Victor go up top and get inside as quickly as he could, then RE-clear the damn rads and hang out inside while waiting for the damn storm to stop. As the ship proved to have a chem bench on it, I had him grab all the various bone bits he was storing on Nick and use them to make some cutting fluid (extra oil never a bad thing), then had him open up the Captain’s Quarters that he’d gotten the key for last time and check them out. As per a known bug, most of the stuff in there was marked as owned and thus could only be stolen, but there was a stash of bottlecaps and a copy of US Covert Ops (the magazine that permanently boosts your ability to sneak) in there, which Victor happily took. The turbopump assembly was also in there, curiously enough – as Nick amused himself sitting at the table, Victor installed the new bearings and got the assembly all sorted! Hooray!
F) With that sorted, and it nearly being 6 PM, I decided to risk sending Victor back up top to talk to Ironsides – fortunately, the radstorm was dying off when he came upstairs, transitioning to just regular rain. Ironsides thanked Victor for all his help (Victor saying it was his pleasure), and that they were just about ready to take their maiden voyage off the blasted Savings & Loan and toward the Atlantic –
When the final scavenger attack commenced! Poor Victor got rather beat up trying to get a good firing point and get the cannons going, getting both arms broken by a grenade, but once he’d stimpacked up and drunk some water, he was good to go, using Righteous Authority to snipe down as many of the scavengers as possible and turn them into ash piles. He also did get to fire the cannons on them, to my delight. :p Eventually, the attack was repelled, though I had Victor go downstairs just to make sure none of the scavengers had gotten inside. They hadn’t, so he took the opportunity to have some Cram and eggs before heading back up top to get more thanks from Ironsides and his final command – to head up to the top of the Royal Arms Apartments and hit the auxiliary generator so they’d have enough power to launch! Though not before getting his reward of the Broadsider. XD I don’t usually use heavy guns, but I think I’m gonna have to have Victor use this at LEAST once before putting it up on the wall on the Red Rocket or something. XD
G) With that sorted, Victor and Nick headed down to street level (after killing off the sole survivor of the original attack, Davies), where Victor started raiding all the corpses he could (some of the ash piles no longer had bodies attached). This also involved finding Mandy Stiles, head scavenger, still alive outside her headquarters – Victor took her out before she could take him out. Raiding went well, though he did get overencumbered again – BUT he also found a Staggering Automatic Laser Rifle on a random scavenger! I’d had no idea any of these guys were Legendary! :D So that’s a nice find – maybe use that as a fast-firing pistol? However, as the night wore on, another radstorm blew up – I had Victor and Nick duck into the Royal Arms’s lowest level, had Victor scrap some armor and guns he’d picked up, then – after a quick poke into the upper levels – set up camp for the night, going to bed at 11 PM.
H) And then, bright and early the next morning, it was up to the top of the building to listen to Ironsides prepare the ship, hit the switch, and watch as the USS Constitution gloriously sailed away. . .into another building. XD I did make sure to take some screenshots of it flying through the sky, though! Ironsides happily declared they were closer to their goal than ever, and the quest completed. . .
I) Bringing Victor all the way up to level 29! :D I promptly checked out what was available to him and pondered some of my options. . .but while Awareness Level 2 was tempting for the extra VATS hit chance and damage, in the end, I had to go with Strong Back Level 2, giving Victor even more carry capacity and making all of his equipped clothes weightless. :D Hahaha, he can carry ALL the things now!
And that’s where I ended things, on the roof looking at the USS Constitution in its new home. XD Next time, we start the journey over to the Castle so we can get THAT quest out of the way!
Writing: Naturally, did the FO4 Playthrough Progression write-up of the day’s events right after my playsession. It was pretty much identical to what happened in my game above, the trio working their way through Boston and killing a few enemies before making it to the boat, kitting it out, repulsing the final scavenger attack, spending the night getting the goodies, and launching the ship the next morning, only with Victor trying to give the scavvers one last chance to turn back when they launch their assault (because he’s a good guy and just doesn’t want them hurting the robots), and letting the remaining ones flee when he manages to kill both Mandy and Davies in the resultant scrap (I of course cut them all down for the XP because none of them ran away). Oh, and Alice and Nick just cracking up over how happy Ironsides is with how everything turned out despite the fact the boat is now stuck in ANOTHER building HIGHER UP, and Victor just – facepalming over it all. XD Good times!
YouTube: The OXtra “garfield.wmv” video still eludes me, but I got the others for today –
A) Started with Call Me Kevin and “I played Naughty Bear so you don't have to” – which is what it says on the tin, really. XD Yes, after two almost 15-minute episodes dedicated to the game in his “short form content” days, he went in and did a proper playthrough of Naughty Bear over 45 minutes for us. Well, SORT OF a proper playthrough – what he did mostly was bounce through a bunch of the levels and challenges (such as doing a speed run, driving everyone insane, and not hitting anyone at all) so he could unlock those that he hadn’t seen yet. And boy, did that just prove what a bizarre and twisted game this is – you go from the tutorial level, which is Naughty fucking everyone up over not being invited to a birthday party (like you do), to stuff like the rise of the living dead (a level Kevin really liked because the zombie bears and the regular bears fighting and killing each other got HIM points), X-Bear superheroes showing up to try and take out Naughty (they proved to be anything but super), and vampire bears running around and being asked to try and take out Naughty (again, they weren’t really up to Naughty’s level. In fact, Kevin made a point of killing the special Unibear twice on this level after killing it once on the former level to prove he was three times as bad as the “Vampricorn” bear). Kevin really got into doing stuff like laying down traps (and then running into them himself), screaming at bears multiple times to drive them insane and make them kill themselves (useful for those “don’t hit anyone” challenges), and just committing vast amounts of “defluffication” (as the game puts it). Hopefully his scratches his video-game-murder itch for a while! XD (Who are we kidding, we know it won’t.)
B) Then it was over to GrayStillPlays and “Any challenge you draw comes to life in Ramp Car Jumping!” Again, exactly what it says on the tin – well, sort of. Ramp Car Jumping is of course a silly mobile game, but it is a mobile game in two parts – regular “use a car to go down a ramp and hit a specific target, saving up money to buy more and more boosts and more and more cars” levels, and “draw your own ridiculous ramp to hit this bullseye” levels. Gray of course had a lot of fun in the latter, drawing ramps that either just led STRAIGHT to the target because they were so long, or sent the car to space. Or an infinite loop-de-loop. The former, though – well, the former proved to be a challenge, as the farther you got in the game, the more ridiculous the distance, and the more ridiculous the board. Gray went from jumping concerts in your standard sports car to leaping through a downtown with loads of skybridges in a turbine dressed as a car top driving straight up a mountain in a space shuttle to circumnavigating the globe spelling “congratulations” as a gold-plated plane. All with the help (and hindrance, as Gray had a real talent for overshooting the target and smashing against a wall or a penguin) of his engine and boosts. He got it in the end, but it took some doing! Good thing he’s GrayStillPlays!
C) And of course, as it is Fallout Sunday, we ended with Jon and “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Part 11 - A Big Deal!” A slightly shorter episode than normal, which covered:
I. The Other Thing You Can Do In Canterbury Commons – which is talk to Uncle Roe and get him to organize the traders! Which generally needs a speech check, but Wanda is already used to using her wiles to get what she wants, lest we forget Mr. Burke. XD More importantly, though, doing this allows you to invest caps in the traders – 200 to improve and expand their inventories, and 500 for a special thing that isn’t obvious – jacking up their repair skills to 100, the highest they can go, meaning they can fix ANYTHING up to full condition, which is what Jon REALLY wanted. And as he had the caps, giving Roe those investments was easy peasy. :) Even better, doing this prompts all the traders to give you a little gift when you encounter them, and while most of them just give you nice generic goods, the armor merchant, Crow, gives you his unique Eyebot helmet! Which is – super-heavy at 10 lbs and doesn’t even protect you that much, but Jon is making a habit of getting things that are FUN, not necessarily USEFUL.
II. The Mechanist Easter Egg – it turns out that, if you get the Mechanist armor and wear it when talking to Moira about the next part of the Wasteland Survival Guide and utilizing old technology, your character gets a special line about how it won’t be difficult for. . .The Mechanist! And Moira squees a little and says she feels like she’s sending you on a super hero quest. :p Very simple, but it is very cute. Worth murdering the guy in cold blood for his outfit. XD
III. The Brotherhood Outcasts And Their Terrible Weapon – who are the Brotherhood Outcasts? Those in the Brotherhood of Steel who objected to Elder Lyons doing things like “letting in local wastelanders” and “sometimes helping people instead of just hoarding technology” and split off into their own “true” BOS group to secure technology from the idiot locals and study it. They’re holed up in Fort Independence, and as you might imagine, they’re not exactly friendly to the Lone Wanderer when you first rock up. However, Jon showed how to befriend them – first, instead of just hopping their fence, go around to the front and help out the guard there with a raider. Then ask said guard about gathering technology for them. She points you in the direction of the Proctor, their local leader, and he indicates he’s willing to give you caps, ammo, stimpacks, or chems in exchange for any technology you can find – in particular, power armor, laser weaponry, sensors, and scrap metal. There’s a hidden “points” system in play with the stuff you give him, though you can’t ever see how many points you’ve got or how much any particular thing is worth (you’ll need the wiki for that). But, get 50 or more points from giving him the items he seeks (best option is to head into DC, loot BOS corpses, and hang around BOS vs super mutant battles to either get the BOS armor or the super mutant laser weapons, though the robot repair center nearby also has some stuff), and he’ll call you a friend, and you can enter the base. (Well, enter it without lockpicking your way inside and getting shot at.) And what’s in the base? Well, some Outcasts studying technology, a whole bank of computers with details on how certain guns and such in the game would actually WORK in sciencey terms, a holotape giving you some info on a hidden weapons stash in a nearby raider base, set up in the Fairfield metro station (or rather, in the utility tunnels nearby), and a big old weapons vault you can crack open –
For the Miss Launcher. A missile launcher that someone was trying to make more accurate, and accidentally broke into a sort of horrible grenade launcher that spits out the missile and just has it bounce a bit. Another horrible thing that Jon got just for the funsies, he broke it out a couple of times when he went raiding the Fairfield raiders and was absolutely ASTONISHED when he actually managed to hurt people with it. XD (People running down narrow gaps/corridors where a bouncing missile COULD actually do damage, but still.) Also, the raiders have the world’s worst grate trap on their building, because it dumps you into their utility tunnels right next to the weapon stash. Jon wondered if they were just very sporting and giving trapped people a fair shot of getting through the tunnels to the ladder back out. XD (To be fair, Jon also insisted on showing off the better “grenade through the cooling pipe” trap they’d set up nearby, and blew himself up a bit as a result, sooo. . .)
IV. More Wasteland Survival Guide – doing the “utilizing old technology” bit of the next bit of the Guide! Not in the Mechanist suit, but still. Moira gave Wanda a gadget to plug into the Robco factory mainframe to see what happened – if she’d get herself a robot army or just a lot of angry robots. Wanda (after her detour to befriend the Outcasts) did so, and discovered that unless your hacking skill is high enough, yes, you would just get a lot of angry robots. Fortunately, thanks to levels and skill books, she was more than able to hack the mainframe and get them to calm down from “Total Liquidation” to just “Pest Control” (thus focusing their killer efforts on the radroaches and mole rats infesting the place). She went back to Moira to report it was carnage, but carnage she controlled, so it was okay, and got herself some pulse grenades, nice.
And that’s where Jon ended it for the week, as the final bit of this chapter of the Guide covers local history – and that means finally going to Rivet City and possibly finally advancing the main plot by talking to Madison Li! Though more likely Jon is going to start doing all the sidequests again, because sidequests fun. XD We’ll see how that goes next Sunday!
*shrugs* Yeah, keeping up with the writing, keeping up with the Subs, have enough of my next big Chill Save update done not to be too stressed out tonight. . .honestly, not a bad Sunday. But now it's time to hit the sheets before heading back to work tomorrow. *sigh* Hopefully it won't be too bad. Night all!
