Fairly Decent Mother's Day
May. 10th, 2026 11:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickThe weather was a HELL of a lot nicer today (for the most part -- while it was warmer, a good portion of the day was cloudy in a way that made me wonder if it was going to rain); Mom very much appreciated the card I got her (a mushy one talking about how I hoped she knew she was loved and appreciated -- it was the nicest template I could find on Microsoft Office at work :P) and was able to get a bunch of flowers from one of the local garden places (my and Dad's usual gift to her); and lunch was calzones from our favorite calzone place (spinach, cheese, and pepperoni & chicken and eggplant parm -- I'm taking the leftovers for lunch tomorrow :D). And I got through most of the things I wanted to get done today -- though a lack of focus this afternoon meant that it took me WAY LONGER than it should have to sum up my Portal 2 session and thus I never got to any writing. *sigh* I have an inkling why my brain rebelled like it did -- staying up too late last night making me extra tired and distracted this afternoon -- but still. Twas annoying! *grumbles* Still, nothing I can do about it now -- here's the daily write-up:
Tumblr: Was another nothing day over on Valice Multiverse, but I did manage to get a little more done on the “Valicer Eats God” post on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) before lunch! Mostly cleaning up the descriptions of everyone’s traits and fleshing out some of their trait expressions (how their traits inform their personality) and where they came from (example: Victor’s Trait Expression for his Fast Feet trait is “Running from my problems is an acceptable way to deal with them” – which comes from the fact that Victor spends a not-inconsiderable amount of Corpse Bride trying to literally run away from his problems XD). Didn’t get as much done as I might have liked, but I still made some progress, and that’s the important thing. *nods* Maybe next weekend I can push this damn post a little closer to “done!” (Either that or switch gears and work on the “how Victor and Alice learn Smiler’s legal name is ‘Marmaduke’” post...)
Portal 2: My Mother’s Day trip back to Aperture Science saw Chell get trapped by GLaDOS; fail to get killed by GLaDOS because of the work she and Wheatley had done ruining the turrets and disabling the neurotoxin earlier; initiate a core transfer with the help of portals; discover exactly WHY she shouldn’t have initiated that core transfer; get punched down a giant pit; land in the deepest bowels of the facility; and use portals to both navigate the wreckage and open up a giant hatch door into the oldest version of Aperture. *nods* And now that I’ve summed up my playsession in less than a minute, here’s the long version –
A) I picked up right where I left off last time, with Chell looking out across a worryingly-vast and empty space near the center of the facility, getting ready to leap through a couple of portals and into a room hanging in said empty space. After taking a moment to enjoy the vertigo-inducing scenery again, I had Chell pop herself through the portal, where she landed in a giant gray metal room in front of this door:
Yeah, uh, GLaDOS is not subtle. XD However, falling for the trap, or at least pretending to fall for it, was the only way to progress, so after checking the rest of the room for anything of use, Chell tried to open the door –
Aaand pulled it right off the wall, backing up rapidly so it didn’t fall on her. Moments later, GLaDOS started going on about how she truly believed that Chell wouldn’t fall for that, and how she’d prepared a nicer, much more elaborate trap for when Chell inevitably got out of this one, and how, if she’d known her nemesis was this easy to trick, she would have simply dangled a turkey leg in front of her – all while slowly shrinking the size of the room so Chell didn’t have anywhere to go. Rather than just crush her nemesis and be done with it, however, GLaDOS insisted on getting creative, dropping Chell into a relaxation vault (complete with toilet) and dragging her into her central chamber. She then informed Chell about how she was about to become the past president of the Being Alive Club while surrounding her with turrets –
All of whom were, of course, crap turrets. (One was even fully boxed!) As you might expect, they completely failed at shooting Chell, and after a minute, all of them exploded, cracking the glass keeping her contained in her vault. An annoyed GLaDOS noted that Chell had clearly been busy, then decided to instead reintroduce Chell’s old friend deadly neurotoxin into the mix. She smashed a big pipe into the side of Chell’s vault, advising her to take a big breath and hold it –
Aaaand instead of lethal gas, what came tumbling through the pipe was Wheatley. Whose arrival in the vault was the last straw for the glass, which all shattered, freeing Chell. GLaDOS: “I hate you so much.” XD We know, GLaDOS, we know.
B) Wheatley’s arrival triggered more than just GLaDOS’s unending hatred, though – it also triggered the Announcer to note that GLaDOS was at 80% corruption...and that an alternate core had been detected that could be used for a core transfer. GLaDOS, realizing what the Announcer was getting at, was like “are you SERIOUS” while Wheatley was extremely excited by the idea of being put in the mainframe. He encouraged Chell to plug him into the little port that popped up out of the floor, while GLaDOS coldly warned her not to do any such thing – Chell hesitated for a bit (because I wanted to get as much dialogue out of both of them as possible), but eventually did as Wheatley asked and plugged him in. The Announcer then asked if both cores were ready for the transfer – Wheatley said yes, while GLaDOS insisted no. The Announcer declared that the two cores were in stalemate, and that the transfer could not continue, causing Wheatley to start yelling for Chell to “pull me out pull me out pull me out” –
And then the Announcer added that the stalemate could be resolved if a stalemate associate was available to press the stalemate resolution button, opening up a nearby annex containing the button and causing Wheatley to switch to “leave me in leave me in leave me in.” XD However, GLaDOS was not about to let Chell just push that button and initiate the transfer – the moment Chell tried to get into the annex, she began popping up floor panels to force her back, informing her that she wasn’t qualified as a stalemate associate and she really should do stop doing things to add to GLaDOS’s list of all the things she’d done wrong. Wheatley promptly countered that, while Chell didn’t have the qualifications to be a stalemate associate, she did have a finger, and – after a failed attempt to confuse GLaDOS into thinking Chell had already pressed the button to give Chell the chance to press the button – began waxing on about how much he loved Chell’s ability to both resolve conflicts and press buttons. XD Once again, I had Chell pretend not to be able to figure out how to get past the panels for just long enough to get a bunch of dialogue out of them (because that’s one of the big reasons you play these games, to listen to the NPC’s chatter on) –
Then, once I was satisfied, had her shoot a portal at a convenient portal-able bit of floor in front of the stalemate button, and one at the wall next to it, to get past GLaDOS’s defenses. GLaDOS retaliated by creating a second, moving wall of raised floor panels around the button itself (so there was always a blockade of panels directly in front of Chell), but that was easily gotten around by having Chell shoot a portal on the opposite wall, then run through quickly and over the panels before GLaDOS could get them up on the correct side. Once she was through, she slapped the button, watching as Wheatley disappeared under the floor and GLaDOS was pulled down into a rising cylinder by a bunch of little mechanical arms –
And a few moments later, Wheatley emerged from said cylinder attached to GLaDOS’s body! He was absolutely thrilled, relishing in how absolutely massive he was and how much control he had over everything – though, as he called the escape elevator down, he DID admit that this would make it difficult for him to escape with Chell. Especially as his only plan – eject himself into the lift as it went by – could result in him and Chell being stranded in an elevator full of broken glass fifty feet off the ground. XD He encouraged Chell to get into the lift anyway, saying they’d work out the details later, and started sending her up, going on some more about how awesome being in control of the facility was and how smart he was now and so on, having a lovely little laugh about it all…
C) A lovely little laugh that rapidly became a big maniacal cackle. Which culminated in Wheatley wondering why they had to leave so soon and calling the elevator back down. Uh-oh. Cue poor Chell finding herself trapped in the elevator, having to watch first as Wheatley started going on about how he, tiny little Wheatley, had done all this –
And then as he got pissy over GLaDOS pointing out that Chell had actually done all the work. He declared “Oh really. That’s what the two of you think, is it?” (never mind that Chell hadn’t said squat), then dragged GLaDOS’s core back into the pit of mechanical arms at the center of the main room and turned her into a potato battery to humiliate her – all while informing Chell about how he was onto her now, how she was SELFISH and didn’t appreciate all he’d SACRIFICED to get here, and how she’d just BOSSED HIM AROUND, before adding quite menacingly, “NOW who’s the boss? Who’s the boss? It’s me.” He then displayed his PotatOS handiwork to her, gloating happily about how GLaDOS, former central core and god of the whole facility, now lived in a children’s toy –
Before GLaDOS revealed that she knew him. Because his voice was the voice of the Intelligence Dampening Sphere that the scientists had hooked onto her in one of their desperate attempts to make her behave. The voice that had done nothing but blather ridiculous, stupid ideas all day long to slow her down. Wheatley declared he wasn’t listening and insisted she was lying, but GLaDOS wouldn’t let up, declaring him to be “THE MORON THEY BUILT TO MAKE ME A IDIOT” –
Prompting Wheatley to have a bit of a temper tantrum, smashing PotatOS into the elevator with Chell and screaming about how he was NOT a moron and demanding “Could a MORON PUNCH! YOU! INTO! THIS! PIT? Huh? Could a moron do THAT?” while beating the elevator down into the shaft below –
Which, uh, naturally culminated in both PotatOS AND Chell falling through the floor and down into the bowels of Aperture. Leaving Wheatley to watch them fall with an “Uh-oh.” Whoops – guess a moron COULD punch them into that pit, eh, Wheaters?
D) And so began the “old Aperture” section of the game, with Chell and PotatOS falling down what felt like an endlessly-long elevator shaft into the bowels of the facility! PotatOS took the opportunity to confirm that her slow clap processor had made it into the potato, then informed Chell that she’d just put “the product of the greatest minds of a generation working together with the express purpose of building the dumbest moron who ever lived” in charge of Aperture. And then tested out her slow clap processor again to make sure it was still working. :p She then asked if Chell could take off one of her long fall boots and stuff her into it, just in case the pit wasn’t actually bottomless –
But before Chell could decide if she was going to do that or not (probably not), there was a loading screen, and we cut to the pair having fallen down into the deepest levels of Aperture. A bird promptly flew off with PotatOS, leaving Chell on her own as she stood up and retrieved her portal gun, then began exploring the debris-covered landscape she found herself in. (Debris and WATER-covered, in fact – Chell openly landed in a puddle. One wonders how she was not immediately electrocuted by her portal gun, given how poorly that thing reacts to liquid, but maybe she managed to toss it onto a bit of dry rusted metal first.) Slogging around brought her through what looked like the remains of some internal structure, with a fence blocking her passage deeper into the mess – fortunately, the wall on either side of the fence had some nice, portal-able patches painted on it, and she was able to use those to go around and continue her journey. Another set of portals helped get her over a mountain of debris preventing her from climbing up a slope – then, after winding her way through some old concrete walls that seemed to form a bit of a maze, she used a final set of portals to get up onto an old broken catwalk sticking out of a wall – to see this:
Yeah – pretty impressive, huh? I know Portal 2 is 15 years old this year (released in 2011, just like Alice: Madness Returns), but the destroyed wreck that is Old Aperture still holds up very well. :D Proof you do not need practically-photorealistic graphics to make a good game!
E) Having discovered the ancient ruins that made up the deepest levels of Aperture, Chell still had to find a way to navigate them. Fortunately, the busted catwalk she was on was directly over a pretty-solid looking beam walkway, so Chell dropped down onto that and followed it over to where another beam intersected it and made a ramp up. Following that brought her past various signs warning her to keep out and not to enter, and finally up to a big old wall stretching across the far left side of the room she’d found herself in. A wall that was covered in various signs once again telling her to scram and warning her of the dangers:
In case you’re having trouble, the yellow sign reads “WARNING: This enrichment shaft may contain unsafe quanities of cosmic ray spallation elements,” while the orange one reads “CONDEMNED: Vitrification Order 6/15/1961 Do not look at, touch, ingest, or engage in conversation with any substances beyond this point.” In short – bad juju ahead. But it was the only place that Chell could really go that wasn’t absolutely covered in rubble and rusty metal and other types of dangerous, occasionally-on-fire debris…
Which made it all the more frustrating that all the doors in the wall were locked very, very tight. Fortunately for Chell, portals remained the answer to all her problems, as there was a wall with a portal-able patch not far from the wall she was trying to get past, and another one way up high above her head over another catwalk. (Took me a minute to spot that one, I admit – I kept peering through the doorway covered by the metal shutter in the wall, thinking that the reason you could look through it was because you had to shoot a portal through it to get to the other side. Nope, red herring, just shows you what you could expect over there.) She thus portaled herself up there, followed the catwalk down to another portal-able patch of wall, then used another set of portals to get back down to ground level. Having successfully bypassed the barrier in her way, she then proceeded through the remains of what looked like a big metal tunnel, before following a giant pipe through the debris and up to a platform with a lever on it –
Overlooking a HUGE hatch door. Like, this sucker was GINORMOUS. Absolutely dwarfed poor Chell. Naturally, curious to see what was on the other side, she pulled the lever in front of her to try and open it –
F) But, as she and I rapidly discovered, all that did was turn the lights on. Which did allow her to get a better look at the area, at least! Admittedly, there wasn’t much two it – apart from the giant hatch door and the catwalk in front of it, the only things of note were two little rooms on either side of the hatch, about halfway up their respective walls and reachable only by portal because their catwalk stairs were broken. Chell thus proceeded down into the room and used portals to get into the room on the left (facing the hatch door) to see what was inside. And what was inside –
Was a big red button labeled “Hatch Recursion Override.” Aha – THAT was how you got the hatch open! Or, at least, one-half of how, given there were two stations. Chell tried pressing the button to see what happened – and while the hatch didn’t move, she did get a short 4-3-2-1 countdown on the nearby crude electronic screen. She promptly sussed out that this was one of those situations where you had to press two buttons at roughly the same time in order to trigger the effect you wanted, meaning the hatch really had to be opened by two attendants working in sync…
Or, you know, one very determined woman with a portal gun and experience with puzzles where she had to press one button and then rapidly get to another. :p She took a moment to determine the best way to get over to the other station (the catwalk in front of the hatch was a no-go, thanks to a pair of firmly-locked gates midway through denying access to the hatch), then portaled her way up and in before pressing the button in there to see how long the timer on THAT one was! It proved to be the same 4-3-2-1 – Chell filed that away, then set up one portal at the back of the station and one right beside the entrance to the other station –
And then hit the button again, ran through the portals, ran up to the other button, and hit that too. The Hatch Recursion Override obligingly engaged, and with a very dramatic sounding of alarms, the gigantic hatch lifted open:
To reveal a plain chunk of wall with the world’s tiniest, most unassuming door behind it. XD Yes, that is definitely in the spirit of Aperture. Still, at least it was a way forward!
And so I left things off with Chell hanging out by the tiny, unassuming door behind the hatch, ready to go through and see what had been vitrified so long ago! Next time, she braves more of Old Aperture, and probably finally gets introduced to the ancient recordings of one Cave Johnson...we’ll see how far I get! (And how long it takes me to sum it up, because damn.)
Workout: I actually ended up watching two videos with my workout tonight – mostly because, when I started my stationary bike ride, Jon of Many A True Nerd had not yet uploaded the F:NV YOLO Remastered finale. So I watched a short BG3 video first, then went back to his channel, where I saw to my relief that he’d finally put the video up. And it was short enough to still fit entirely into my remaining workout time, yay! :) So I ended up pedaling my way through both:
A) “Top 15 Astarion's funniest reactions in Baldur's Gate 3” by DragonsDream! Five minutes of hilarious lines from our favorite elf vampire. Including:
I. Astarion’s awkward confession that he is a vampire if somehow you never got the “bite night” scene, including him promising to be “the very model of virtue – cross my heart and hope to – uh...I’ll be good, I promise” XD
II. Weighing up the pros and cons of killing Gortash or leaving to Gale to die at the hands of Orin – “On the one hand, killing Gortash would be fun. On the other, Gale can be very annoying.” Don’t worry, Gale lovers, he comes down on the side of saving the wizard because he has his moments XD
III. His reaction to Karlach asking to join the team and take down the Paladins – “You want to just team up with some bloodstained killer?! Because I’m fine with that.” XD
IV. And of course probably his most famous line, if you let him get evaporated by the sunlight lance in the githyanki creche because you didn’t disable the superweapon before taking the Blood of Lathander mace – “What in the sweet hells were you thinking, activating that lance?! I WAS RIGHT THERE!” XD Followed by, if you note that the parasite is supposed to PROTECT him from sunlight, that “Well, apparently there’s a limit. Somewhere between a nice summer’s day and THE FULL CONCENTRATED POWER OF THE SUN!” XD I mean, it’s completely understandable that he’s upset, but still. XD
Yeah – when you see compilations like this, you understand how Astarion became the breakout hit character of the group. Not only does he get a number of delightful lines, Neil Newbon says them perfectly. :D I look forward to hearing some of these in my own game in the future!
B) And, of course, “Fallout New Vegas: You Only Live Once Remastered - Grand Finale - Doomed To Repeat It” by Jon of Many A True Nerd! The big wrap-up to P. D. Shoot’s drunken & high melee & unarmed adventures in the Mojave desert, with her facing down a deceptively simple challenge – survive the final room of the “Lonesome Road” DLC. What made it deceptively simple? Well, on the one hand, P. D. just had to fight about ten guys, who would be entering the room in waves of about two or three men at a time, without dying, and she won the day!
On the other hand, she had to fight those ten guys in a rather small area, and all of those ten guys would explode upon dying (Jon wasn’t sure if this was supposed to be a brilliant military strategy to try and make sure they took out P. D. even if they themselves got killed, or if it was just the game cleaning up the corpses so the engine didn’t go kaput midway through the fight). Meaning she had to get up close to kill them, and then IMMEDIATELY run away to avoid being killed by their corpses. Add in that the Marked Men were some of the few enemies in the game who could cheat when it came to detecting where she was (AKA, lob a grenade in the correct direction even if she was technically hidden), and – yeah. Jon was not expecting an easy fight. So, how did it go?
Pretty damn well for the most part! :D Here’s how P. D. handled the final challenge of the run:
I. First, she faced off against Ulysses – and, instead of talking him down, like she was very much capable of doing, she instead chose to fight him! Why, you ask? Well, it was pretty simple – if Ulysses died, she had to kill ten Marked Men, as per the above. If she didn’t, she was faced with killing twenty, because Ulysses would temporarily ally with her for that final fight, and the game would compensate for him being a tough son of a bitch by throwing more enemies at them in larger waves. Basically, she’d spare one guy and then have to fight nine or ten more. The math did not work out! (Plus, given that P. D. is not allowed to have companions help her fight, having Ulysses as an ally for the final battle would probably be against YOLO rules, though Jon didn’t mention that bit.) So, instead of going up to Ulysses and trying to talk him out of nuking the hell out of the NCR (for reasons that we don’t have time to go into here), she instead loaded herself up with drugs to boost her damage resistance and increase her critical hit chances and whatnot, coated her ballistic fist in potent poison, read a magazine to further increase her critical hit chance, walked up to Ulysses and told him in essence “I don’t care about all your carefully-prepared speeches, let’s have it out, right here, right now” –
Then, the minute she came out of dialogue, burned ALL of her Implant GRX doses and snuck around behind him before he could properly detect her. One sneak attack critical and one cross with her ballistic fist later, Ulysses was just a bunch of bloody chunks. Hooray!
II. Then, she had to take out the repair eyebot that had also been in the room and who objected to her killing its master. She quickly downed an Atomic Cocktail to boost her energy resistance as a preventative measure, dodged and weaved around its various blasts, then took it out with a couple of hits (mostly because VATS was being weird and giving her like zero chance to hit despite being right up in the robot’s literal grill at first, so she had to hit it with a manual attack – fortunately, the manual punch turned out to be a critical, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been).
III. Then, before the Marked Men started arriving, she took a second and ran back to Ulysses’s corpse to loot the hell out of it – specifically grabbing his unique Duster, which had DT 13 and added +5 to critical hit chance (making it slightly better than the Sierra Madre Reinforced Armor she was wearing, even if it had slightly less DT), and his unique melee weapon, Old Glory. A flagpole that had the Grand Slam special move and INCREDIBLY high critical hit damage PLUS a good critical damage multiplier on it, meaning – if you could stack all possible critical hit bonuses with this thing – it could do 1,500 damage on a sneak attack crit. Best weapon in the game, as per Jon – at least, if you were set up like good old P. D.!
IV. Then, at last, she faced off against the Marked Men! Where, after a few swings of Old Glory, she learned a very important fact about it – namely, it did a shitload of damage, but it absolutely DEVOURED her AP. And given there were Marked Men spawning into the room on the regular, she couldn’t afford to wait around very long for it to recover! So yeah, NOT the best weapon in the game, as it turned out. :p So after killing the first two Marked Men with it, she swapped back to the ballistic fist and did a whole bunch of drugs to keep her AP high so she could get it in as many hits as possible with it. She then more or less parked herself by the door where all the Marked Men were spawning so she could take them out one by one, running to the far corner to avoid their explosive deaths –
Which worked until a guy came in and started tossing grenades in her general direction! Because, again, these particular enemies are allowed to cheat when it comes to perceiving you. And while P. D. didn’t get caught by the initial grenade, she did get caught in his subsequent death explosion – mostly because it looks like when she killed him, he dropped a second grenade, and that went off before she could get away. Knocking 21 points off her health and bringing her down to 142. Ouch. *grimacing* However, that was not enough to bring her down, and despite having to run away for a moment before facing off against the final three guys to regain some AP and do a bit more Turbo to keep time nice and slowed, she did in fact finish killing everyone coming after her without taking any more hits. *whew* Hooray!
V. Then, of course, before she left the Divide, she had to do something about the nuke launch that Ulysses had set up. She couldn’t stop it, because, well, she’d abandoned LR ED-E to his fate back in the eyebot maintenance room (tch tch), so instead she had to choose her target – NCR, Legion, or both? (Because yes, you can just nuke them both if you’re a real bastard.) Fortunately for P. D., the choice was pretty easy –
Namely, nuke the jerks who never came through with a random box of 40-odd stealth boys like she’d been hoping when she first got access to the cache by Cottonwood Cove. XD She thus said “bye bye, Legion!” and fled the Divide as the nukes went off to destroy the Legion lands east of the Colorado River!
VI. And finally, after the ending slides talking about how she rained down nuclear death on the Legion territory that had once contained the last remnants of Ulysses’s tribe, the Twisted Hairs (who allied with, and then were betrayed and broken by, the Legion – and if you’re wondering why Ulysses doesn’t hate THEM, again, we don’t have time to go into that right now), buried her fellow courier wrapped in his precious old world flag, and walked through the Divide back to the Mojave untroubled by tunnelers or Marked Men (who respected and/or feared her too much to attack her at this point) – and how poor LR ED-E remained trapped in the installation, sending one final transmission to his Mojave counterpart regarding his memories before going silent – she exited the DLC and claimed her rewards! Which included:
a. The perk “Scourge Of The East,” allowing her to put a single point into one of her SPECIAL stats (she chose Luck because critical hits had been ESSENTIAL to her survival this run)
b. Copies of Ulysses’s duster and Old Glory in the goodies box (because apparently the DLC is VERY SURE you’ll be able to talk the guy down – or maybe that you’ll be too busy taking on the Marked Men to loot his corpse)
c. And the special Courier’s Duster (which comes in four versions depending on who you have the best reputation with at the time you complete the DLC – hilariously, P. D.’s was the Mr. House version (which gives Agility +1) despite her having murdered the guy because her reputation with The Strip, his faction, was better than her reputation with the NCR or the Legion. This is what happens when you spend the majority of the game playing nice with the Legion and then change sides because you want the goodies the NCR gives on their ending path!).
And so the episode, and the series, ended with P. D. returning to Goodsprings, watching the sun rise over the town from the nearby hill before parking her butt on Doc Mitchell’s couch because oh GOD did she need all the therapy, while Jon talked about how he was still stunned that he’d actually managed to complete the run, as he hadn’t been sure at all that it was doable when he first came up with the idea (once again bringing up the fact that he’d thought “Dead Money” with its Ghost People and deadly radios was going to be the end of P. D.). But no, he’d gotten through all the challenges, and even learned a few things – namely:
One – that the melee and unarmed skills and weapons were INCREDIBLY overpowered
Two – that “Logan’s Loophole” was an absolutely INCREDIBLE trait and probably his new favorite for all the ridiculous bonuses it gave
Three – that he had REALLY been sleeping on how incredible drugs were in New Vegas, ESPECIALLY Turbo and it’s ability to slow time
Important lessons, all. XD Next week – well, Jon’s got a new micro-challenge run on the docket! Possibly because, while he did thoroughly enjoy playing F:NV YOLO Remastered, he also found it rather stressful, so he kind of wanted something simpler for his next series. :p Don’t know which game it’s set in or what the premise is yet, but we’ll find out next Sunday! Looking forward to it. :)
And that is that! And now I should head to bed because I do have work tomorrow and I cannot stay up all night. *nods* Night all!
Tumblr: Was another nothing day over on Valice Multiverse, but I did manage to get a little more done on the “Valicer Eats God” post on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) before lunch! Mostly cleaning up the descriptions of everyone’s traits and fleshing out some of their trait expressions (how their traits inform their personality) and where they came from (example: Victor’s Trait Expression for his Fast Feet trait is “Running from my problems is an acceptable way to deal with them” – which comes from the fact that Victor spends a not-inconsiderable amount of Corpse Bride trying to literally run away from his problems XD). Didn’t get as much done as I might have liked, but I still made some progress, and that’s the important thing. *nods* Maybe next weekend I can push this damn post a little closer to “done!” (Either that or switch gears and work on the “how Victor and Alice learn Smiler’s legal name is ‘Marmaduke’” post...)
Portal 2: My Mother’s Day trip back to Aperture Science saw Chell get trapped by GLaDOS; fail to get killed by GLaDOS because of the work she and Wheatley had done ruining the turrets and disabling the neurotoxin earlier; initiate a core transfer with the help of portals; discover exactly WHY she shouldn’t have initiated that core transfer; get punched down a giant pit; land in the deepest bowels of the facility; and use portals to both navigate the wreckage and open up a giant hatch door into the oldest version of Aperture. *nods* And now that I’ve summed up my playsession in less than a minute, here’s the long version –
A) I picked up right where I left off last time, with Chell looking out across a worryingly-vast and empty space near the center of the facility, getting ready to leap through a couple of portals and into a room hanging in said empty space. After taking a moment to enjoy the vertigo-inducing scenery again, I had Chell pop herself through the portal, where she landed in a giant gray metal room in front of this door:
Yeah, uh, GLaDOS is not subtle. XD However, falling for the trap, or at least pretending to fall for it, was the only way to progress, so after checking the rest of the room for anything of use, Chell tried to open the door –
Aaand pulled it right off the wall, backing up rapidly so it didn’t fall on her. Moments later, GLaDOS started going on about how she truly believed that Chell wouldn’t fall for that, and how she’d prepared a nicer, much more elaborate trap for when Chell inevitably got out of this one, and how, if she’d known her nemesis was this easy to trick, she would have simply dangled a turkey leg in front of her – all while slowly shrinking the size of the room so Chell didn’t have anywhere to go. Rather than just crush her nemesis and be done with it, however, GLaDOS insisted on getting creative, dropping Chell into a relaxation vault (complete with toilet) and dragging her into her central chamber. She then informed Chell about how she was about to become the past president of the Being Alive Club while surrounding her with turrets –
All of whom were, of course, crap turrets. (One was even fully boxed!) As you might expect, they completely failed at shooting Chell, and after a minute, all of them exploded, cracking the glass keeping her contained in her vault. An annoyed GLaDOS noted that Chell had clearly been busy, then decided to instead reintroduce Chell’s old friend deadly neurotoxin into the mix. She smashed a big pipe into the side of Chell’s vault, advising her to take a big breath and hold it –
Aaaand instead of lethal gas, what came tumbling through the pipe was Wheatley. Whose arrival in the vault was the last straw for the glass, which all shattered, freeing Chell. GLaDOS: “I hate you so much.” XD We know, GLaDOS, we know.
B) Wheatley’s arrival triggered more than just GLaDOS’s unending hatred, though – it also triggered the Announcer to note that GLaDOS was at 80% corruption...and that an alternate core had been detected that could be used for a core transfer. GLaDOS, realizing what the Announcer was getting at, was like “are you SERIOUS” while Wheatley was extremely excited by the idea of being put in the mainframe. He encouraged Chell to plug him into the little port that popped up out of the floor, while GLaDOS coldly warned her not to do any such thing – Chell hesitated for a bit (because I wanted to get as much dialogue out of both of them as possible), but eventually did as Wheatley asked and plugged him in. The Announcer then asked if both cores were ready for the transfer – Wheatley said yes, while GLaDOS insisted no. The Announcer declared that the two cores were in stalemate, and that the transfer could not continue, causing Wheatley to start yelling for Chell to “pull me out pull me out pull me out” –
And then the Announcer added that the stalemate could be resolved if a stalemate associate was available to press the stalemate resolution button, opening up a nearby annex containing the button and causing Wheatley to switch to “leave me in leave me in leave me in.” XD However, GLaDOS was not about to let Chell just push that button and initiate the transfer – the moment Chell tried to get into the annex, she began popping up floor panels to force her back, informing her that she wasn’t qualified as a stalemate associate and she really should do stop doing things to add to GLaDOS’s list of all the things she’d done wrong. Wheatley promptly countered that, while Chell didn’t have the qualifications to be a stalemate associate, she did have a finger, and – after a failed attempt to confuse GLaDOS into thinking Chell had already pressed the button to give Chell the chance to press the button – began waxing on about how much he loved Chell’s ability to both resolve conflicts and press buttons. XD Once again, I had Chell pretend not to be able to figure out how to get past the panels for just long enough to get a bunch of dialogue out of them (because that’s one of the big reasons you play these games, to listen to the NPC’s chatter on) –
Then, once I was satisfied, had her shoot a portal at a convenient portal-able bit of floor in front of the stalemate button, and one at the wall next to it, to get past GLaDOS’s defenses. GLaDOS retaliated by creating a second, moving wall of raised floor panels around the button itself (so there was always a blockade of panels directly in front of Chell), but that was easily gotten around by having Chell shoot a portal on the opposite wall, then run through quickly and over the panels before GLaDOS could get them up on the correct side. Once she was through, she slapped the button, watching as Wheatley disappeared under the floor and GLaDOS was pulled down into a rising cylinder by a bunch of little mechanical arms –
And a few moments later, Wheatley emerged from said cylinder attached to GLaDOS’s body! He was absolutely thrilled, relishing in how absolutely massive he was and how much control he had over everything – though, as he called the escape elevator down, he DID admit that this would make it difficult for him to escape with Chell. Especially as his only plan – eject himself into the lift as it went by – could result in him and Chell being stranded in an elevator full of broken glass fifty feet off the ground. XD He encouraged Chell to get into the lift anyway, saying they’d work out the details later, and started sending her up, going on some more about how awesome being in control of the facility was and how smart he was now and so on, having a lovely little laugh about it all…
C) A lovely little laugh that rapidly became a big maniacal cackle. Which culminated in Wheatley wondering why they had to leave so soon and calling the elevator back down. Uh-oh. Cue poor Chell finding herself trapped in the elevator, having to watch first as Wheatley started going on about how he, tiny little Wheatley, had done all this –
And then as he got pissy over GLaDOS pointing out that Chell had actually done all the work. He declared “Oh really. That’s what the two of you think, is it?” (never mind that Chell hadn’t said squat), then dragged GLaDOS’s core back into the pit of mechanical arms at the center of the main room and turned her into a potato battery to humiliate her – all while informing Chell about how he was onto her now, how she was SELFISH and didn’t appreciate all he’d SACRIFICED to get here, and how she’d just BOSSED HIM AROUND, before adding quite menacingly, “NOW who’s the boss? Who’s the boss? It’s me.” He then displayed his PotatOS handiwork to her, gloating happily about how GLaDOS, former central core and god of the whole facility, now lived in a children’s toy –
Before GLaDOS revealed that she knew him. Because his voice was the voice of the Intelligence Dampening Sphere that the scientists had hooked onto her in one of their desperate attempts to make her behave. The voice that had done nothing but blather ridiculous, stupid ideas all day long to slow her down. Wheatley declared he wasn’t listening and insisted she was lying, but GLaDOS wouldn’t let up, declaring him to be “THE MORON THEY BUILT TO MAKE ME A IDIOT” –
Prompting Wheatley to have a bit of a temper tantrum, smashing PotatOS into the elevator with Chell and screaming about how he was NOT a moron and demanding “Could a MORON PUNCH! YOU! INTO! THIS! PIT? Huh? Could a moron do THAT?” while beating the elevator down into the shaft below –
Which, uh, naturally culminated in both PotatOS AND Chell falling through the floor and down into the bowels of Aperture. Leaving Wheatley to watch them fall with an “Uh-oh.” Whoops – guess a moron COULD punch them into that pit, eh, Wheaters?
D) And so began the “old Aperture” section of the game, with Chell and PotatOS falling down what felt like an endlessly-long elevator shaft into the bowels of the facility! PotatOS took the opportunity to confirm that her slow clap processor had made it into the potato, then informed Chell that she’d just put “the product of the greatest minds of a generation working together with the express purpose of building the dumbest moron who ever lived” in charge of Aperture. And then tested out her slow clap processor again to make sure it was still working. :p She then asked if Chell could take off one of her long fall boots and stuff her into it, just in case the pit wasn’t actually bottomless –
But before Chell could decide if she was going to do that or not (probably not), there was a loading screen, and we cut to the pair having fallen down into the deepest levels of Aperture. A bird promptly flew off with PotatOS, leaving Chell on her own as she stood up and retrieved her portal gun, then began exploring the debris-covered landscape she found herself in. (Debris and WATER-covered, in fact – Chell openly landed in a puddle. One wonders how she was not immediately electrocuted by her portal gun, given how poorly that thing reacts to liquid, but maybe she managed to toss it onto a bit of dry rusted metal first.) Slogging around brought her through what looked like the remains of some internal structure, with a fence blocking her passage deeper into the mess – fortunately, the wall on either side of the fence had some nice, portal-able patches painted on it, and she was able to use those to go around and continue her journey. Another set of portals helped get her over a mountain of debris preventing her from climbing up a slope – then, after winding her way through some old concrete walls that seemed to form a bit of a maze, she used a final set of portals to get up onto an old broken catwalk sticking out of a wall – to see this:
Yeah – pretty impressive, huh? I know Portal 2 is 15 years old this year (released in 2011, just like Alice: Madness Returns), but the destroyed wreck that is Old Aperture still holds up very well. :D Proof you do not need practically-photorealistic graphics to make a good game!
E) Having discovered the ancient ruins that made up the deepest levels of Aperture, Chell still had to find a way to navigate them. Fortunately, the busted catwalk she was on was directly over a pretty-solid looking beam walkway, so Chell dropped down onto that and followed it over to where another beam intersected it and made a ramp up. Following that brought her past various signs warning her to keep out and not to enter, and finally up to a big old wall stretching across the far left side of the room she’d found herself in. A wall that was covered in various signs once again telling her to scram and warning her of the dangers:
In case you’re having trouble, the yellow sign reads “WARNING: This enrichment shaft may contain unsafe quanities of cosmic ray spallation elements,” while the orange one reads “CONDEMNED: Vitrification Order 6/15/1961 Do not look at, touch, ingest, or engage in conversation with any substances beyond this point.” In short – bad juju ahead. But it was the only place that Chell could really go that wasn’t absolutely covered in rubble and rusty metal and other types of dangerous, occasionally-on-fire debris…
Which made it all the more frustrating that all the doors in the wall were locked very, very tight. Fortunately for Chell, portals remained the answer to all her problems, as there was a wall with a portal-able patch not far from the wall she was trying to get past, and another one way up high above her head over another catwalk. (Took me a minute to spot that one, I admit – I kept peering through the doorway covered by the metal shutter in the wall, thinking that the reason you could look through it was because you had to shoot a portal through it to get to the other side. Nope, red herring, just shows you what you could expect over there.) She thus portaled herself up there, followed the catwalk down to another portal-able patch of wall, then used another set of portals to get back down to ground level. Having successfully bypassed the barrier in her way, she then proceeded through the remains of what looked like a big metal tunnel, before following a giant pipe through the debris and up to a platform with a lever on it –
Overlooking a HUGE hatch door. Like, this sucker was GINORMOUS. Absolutely dwarfed poor Chell. Naturally, curious to see what was on the other side, she pulled the lever in front of her to try and open it –
F) But, as she and I rapidly discovered, all that did was turn the lights on. Which did allow her to get a better look at the area, at least! Admittedly, there wasn’t much two it – apart from the giant hatch door and the catwalk in front of it, the only things of note were two little rooms on either side of the hatch, about halfway up their respective walls and reachable only by portal because their catwalk stairs were broken. Chell thus proceeded down into the room and used portals to get into the room on the left (facing the hatch door) to see what was inside. And what was inside –
Was a big red button labeled “Hatch Recursion Override.” Aha – THAT was how you got the hatch open! Or, at least, one-half of how, given there were two stations. Chell tried pressing the button to see what happened – and while the hatch didn’t move, she did get a short 4-3-2-1 countdown on the nearby crude electronic screen. She promptly sussed out that this was one of those situations where you had to press two buttons at roughly the same time in order to trigger the effect you wanted, meaning the hatch really had to be opened by two attendants working in sync…
Or, you know, one very determined woman with a portal gun and experience with puzzles where she had to press one button and then rapidly get to another. :p She took a moment to determine the best way to get over to the other station (the catwalk in front of the hatch was a no-go, thanks to a pair of firmly-locked gates midway through denying access to the hatch), then portaled her way up and in before pressing the button in there to see how long the timer on THAT one was! It proved to be the same 4-3-2-1 – Chell filed that away, then set up one portal at the back of the station and one right beside the entrance to the other station –
And then hit the button again, ran through the portals, ran up to the other button, and hit that too. The Hatch Recursion Override obligingly engaged, and with a very dramatic sounding of alarms, the gigantic hatch lifted open:
To reveal a plain chunk of wall with the world’s tiniest, most unassuming door behind it. XD Yes, that is definitely in the spirit of Aperture. Still, at least it was a way forward!
And so I left things off with Chell hanging out by the tiny, unassuming door behind the hatch, ready to go through and see what had been vitrified so long ago! Next time, she braves more of Old Aperture, and probably finally gets introduced to the ancient recordings of one Cave Johnson...we’ll see how far I get! (And how long it takes me to sum it up, because damn.)
Workout: I actually ended up watching two videos with my workout tonight – mostly because, when I started my stationary bike ride, Jon of Many A True Nerd had not yet uploaded the F:NV YOLO Remastered finale. So I watched a short BG3 video first, then went back to his channel, where I saw to my relief that he’d finally put the video up. And it was short enough to still fit entirely into my remaining workout time, yay! :) So I ended up pedaling my way through both:
A) “Top 15 Astarion's funniest reactions in Baldur's Gate 3” by DragonsDream! Five minutes of hilarious lines from our favorite elf vampire. Including:
I. Astarion’s awkward confession that he is a vampire if somehow you never got the “bite night” scene, including him promising to be “the very model of virtue – cross my heart and hope to – uh...I’ll be good, I promise” XD
II. Weighing up the pros and cons of killing Gortash or leaving to Gale to die at the hands of Orin – “On the one hand, killing Gortash would be fun. On the other, Gale can be very annoying.” Don’t worry, Gale lovers, he comes down on the side of saving the wizard because he has his moments XD
III. His reaction to Karlach asking to join the team and take down the Paladins – “You want to just team up with some bloodstained killer?! Because I’m fine with that.” XD
IV. And of course probably his most famous line, if you let him get evaporated by the sunlight lance in the githyanki creche because you didn’t disable the superweapon before taking the Blood of Lathander mace – “What in the sweet hells were you thinking, activating that lance?! I WAS RIGHT THERE!” XD Followed by, if you note that the parasite is supposed to PROTECT him from sunlight, that “Well, apparently there’s a limit. Somewhere between a nice summer’s day and THE FULL CONCENTRATED POWER OF THE SUN!” XD I mean, it’s completely understandable that he’s upset, but still. XD
Yeah – when you see compilations like this, you understand how Astarion became the breakout hit character of the group. Not only does he get a number of delightful lines, Neil Newbon says them perfectly. :D I look forward to hearing some of these in my own game in the future!
B) And, of course, “Fallout New Vegas: You Only Live Once Remastered - Grand Finale - Doomed To Repeat It” by Jon of Many A True Nerd! The big wrap-up to P. D. Shoot’s drunken & high melee & unarmed adventures in the Mojave desert, with her facing down a deceptively simple challenge – survive the final room of the “Lonesome Road” DLC. What made it deceptively simple? Well, on the one hand, P. D. just had to fight about ten guys, who would be entering the room in waves of about two or three men at a time, without dying, and she won the day!
On the other hand, she had to fight those ten guys in a rather small area, and all of those ten guys would explode upon dying (Jon wasn’t sure if this was supposed to be a brilliant military strategy to try and make sure they took out P. D. even if they themselves got killed, or if it was just the game cleaning up the corpses so the engine didn’t go kaput midway through the fight). Meaning she had to get up close to kill them, and then IMMEDIATELY run away to avoid being killed by their corpses. Add in that the Marked Men were some of the few enemies in the game who could cheat when it came to detecting where she was (AKA, lob a grenade in the correct direction even if she was technically hidden), and – yeah. Jon was not expecting an easy fight. So, how did it go?
Pretty damn well for the most part! :D Here’s how P. D. handled the final challenge of the run:
I. First, she faced off against Ulysses – and, instead of talking him down, like she was very much capable of doing, she instead chose to fight him! Why, you ask? Well, it was pretty simple – if Ulysses died, she had to kill ten Marked Men, as per the above. If she didn’t, she was faced with killing twenty, because Ulysses would temporarily ally with her for that final fight, and the game would compensate for him being a tough son of a bitch by throwing more enemies at them in larger waves. Basically, she’d spare one guy and then have to fight nine or ten more. The math did not work out! (Plus, given that P. D. is not allowed to have companions help her fight, having Ulysses as an ally for the final battle would probably be against YOLO rules, though Jon didn’t mention that bit.) So, instead of going up to Ulysses and trying to talk him out of nuking the hell out of the NCR (for reasons that we don’t have time to go into here), she instead loaded herself up with drugs to boost her damage resistance and increase her critical hit chances and whatnot, coated her ballistic fist in potent poison, read a magazine to further increase her critical hit chance, walked up to Ulysses and told him in essence “I don’t care about all your carefully-prepared speeches, let’s have it out, right here, right now” –
Then, the minute she came out of dialogue, burned ALL of her Implant GRX doses and snuck around behind him before he could properly detect her. One sneak attack critical and one cross with her ballistic fist later, Ulysses was just a bunch of bloody chunks. Hooray!
II. Then, she had to take out the repair eyebot that had also been in the room and who objected to her killing its master. She quickly downed an Atomic Cocktail to boost her energy resistance as a preventative measure, dodged and weaved around its various blasts, then took it out with a couple of hits (mostly because VATS was being weird and giving her like zero chance to hit despite being right up in the robot’s literal grill at first, so she had to hit it with a manual attack – fortunately, the manual punch turned out to be a critical, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been).
III. Then, before the Marked Men started arriving, she took a second and ran back to Ulysses’s corpse to loot the hell out of it – specifically grabbing his unique Duster, which had DT 13 and added +5 to critical hit chance (making it slightly better than the Sierra Madre Reinforced Armor she was wearing, even if it had slightly less DT), and his unique melee weapon, Old Glory. A flagpole that had the Grand Slam special move and INCREDIBLY high critical hit damage PLUS a good critical damage multiplier on it, meaning – if you could stack all possible critical hit bonuses with this thing – it could do 1,500 damage on a sneak attack crit. Best weapon in the game, as per Jon – at least, if you were set up like good old P. D.!
IV. Then, at last, she faced off against the Marked Men! Where, after a few swings of Old Glory, she learned a very important fact about it – namely, it did a shitload of damage, but it absolutely DEVOURED her AP. And given there were Marked Men spawning into the room on the regular, she couldn’t afford to wait around very long for it to recover! So yeah, NOT the best weapon in the game, as it turned out. :p So after killing the first two Marked Men with it, she swapped back to the ballistic fist and did a whole bunch of drugs to keep her AP high so she could get it in as many hits as possible with it. She then more or less parked herself by the door where all the Marked Men were spawning so she could take them out one by one, running to the far corner to avoid their explosive deaths –
Which worked until a guy came in and started tossing grenades in her general direction! Because, again, these particular enemies are allowed to cheat when it comes to perceiving you. And while P. D. didn’t get caught by the initial grenade, she did get caught in his subsequent death explosion – mostly because it looks like when she killed him, he dropped a second grenade, and that went off before she could get away. Knocking 21 points off her health and bringing her down to 142. Ouch. *grimacing* However, that was not enough to bring her down, and despite having to run away for a moment before facing off against the final three guys to regain some AP and do a bit more Turbo to keep time nice and slowed, she did in fact finish killing everyone coming after her without taking any more hits. *whew* Hooray!
V. Then, of course, before she left the Divide, she had to do something about the nuke launch that Ulysses had set up. She couldn’t stop it, because, well, she’d abandoned LR ED-E to his fate back in the eyebot maintenance room (tch tch), so instead she had to choose her target – NCR, Legion, or both? (Because yes, you can just nuke them both if you’re a real bastard.) Fortunately for P. D., the choice was pretty easy –
Namely, nuke the jerks who never came through with a random box of 40-odd stealth boys like she’d been hoping when she first got access to the cache by Cottonwood Cove. XD She thus said “bye bye, Legion!” and fled the Divide as the nukes went off to destroy the Legion lands east of the Colorado River!
VI. And finally, after the ending slides talking about how she rained down nuclear death on the Legion territory that had once contained the last remnants of Ulysses’s tribe, the Twisted Hairs (who allied with, and then were betrayed and broken by, the Legion – and if you’re wondering why Ulysses doesn’t hate THEM, again, we don’t have time to go into that right now), buried her fellow courier wrapped in his precious old world flag, and walked through the Divide back to the Mojave untroubled by tunnelers or Marked Men (who respected and/or feared her too much to attack her at this point) – and how poor LR ED-E remained trapped in the installation, sending one final transmission to his Mojave counterpart regarding his memories before going silent – she exited the DLC and claimed her rewards! Which included:
a. The perk “Scourge Of The East,” allowing her to put a single point into one of her SPECIAL stats (she chose Luck because critical hits had been ESSENTIAL to her survival this run)
b. Copies of Ulysses’s duster and Old Glory in the goodies box (because apparently the DLC is VERY SURE you’ll be able to talk the guy down – or maybe that you’ll be too busy taking on the Marked Men to loot his corpse)
c. And the special Courier’s Duster (which comes in four versions depending on who you have the best reputation with at the time you complete the DLC – hilariously, P. D.’s was the Mr. House version (which gives Agility +1) despite her having murdered the guy because her reputation with The Strip, his faction, was better than her reputation with the NCR or the Legion. This is what happens when you spend the majority of the game playing nice with the Legion and then change sides because you want the goodies the NCR gives on their ending path!).
And so the episode, and the series, ended with P. D. returning to Goodsprings, watching the sun rise over the town from the nearby hill before parking her butt on Doc Mitchell’s couch because oh GOD did she need all the therapy, while Jon talked about how he was still stunned that he’d actually managed to complete the run, as he hadn’t been sure at all that it was doable when he first came up with the idea (once again bringing up the fact that he’d thought “Dead Money” with its Ghost People and deadly radios was going to be the end of P. D.). But no, he’d gotten through all the challenges, and even learned a few things – namely:
One – that the melee and unarmed skills and weapons were INCREDIBLY overpowered
Two – that “Logan’s Loophole” was an absolutely INCREDIBLE trait and probably his new favorite for all the ridiculous bonuses it gave
Three – that he had REALLY been sleeping on how incredible drugs were in New Vegas, ESPECIALLY Turbo and it’s ability to slow time
Important lessons, all. XD Next week – well, Jon’s got a new micro-challenge run on the docket! Possibly because, while he did thoroughly enjoy playing F:NV YOLO Remastered, he also found it rather stressful, so he kind of wanted something simpler for his next series. :p Don’t know which game it’s set in or what the premise is yet, but we’ll find out next Sunday! Looking forward to it. :)
And that is that! And now I should head to bed because I do have work tomorrow and I cannot stay up all night. *nods* Night all!
