Your Dutch Oven Killed a Titanoboa

(Part 1)
(Part 2)

Another day, another attempt to tame a raptor in the ugly Switch version of Ark: Survival Evolved. Surely we succeeded this time around, right? (Spoiler: Hahahahahahafuckoffhahahaha!)

Before we could begin our quest, we had to go on an expedition. We had already scouted all the forests and beaches in the vicinity of our camp and somehow managed to murder all of the raptors we tried to tame. Basically, the entire map section around our base was now infested with legions of dodos. They had become the dominant species on THEISLAND. And as if their constant squawking and shitting wasn't annoying enough, the situation really is a ticking time bomb. It's only a matter of time until some major predator is going to realize that our camp is basically a Flintstones KFC. We're all doomed.

Whilst waiting for our inevitable deaths, we decided to explore some new territory in order to find those raptors we were hoping to tame. This time, however, I wasn't going to leave without some protection. I brought our pack of dilophosaurs, had Ptetra come along for air support and rode into battle on Horm, our trusty triceratops. We travelled through a snake-infested swamp and eradicated dozens of titanoboas, helicopter flies and all sorts of carnivorous dinos. It was easily the most epic thing we had ever done on there. Our little pack of hunting dinos chasing prey all over the place, a pteranodon swatting giant bugs right out of the air and my three-horned battering ram knocking over the trees in our path as if they were matchsticks. Granted, much of the awesomeness happened in my imagination, because a combination of night time, low resolution and awkward first person riding made most of the adventure look like this:

It's like you're right there. And extremely near-sighted and possibly drunk. 

On our trip back from the swamp we discovered Awesome Beach, a place full of weird prehistoric horse things, beavers and birds. Oh yeah. And one giant asshole crocodilian creature, which splattered Claire all over the side of a cliff. So while she spent the next hour or so trying to sneak past the fucker in order to retrieve her gear, I started shooting random creatures out of the sky. I tamed something called a Dimorphodon and parked it on my shoulder. From now on, anything that got too close to me would get shredded to bits by my new pet. Meet Cheese Grater:

It's hard to tell what he's even supposed to be with these visuals.

Having discovered a fun new place to investigate, we parked our hunting pets at home, went back to the beach with a fresh lot of tranquilizer arrows and started hunting raptors again. It didn't take long for Claire to get jumped by one. I decided to sneak up on it and club it over the head while it sat on top of Claire and ate her face. That's when Cheese Grater just killed it. Ark defaults to first person and at that time I had completely forgotten about my shoulder bird and the fact it would attack anything that got in biting distance. Oh well, time to add another dead raptor to the ever-growing list of unintentional fatalities.

We kept exploring for a while, but it was getting dark, we were repeatedly attacked by snakes, leeches and other crap, we didn't find any raptors and when our gear started to wear down alongside our morale and patience, we decided to head back home and make things a little easier by taming the next thing we'd bump into for some added protection. It was some crappy low-level dilophosaurus. We already had half a dozen of these guys back at home and it looked puny and unimpressive, but it's all we had at the time. I named it Dutch Oven, fully expecting it would die in the first confrontation with monsters, anyway.

Little did we know he's the reptilian god of war.

It didn't take long for us to get jumped by random critters. Dutch Oven did his job and held them off, getting more and more injured each time. It only took about five minutes of this until he dropped all the way down to 20 HP, which is about as low as it sounds. "Yeah, another fight and he's gonna kick the bucket, but that's okay. We're almost home now." That's when the titanoboa bit me and knocked me out. And where there's a boa, you get two. We got three. It took a few moments, then Claire was unconscious, as well. Black screens. Fighting noises. All we had was a badly-injured, low-level dilophosaurus to protect our lifeless, dying characters against these snakes. Dutch Oven is the endbringer. He destroyed the snakes, eradicated the bunch of helicopter flies, who were starting to eat our sleeping characters, then murdered an entire pack of compies for good measure. He also ate (!) a raptor Claire managed to tranquilize on the way home, so there's another victim claimed by Mission Raptor. We're gonna tame one of them, someday!
I have no idea how the hell this little shit is so deadly and practically invincible, but we took him back to camp, where he's allowed to reign free and fuck all the other dilophosaurs, the triceratops and the brontosaurus. Because he earned it and I sure as hell ain't crazy enough to try and stop him. He's the leader of our tribe now and I'll do whatever he says.

So our latest attempt at bringing home a raptor resulted in us taming the god-lizard and a cheese grater. Time to head out AGAIN, this time without any aggressive pets and just tranquilizers. More beavers, more swamp and plucking leeches from each other's faces. Yep, that's a thing in this game. Then, out of nowhere, Claire was obliterated by a tornado of claws and feathers. "Raptor", she shouted. Sure, the thing was aggressive, it shredded her to bits and we've seen feathered raptors on there before, so it all checked out. Except the fucker ate what must have been a dozen tranquilizers before he ripped Claire to pieces. I lucked out and pushed him over the edge with another shot or two when he came after me. He crashed out and got stuck face-first inside a random hill with only his ass poking out of the ground. We had no idea what the hell we just knocked out, but it sure as fuck wasn't a raptor.

uuuh... prehistoric murder turkey?

Whatever it was, we fucking wanted it! Claire guarded it with her torch, while I proceeded to shove all the meat and fish I could find up the creature's ass. And it ate nothing!
Turns out that this monster, which jumped us out of nowhere, required dozens of tranquilizers and killed one of us in under five seconds was a herbivore. Makes sense, carrots are super deadly, after all! I spent the next half hour gathering truckloads of berries, while Claire kept unloading tranq darts into the fucker. Feed, keep knocking him out, try not to kill him in the process. I'm sure Steve Irwin was smiling down at us from above.
It took all of our tranquilizers, millions of berries and a whole lot of fighting (snoring turkey monster attracted a bunch of curious predators), but finally, an eternity and a half later, we had a brand new friend and I immediately hated his ugly hipster face, which stared down at me with its dumb afro and a goatee, all made out of feathers.

He looks perpetually surprised and 34% worried, just like Martin Freeman. I hate Martin Freeman.

Apparently, the thing we just tamed was a therizinosaur. A herbivore (again, wtf?) so fierce and deadly, it rivals the sheer destructive force of a T-Rex. Okay, we came to get a raptor and got a free upgrade instead. This thing would eat raptors for breakfast if it wasn't fucking vegan. It towered above all our other dinos. It had claws as big as our entire characters. It had an incredibly dumb face and Claire decided to name it Theon, which made me hate both of them.

AAAH! Go away, Theon! You and your stupid hipster chin feathers!

Murdering all the creatures in the land helped us gain a bunch of levels. And in doing so, I finally learned how to craft a saddle for Ptetra. Walking was for plebs now. I could fly! Wankshark Airlines was ready to ... oh right, we only had one flying mount. Apparently you can make your pteranodon pick up another player in its talons, but Petra wasn't strong enough to lift both of us at the same time, so we had to brutally beat the shi... ahem, lovingly tame an extra airplane.

What came next was one of the weirdest things I've ever done in a videogame. We flew around the place on our pteranodons, found some weird alien structures, went past rivers and waterfalls and got jumped by raptors, who threw themselves off a cliff as they chased us. Had a nice dogfight with a bunch of flying giant ants, as well. With barrel rolls and everything.
The video quality is absolutely terrible even for this game, because it was now 3 in the morning, we played in handheld mode and the Switch refuses to replace the giant billboard placeholder tree graphics with actual trees when you get close to them too quickly, which basically happens all the time while flying. But hey, we were having fun!

We saw what looked like a giant volcano, a bunch of snowy mountains and some huge-ass eagles, which were probably bigger than the dinos we flew around on. There's a lot more to do on here. We've barely touched the surface. Also, we should probably try and actually tame one of those fucking raptors already.