Ark Reborn - Dying in Glorious 4K

I've done a thing.
If you're somewhat familiar with my blog, then you're probably aware of my Ark diaries. I've sunk countless hours into the Nintendo Switch version, wrote about all my glorious misadventures, then somehow turned this into my RL job. I'm not making this up. I pay my bills by bitching about Ark: Survival Evolded and other horrible games. Between that, some actual game reviews here and there and people throwing money at me for furry porn, I almost make a decent living. Or I would do, if it wasn't for Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs aaaand we're already drifting way off. Focus, damn you!

So. Ark. Dinosaurs. Survival. Yeah. I love this game on Switch. I've been playing videogames for all my life and I had a whole lot of really awesome moments in a lot of games. Completing heists on GTA with some good friends, laughing so hard that we couldn't breathe. Defeating Ragnaros during the first year of WoW. Dominating the absolute shit out of several consecutive lobbies and sessions in countless fighting games and shooters. Watching Warframe's Rebecca and Meg try to pronounce my username. But if I had to name that one moment, that single-most awesome day I ever had in any game ever, it would have to be our journey across THEISLAND with all our favourite dinos, which we gathered up for a boss battle.

If you're bored enough to actually click on that video above, all you see is the two of us stomping about the place on a bunch of blurry, pixellated dinosaurs. I cannot possibly describe to you what a thrill this was. Every single one of these dinos has a story. We've stalked some of them for actual days! Our massive gigantosaur must have killed me hundreds of times. We crafted thousands of items, built ramps, traps and ladders, spent insane amounts of hours until we finally captured him.

I remember every hunt, every taming attempt, all the drama, anger, frustration and the sense of reward when we finally managed to tame one of these suckers. Gathering up the lot of them, watching them rule THEISLAND together, absolutely nothing left to stop us - it's something you just don't get if you spawn in a bunch of random high level dinos and wreck the place in five minutes. We worked our way up from tiny, helpless little sacks of flesh, clueless morons with absolutely no idea how anything works. Absolutely destroying the place with a pack of the absolute deadliest dinos in the game wasn't something we cheated up in a few seconds. We worked on that for hundreds of hours. That shit was our reward. It meant something. Doesn't matter if you get it or not. It was a pretty big deal for us.

And now we party!

And then we played the game less and less. Not because we got bored or ran out of stuff to do. But because of technical issues. Before starting a game, you have to adjust several pages full of options and settings and sliders. This plus the insane load times will easily take up a whole five minutes or more before you're even in the game. And then Ark will reliably crash once every 30-60 minutes. It may run for a whole two hours before the crash on a good day or instantly kill itself after less than ten minutes. Good days or bad - the crash is ultimately inevitable.

Every crash means having to set all the options again for a new session. It also means repeating everything you've done up to ten minutes before the crash, because that's how often the game autosaves. If you were on a flying mount during the last save before the crash, you'll spawn into the game in mid-air, fall to your death, then spend the rest of the day trying to retrieve your flying mount and all pets and belongings you had on you at the time.

Time and time again you'll wake up alone, naked and fucking shredded for some reason.

These problems just kill all motivation to play any serious content. You simply can't explore caves and search for boss artifacts if you could crash at any moment, lose tons of progress and find yourself forced to retrieve what's left of your shit from a pool of lava, because Ark always autosaves at the worst possible moment.
Of course there's always the Steam version, but there's just no way I'd ever want to start over. I'm attached to all our dinos, to our ugly little base camp, our characters, all the dozens upon dozens of hours we've spent building it all from nothing. There's just no way I'd ever give up on all that! So no Steam version for me. Unless ...

Okay. So I went and re-created Camp Nova and all our progress and dinos from the Switch version on PC, down to the last pixel, by hand. The little video above shows a comparison of how every hut, dino, crop plot and just about everything else appeared on Switch, compared to its PC counterpart. I used console commands to spawn in each of our dinos, named and coloured them just like on Switch, put our houses in the exact same spots using the exact same materials, paintjobs and furniture. No tweaks, no upgrading, no editing anything in our favour, with two exceptions.

One, I fixed some of the messy wiring we had on Switch, because building stuff just feels a little bit easier with a mouse and a platform that runs the game at more than 10 FPS. Two, I've added some weird fertilizer machines to our crops (the blue and yellow glowing cylinders), so I won't have to spend 80 percent of my play time collecting dino shit and spreading it on my taters when I could be exploring, fighting, taming and doing all the cool stuff that happens outside of the poop farming gameplay loop.

It's ugly and ramshackle as base camps go. But it's home.

And one all-nighter later, I had re-created all our stuff from Switch on the PC version, coming as close to perfection as one could possibly get. We were ready to continue our big adventure in marvellous 4k! And with a tougher ruleset to boot!

First of, we kept the difficulty slider on the highest setting. Back when we first started on Switch, we had no idea what we were doing, got owned a lot and toned things down. But it's max difficulty on PC, baby!
Secondly, no save scumming. Back on Switch, it got a little out of hand. We're out hunting, Claire brings her favourite raptor. Raptor dies, we terminate the game, load the most recent autosave, raptor is fine. I can absolutely understand the motivation here, but death should matter. And so it does on PC. Holy shit, does it ever! But I'll get to that in a minute.
Lastly, we're raising the affinity for health, carry weight and stamina on our tamed dinos. We're only two people. In between managing camp, generators, crops, feeding troughs, taming and exploration, we simply can't spend even more time selectively breeding tons upon tons of every species in order to get ideal stats. We're tweaking the sliders in a way that makes our dinos tougher and lets them become useful mounts fairly quickly. They're not immortal, they also don't oneshot brontos, but they're definitely sturdier than average.
This is how we balance our game. We want it to be challenging, without it becoming completely impossible. It's what works for us. Your mileage may vary.

Rest in peace, Fidget!

So, about that death thing.
Once everything was set up and good to go, we decided to re-explore THEISLAND, now that it's all in super high resolution and incredibly detailed and what not. So we hopped on Twitches, our gallilimus. Up to three people can sit on him, he's an incredibly fast runner and he's really great at jumping, too. Claire controlled him while I was sitting on the tail end, pointing at stuff with my shotgun. It looks a little something like this:

In the video above you may notice how there's a rather spectacular leap off a cliff. You may also notice how our dino is covered in blood and bruises. I did make my driver away of this, asking about fall damage. She told me our dino can take it. He could not. After one too many giant leaps, Twitches got crushed and never got up again. Something about carrying two people in heavy riot gear and gravity-induced blunt trauma.

Now we were short one gallilimus, miles and miles away from home and surrounded by hungry raptors and other nasty shit. And I can only shotgun so many things at once. We managed to hang in there for a while, but were ultimately overwhelmed.

At that point, my day was ruined. We lost a dino, we got owned by wildlife, and now I was just sitting there, watching as my unconscious character and his belongings were torn to shreds. These moments are incredibly frustrating. Not only was Twitches an incredibly fun, useful dino, but the gear I was about to lose is pretty hard to craft and repair at this point in the game. And my pet otter, who accompanied us on the journey, was likely toast, as well.

Yeah well. Turns out the otter was the one thing that stopped this miserable day from turning into an absolut catastrophe. Claire managed to turn him aggressive before she got munched on, so the little shit went absolutely berserk and defended our characters and their stuff with the burning fury of a thousand suns.
So my character is just on the ground sleeping and you can hear stuff get torn to shreds by an angry otter. Meanwhile, a giant turtle keeps running back and forth across the screen, chasing after a naked Claire (all her gear got eaten), who occasionally forces stimulants down my throat in order to wake me up. And by some miracle, she manages to revive me on time, I nuke the damn turtle and we make our way back home, past two more angry raptors and through shark-infested waters. You can watch all of it in the video below. Full disclosure: Raptors usually pin you down and completely fuck you up when they chase you. They didn't do that in the video, which is likely the only reason we ever made it back home. Apparently this is because of a mod, which also stops little dinosaurs from stealing your items. I may have to deactivate this, because for as annoying as that first experience on PC was, I want raptors to be deadly. I mean, they're fucking velociraptors, damn it!

So we made it back home, repaired our stuff, everything was great. Except, you know, we no longer had a gallimimus. So we decided to travel out into the redwoods and tame a new one. Fully unprepared, because I had not touched the game in a year and had no recollection of how fucking terrible these fuckers are to tame.
We went with the strategy that worked for our giga, it works for a rex and for most of the other aggressive dinos in this game: Claire picked me up with her argentavis and I started pelting random gallis with tranquilizing arrows from above. See, if you do that sort of thing to an angry carnivore, it's gonna come after you, trying to eat you as you dangle in the air like a tasty treat. Thing is, the gallilimus had absolutely zero interest in attacking and simply ran away at a speed, which made it impossible for us to chase after it. Even in the unlikely event that we managed to shoot one enough times, it would rather die than get knocked out by the tranquilizers.

Bolas didn't work anymore, either. On Switch you can just tie them up, then knock them out. Doesn't work on Steam. There's also a lot more dino activity on PC in general, so you rarely get the chance to chase after any of these guys before some predator gets ahead of you and eats them. To cut a long story short, there was no way we were gonna catch one of those guys using our usual methods.

Okay, so the old tease & dangle didn't work. So we moved on to plan B: poking and licking. And our day got a lot more fun before getting so much worse.
Basically, we changed from a flying mount to a scorpion and a toad, respectively. My scorpion comes with a nice stinger, which puts animals to sleep. Claire's toad can tranquilize critters by hitting them with its tongue. Of course we had to experiment first. See how many pokes and/or licks it would take to put a critter to sleep. This may sound scientific, but it really just boils down to the two of us being dicks to random animals for a bit:

Now is probably a good time to remind you that I'm only used to the Switch version of Ark.
Poking and licking random animals was hilarious. We got a little crazy. We poked dinos and licked snakes. We wiped out an entire swamp full of creatures. We felt untouchable. You can do that sort of thing on Switch and get away with it. On PC, however ... well, I poked a dimorphodon. And these guys are social. I just wanted to see whether I could knock one out in one hit. Instead, I was immediately surrounded by a cloud of dimorphodons, which completely ignored my tanky mount and murdered me pretty much instantaneously. Respawn back at camp - no gear, no mounts, no gallimimus. Fanfuckingtastic!

Sure, it's not as terrible as it sounds. I mean, we still had spare mounts back at camp, so for as long as we managed to get back to the swamp before our dropped items despawned and our pets got murdered or starved to death, we'd be fine. Just get an air lift, jump down there in your underpants, collect all your pets and items and you're all set.
Too bad the place is full of fucking crocodiles, so several rescue attempts proved unsuccessful.

In the end, what worked out was this:
Get dropped in the swamp in my underpants, attempt to find the correct otter, jump on the mount, get knocked unconscious by a snake, watch helplessly as your otter runs for its life and Claire and the mounts attempt to fight off the invading snakes, finally wake up after the battle is over, retrieve the gear - DONE! Everything turned out okay!
Except ... aw shit. We still never actually got what we came here for in the first place. The fucking gallimimus!

We rode across the redwood. We weren't taking any risks that time. We brought Rocky, Claire's argentavis, for air support. We licked. And we poked. We got mauled by bears. We got chased by all the predators. We got lost, fell off cliffs, got stuck, spent several nights in complete darkness before continuing our hunt time and time again. Here's the thing, though: You don't catch a gallimimus with a frog. You don't catch one with a scorpion, either.

This sucked ass. We had lost the one thing we seemed utterly incapable of re-taming. Of course, if we're being honest, it didn't really matter. At this point in time we have no friends or loved ones playing with us, so it's not like we desperatly needed a mount for three players. We had plenty of other mounts, including every flying one under the sun. But I had spent an entire night painstakingly re-creating every last detail from our Switch playthrough and I simply didn't want to accept that the first thing that was gonna happen was the loss of one of our most fun utility-pets.

We decided to farm some resources to craft rifles and tranquilizing darts. Maybe bear traps. Different tools to catch a galimimus some other way. When returning home from one of these farming runs one night, another advantage of the PC version became apparent: lighting and draw distance. Arriving back home in complete darkness made our camp stand out like a busy airport. It was quite a sight:

On a mildly related note, one of these farming trips also lead to the most cruel sentence I've ever heard Claire utter in real life: "It takes like four shots to kill a baby penguin." Ahem. Yeah. See, in order to create certain items you need organic polymer. Penguins are a great natural source of this stuff. I try to kill as few of them as quickly as possible to get only the amounts of stuff I need. Claire hunts down baby penguins, because they drop the most resources for some reason. I felt like Donald Trump Jr. Gross!

But then, out of some incredible luck, something amazing happened! Something completely unexpected and so lucky, I felt that Ark and I could be friends again and I could finally start to really enjoy our journey on here. Behold:

In case you can't be fucked to watch dozens of little videos whilst reading a blog or you simply don't understand what happened: We got a free gallilimus. We were on our way home from butchering dozens of innocent baby penguins farming essential resources when we spotted a cache down the side of a cliff. More importantly, however, I spotted two gallis just derping about on the edge of that very same cliff, so I started shooting one with tranquilizing arrows.

Not wanting to accidentally murder it again, I tried a different strategy this time. After every shot I counted to five before shooting again. According to the interwebs, this gives the tranquilizer enough time to fully unfold its full effect before you damage the dino again with another potentially deadly arrow. So I hit him once, twice, then the fucker fell off the cliff. Fortunately for us, however, the dino got stuck between some trees down below, so we actually managed to knock it out without killing it (by about 1.8 hit points!) and tamed it! WE HAD A NEW GALLILIMUS! Woo!

We had a difficult journey ahead of us, but nothing we haven't done a hundred times for a hundred different dinosaurs before. Walk Fidget home to camp, protect her from predators, slowly and carefully, one step at a time. No problem. We had Charon, our tapejara for air support. We fed and healed her before we even started our trip. Then we navigated her through piranha-infested waters, past giant but mostly harmless herbivores, moved some oversized insects out of the way and ferried her past a pissed-off therizinosaur. Then it got dark, so we decided to sit and camp for the night. Never a good idea to move a fragile, vulnerable dino through the pitch-black nights on THEISLAND. Well, you can see all that in the video above.

So we waited for daytime, took our new dino home to camp in one piece, and everyone lived happily ever after. The end.
Except, that didn't actually happen. Claire got impatient and decided to scout ahead on Charon. "The path down to the beach is clear", she said. I figured the beach might be an easier place for me to guard Figdet, because at least no threats would emerge from the water, which is slightly better than sitting in an open field. We made three steps, then we got jumped by a level 64 carnotaurus and his posse. My gear exploded instantly. It wasn't just damaged - my items were completely destroyed from the ridiculous amounts of damage that came our way. Fidget just vaporized on the spot and didn't even leave a corpse.

Me at that precise moment.

I was done. I was just completely fucking done at that point. With Ark. With games. With computers. Just fuck it. I just turned the damn thing off and was already half-way back to bed when I remembered I had only been up for four or five hours.
Only on Ark. Only in this fucking game are you forced to helplessly watch as everything is repeatedly taken away from you. Then the game tricks you, throws the one thing you really want straight into your lap. Only to laugh at you and watch you suffer as it takes it all away once more. It's the endless cycle of suck. And I had enough. I'm playing videogames to escape misery and existential dread, not to make me feel worse. Fuck this shit.

Yeah well. I decided to simmer down and do some research. Allegedly, a quetzal can just lift up a gallilimus with its claws. So Claire saddled Nasca, our quetzal originally known as Kali, until it was politely pointed out to me what an idiotic name that was for a quetzal, because I'm ignorant and mixing my cultures. Claire hovered our big old bird over Polygon, our stegosaurus, and tried to pick her up. Polygon wasn't exactly happy about it, but what do you know - Nasca was strong enough to carry her up into the air!
So I went and bolted a chair to our quetzal's massive platform saddle and off we went.

So we flew back to the redwood, but before we even had the chance to look for the dino we needed, we were instantly jumped by a pack of dilophosaurs. That's where we noticed something really cool: Quetzals have a hilarious knockback attack. So we spent the next five minutes playing a round of dilo golf:

Finally, we spotted our first gallilimus, tried to pick it up and - nothing. Tried a different one. Still nothing. Perhaps we were too heavy? I hopped off the quetzal, Claire tried picking up various other dinos, mammals and snakes and lifted them all up without issue. Gallilimus? Not a chance!

In the end, we did what any reasonable scientist would do and crushed one of the bastards. Parked the fucking quetzal right on top of it and trapped one underneath. Then I went and shot it with tranquilizers. One arrow ... three, four, five. Another! ...two, three, four, five. And one more. Rinse, repeat.

Finally, the dino went down and we managed to tame it. But even after we managed to make Bill Clinton, our third gallilimus that day, our own, there was no way Nasca could pick him up. And judging by our last attempt, simply walking Bill home wasn't going to work.
So, in case you're actually still watching these, here is what we did:

The nice thing about platform saddles is that you can build structures on top of them. So we left Bill Clinton in his safe spot and started chopping down trees, which I used in order to set up a makeshift cage on top of Nasca.
Now Claire had to find a ramp tall enough for Bill Clinton to make his way on top of Nasca. We settled for some pointy rocks nearby and tried to get him to jump on the platform. It was like threading a needle. Maneuvring an incredibly skittish, panicking dinosaur on top of an oversized prehistoric robo-bird is a lot more difficult than you'd think. Or maybe it isn't. I have absolutely no clue how easy you may or may not think it is. I'm just making conversation. No, you are being weird!

I had to heighten the walls of our cage a bit in order to help catch the jumping dino. In the end, we managed to thread the needle, then balance Bill Clinton inside the cage as we air-lifted him back to camp. His face glitched through the side of the cage a bit, having us worried he might just bug out completely and fall through, but finally, after an entire day of nothing but misery and suffering, we got our brand new gallimimus home safe and sound.

Fuck my life, man. An entire day and night wasted on such incredibly stupid bullshit. Putting god knows how much time and effort into obtaining something most sane people either would give up on or cheat with a console command. But I refuse to cheat myself out of stupid adventures like this one. And, more importantly, we have now discovered a new taming method: the pancake and cage! Flatten them with a quetzal, then catapult them on top of the bird to fly them home before they know wtf is going on. I think I wanna try that exact strategy with a bear tomorrow! What can possibly go right?

Ark: Boss Battle Time

After nearly a whole year, or, more precisely, several hundred hours playing Ark: Survival Evolved on Switch, we had reached a point where we have crafted, tamed and obtained just about everything you can get - and then some.

After it was confirmed in a recent interview, that the Switch version is to receive all missing updates and DLC, I was interested to see whether the Switch already had any content, which went beyond the things you can see and tame in the basic version of the game. And what do you know - we've got bionic dinos in all the flavours, as well as griffins. Interesting!

May as well have one, now that I know they're here.

Having explored many of the caves on THEISLAND, we had acquired a nice collection of boss relics. We never really intended to fight these bosses, seeing as we're only two players. Besides, there's nowhere else to go after completing the one and only area in this game. But since that's about to change in the not so distant future and we're dangerously out of stuff to do, we figured we may as well give it a shot.

My otter and I were as ready as one could get.

With the Switch version being as quirky as it is, some of our strongest dinos had somehow managed to get melee damage bonuses of several thousand per cent, despite the fact we never touched the affinity settings for damage in any way. The only thing we did tweak in our favour were the sliders for dino health and stamina, since breeding dozens upon dozens of dinos for ideal mutations simply isn't massively enjoyable with only two players and only 24 hours in a day. So we had a few strong dinos with the recommended ~30k health for the boss fight, some of which were capable of hitting quite a bit harder than they should. Especially with all the pack buffs and roars and what have you. 

Claire was ready, too. I think. Bit hard to tell with the low-resolution Switch visuals. But she looks ready.

It's a bit annoying how our rexes hit for 1-2k, which can go all the way up to 6k with buffs, because it trivializes boss battles a little bit. Especially when you only fight their gamma versions - but it was our first attempt at this, so we had no idea what to expect or how it would go. We're gonna tackle the alpha versions of all three bosses in the coming days, but you have to start somewhere.

The biggest problem was moving our 20 strongest dinos to the obelisk where the boss is summoned. Moving the giga and the rexes was simple enough, since there isn't a tree in the world that could stop them. 

Basically, if Darth Vader was a dinosaur.

The official wiki recommends 19 rexes and a uterus to buff them. We don't have these numbers, so we had to make substitutions. One of them happened to be a sarco, which turned out to be a terrible idea. Basically, they're terribly slow on land, forcing the entire group to wait for them all the time. At the same time, however, they're faster than light when traveling through water, meaning it was now waiting for the entire group to catch up. We also threw in a high level scorpion for good measure, because it's the best we had. You know, everything but the kitchen sink or however the saying goes.

Some dinos handled the terrain better than others.

When we had finally moved everyone to the boss battle area, the whole thing only lasted for about a minute. We just stomped the boss into the ground. Some of our dinos got injured pretty badly, but there were no casualties. If I could go back (and we will, soon!), I'd crank that fight up to maximum difficulty. But again, we had to start somewhere to see how it all goes.

The trophy was too big to fit inside my house.

The journey to the obelisk and back, as well as the boss fight against the brood mother, was actually quite spectacular. Look at the video and tell me how this is supposed to be the worst game on Switch:

As an added bonus, I recorded a little bit of footage whilst riding shotgun on the back of Claire's griffin. We made an interesting new friend while we were up there. I don't care what everyone else says, I really love this game.

Ark: Survival Evolved on Switch Has Changed my Life

I've gone and done something fun in autumn 2018 - I decided to spend all of our remaining money for that month on the Switch version of Ark: Survival Evolved. Not only that, but I bought it twice, so Claire could play it with me. I just installed it on her console while she was at work, then surprised her with it when she came home. She couldn't have been more excited had I just microwaved her cat, instead. I'm still not entirely sure what she was so upset about, just because the game was ridiculously overpriced at nearly 60 quid a pop at the time, sold entirely on lies and rapidly became known as the worst game on the system. Not 'one of the worst' - the worst. No game worserer than Ark.

Advertisement screenshot on the Nintendo eShop.

Actual ingame screenshot. Almost perfectly identical.

But we fired it up and gave it a fair shake, anyway. The Switch was a different animal back then. In between Nintendo's admittedly amazing first-party releases, we got a whole lot of stupidly overpriced WiiU ports and a bunch of okay-ish indie games we enjoyed on Steam seven years ago at a fraction of the price Nintendo would charge on their hybrid platform. In 2019 I have neither the time, nor the money to play even half of the games I want to own, let alone finish on there. But I digest.

We hated it. We absolutely hated every single minute we had to spend on there. Our first steps into Ark were weird, confusing and straight-up bizarre. I blogged about it in all detail, so let's just go with an abridged version here - Claire died, she respawned, we chopped up her corpse, roasted it over an open fire, then ate it. This led to her character taking a massive shit, so we sat by the fire, next to her half-eaten corpse, and used the emote system to cheer at a massive pile of crap. Ark in a nutshell.

We'd encounter much, MUCH bigger shits later on.

It wasn't very fun, but we decided to at least try and get our money's worth until we developed what might just be some form of digital Stockholm syndrome. By the time we tamed our first ever dilophosaur, we started to care. In this virtual world where absolutely everything is out to kill you and make your short, wretched life absolutely miserable, we suddenly had a friend. We went out and started to hunt. We had a dino friend, who grew stronger and more experienced alongside us. We finally had a fighting chance. Well, we did until we took a walk up Raptor Hill towards Horror Beach, where we lost all our humble belongings and our first ever pet, but by then we were determined to carry on and get it all back.

I frequently blogged about all of the stupid crap we did on there until the good folks at GameStar magazine said they could imagine featuring a German version of my Ark diaries on their premium section. Just a one-off, a goofy little something to entertain people for Christmas.
Almost a year has passed since then, and writing goofy game diaries has more or less become my job. I'm covering all sorts of games these days, and, more often than not, am asked to play incredibly lousy games for the sake of making these articles more entertaining. Basically, I get to play terrible games nobody else wants to look at, I moan about how much I hate them, then I get paid. People ended up liking angry diary-style articles so much, I started writing most of my articles that way, including a recent review about the excellent Remnant: From the Ashes. It's pretty awesome, really - I mostly get to write whatever I want, for as long as it's in the same style I used when I first started writing about our experiencs on Ark.

It's muddy and blurry, but I find it quite beautiful in places.

Today I have nearly 100 games on my Switch. It has replaced my PC as my gaming platform of choice, and I spend several hours playing with it just about every single day. But the one game I have played the most, the one I've spent more hours with than I have with Smash, Mortal Kombat, Dark Souls or Zelda, is Ark: Survival Evolved.
And yes, I could just buy the Steam version of that game, play with much better visuals, enjoy all the expansions and DLC and have a much bigger community, which consists of more than just five or so semi-active servers like on Switch. But we've spent literally hundreds of hours taming our dinos, building our base camp and making the one and only selectable level on Switch our home.

It's weird. I'm a sucker for maxed-out eyecandy. I will crank all the visual settings in every PC game all the way to the max, I'll sacrifice smooth 60 FPS gameplay over a bit of extra detail any day. But when I play this fuzzy, blurry, stuttering portable version of Ark, I'm having too much fun to even think about all the detail I'm missing by not playing it on Steam. I have a massive camp with well over a hundred dinos, each of which we've tamed, named and leveled-up by hand. Every building, every feeding trough, every stupid potato growing in our crop plots - we've created all of it, ourselves. And it fits in my pocket. I can check on our pets, build, explore, lead a pack of raptors around the place anywhere I go. We've played Ark on family visits, in the pub and at the park. I couldn't be more amazed by how this is even possible on a portable device if I was born in the stone age and had never seen a videogame in my life.

We care about these derpy faces almost as much as we do about our real pets.

Despite its ugly visuals, I genuinely believe that the Switch port of Ark is a technical marvel. Every creature, every boss fight, each and every item, mechanic, costume - absolutely everything you can find in the PC and console versions of Ark, is also included in the Switch version, sans DLC. Our camp has over a hundred dinos, all of which have their own AI and behaviour settings, hunger levels, favourite food, mates, paths they like to explore and what have you. And that shit runs on a crappy little portable device. No, it doesn't run overly well, it doesn't look great, but it's certainly playable and, in case you've forgotten about the frequent crashes on the PC version, it's definitely not any more unstable than it is on the bigger, more powerful platforms.

If it sounds like I'm biased and willing to forgive Ark's shortcomings because I like the gameplay, it's because I am. Just like everybody else. Have you seen Doom 2016 or Wolfenstein on Switch? They look abysmal. They struggle to maintain 30 FPS. And everybody rightfully loves these ports, because they're stupidly fun to play. Even with massively downgraded visuals, these games are some of the greatest titles ever made. Everybody loves Doom on Switch, beause it's Doom. If an unpopular game looks and runs like ass, well ...

Doom gets away with these visuals, because it's Doom.

I'm not going to pretend that Ark is this hidden, underappreciated gem that everybody needs to give another chance, because of course not. I'm just saying the game is getting more flack than it deserves. I believe that people choose to criticize it more harshly than other games, which commit many of the same sins, yet receive praise for being excellent ports. Of course I'm flogging a horse, which has long decomposed. I'd love to see updates for Ark, now that developers have been given access to higher clock speeds. I'd genuinely pay to get some of the DLC they released for the Steam version. Fat chance for that now.

Sure, there are many other titles on Switch, which make me spend my time with Nintendo's hybrid than I do on my PC. If it hadn't been for Ark, chances are, some other game experience may have led to me paying most of my bills these days with 'funny' articles. So the headline for today's entry might be a bit hyperbolic, like everything on the internet. But I sincerely love the Switch version of Ark: Survival Evolved, no matter how much everyone else loves to hate it. There won't be any performance updates, they'll never fix the messy visuals and there most certainly isn't going to be any downloadable content. But I'll be taking care of my camp and my dinos long after they inevitably shut down the last official server.

Moar Snek Updet

Sir Toby is settling in okay. Every night at precisely 9 o'clock he comes out, goes for his water bowl, then chills out in his basking spot until he fucks off again at midnight. It's weird how all of our reptiles have their weird little habits and rituals. Hugo would always get up for a drink at midnight, then go back to sleep.

Toby is a bit bitchy. You can take him out and handle him okay on most days, but if you go anywhere near him when he's hungry or preparing to shed his skin and he'll hiss at you. It's all just for show, you can still pick him up, but he'll keep on hissing. He'll let you know that he's not in the mood for any of this. But he's reasonably tame for an adolescent snake, he doesn't try to bite anyone and on a good day he'll let you take him anywhere. We had him in the car, in my backpack, he was my scarf when I prepared stuff in the kitchen, he's cool like that. Well. Or he used to be until one day, where he sat on me and out of nowhere my cat showed up and decided she's gonna sit on that. And the snake completely lost all of his shit. Something, anything just suddenly appearing from above will trigger all of his instincts, because he'll think he's about to get eaten by a predator. I threw away the cat, Claire took Toby, who immediately started biting her, chaos ensued and everyone's day was ruined.

Eventually, Toby pretended to be a ball python and calmed down a little, so Claire put him back in his vivarium. We took him back out the next day. You know, keep on working with him, handle the fucker, make it normal for him to be out and sit around with people. He didn't like it very much and I've never been so irrationally scared in my entire life.

This is our carpet python. Look at Mrs. Kitten's arm. Then look at the python. That snake is more than twice as long as we are tall. I'll hold that thing if I have to. I can handle her and we're both cool. I'm not normally afraid of reptiles.

Toby hissed and really didn't want to come out, but Claire was having none of it. Snek put up with it, snaked all over her, did what snakes do. Then she gave him to me and he went completely still. Didn't move a muscle, made absolutely no noise, just froze and played dead. Staring. One minute goes by, two minutes, then he lets out that incredibly long, drawn-out hiss. Yeah, I get it, you don't like me, because I'm the asshole with the cat. Claire takes him off me again and Toby is perfectly cool. He looks over to me, stretches out, rests his head on my leg, immediately freezes again and, moments later, starts hissing.

And I thought, "Okay, this is it, this is how I'm gonna die." He stared at me, he hissed, basically going, "Just move a tenth of an inch, I dare you! Do it and I'm gonna fuck you up!" I sat perfectly still and I cannot really explain why the fuck I was so nervous to begin with. What the fuck was that pathetic spaghetti gonna do, give me two tiny pin-pricks and immediately fuck off again? I saw the bite marks he left on Claire after the cat jumped on him and they were almost invisible. I've had worse scratches from our cats and even our beardies. Don't get me started on the claw marks Hugo would leave all over you just from climbing around.

I'm not afraid to get hurt, either. Claire and I were joking and dicking around while we were getting our tattoos. I was involved in half a dozen motorcycle accidents. I've broken bones. I'm being forced to watch Coronation Street three times a week. I can handle pain. What I can't deal with is our species' innate fear of the unknown. I've never been bitten by a snake. I don't know what it feels like, I don't know how to tell whether or not he's gonna go for it, I have no idea what he's thinking or what he's going to do. And for some fucked up reason it absolutely freaks me out. He sits there, perfectly motionless, stares at me through these red, unblinking eyes and just hisses. He never stops hissing.

Look at him! Could he possibly be any less scary?

I'll hold our giant-ass carpet python and drag her enormous ass around the house if I have to. I babysit our snakes all the time when Claire cleans their vivs. When I met Toby at the pet shop, he sat on my head and crawled all over my face while I was chatting with baffled customers. When he just sat there, stared at me, hissed and basically did absolutely nothing, I completely bricked it. I think we're both gonna be freaked out by each other for a couple days now.

In other news, I strongly believe that all animals are idiots. Our carpet python lives in Hugo's tank now, where she gets a whole lot of space to climb on stuff. She'll climb on a log, she'll climb and sit on her lamp, she'll even climb the freaking cage lock. Then she sits there for five minutes, goes to sleep, slides off and pancakes on the floor. Carpet pythons are supposed to be good at climbing, but this one just keeps on falling off of shit. I bet if you're in the jungle and just sit and wait for five minutes, you'll see snakes and other random animals falling out of trees all the time. They just never show that in the nature documentaries, because it ruins the whole narrative about them being deadly, gracious predators.

I mean, my stupid cat constantly falls off shit when she goes to sleep. She'll sit on one of the reptile tanks, because they're nice and warm, then she does that stupid cat thing where they go all liquid and boneless, falls asleep and slides right over the edge - splat! That shit you've seen in The Lion King? All lies. I bet Mufasa took a nap at the edge of a cliff and just fell off all by himself. I dunno. I've never watched that movie and only know the stuff they show on YouTube, but I'm pretty sure there's a decent amount of lions, which just fall off of things when they sleep and that's why they're endangered. Loads of people die each year when they fall out of their beds, so we're all stupid, too. But animals are supposed to be good at these things. They're not. They really fucking aren't.

Are Snakes Dumb?

As a scientist, I automatically know more about reptiles than you do.

Can snakes get bored? Should you bother decorate their setups at all or is that a waste of time and money? Is snake enrichment a thing or are we just morons trying to treat them as though they were human beings? Owning a new pet means I get to worry about all sorts of weird new shit.

So the other day I went and got myself a snek and he looks like this:

♥

I know nothing about snakes. So I tried and do my research in order to become a responsible snake owner and what do you know - nobody knows shit about snakes! And that's because snakes are weird. They're scaley flesh tubes with one hole at the top and one hole at the bottom. They don't express themselves. Can a snake be happy? Can it be sad? How the fuck would anyone know? They're not cats, after all.

You see, mammals are easy. They're social by design, because they have to be. When you get a newborn kitten, it's basically like a computer with an empty hard drive. The mother of our clever cat taught her how to eat, play and shit in a box, which ultimately installed the kitten's operating system. Cat 10, basically - it gets the job done, but the cat requires 18 hours of standby mode each day in order to download updates. Meanwhile, there weren't enough resources left for our dumb cat, so she got stuck with Cat95 and you have to reboot her every 20 or so minutes.

She's legally retarded.

They're basically worthless until you install all the drivers for eyesight, hair, basic walking animations and so forth. They get most of their basic programs and day-by-day software via LAN from the other mammals around them. Monkey see, monkey do.
Meanwhile, most reptiles are like something you order from Dell. Or Alienware, if you shell out for some overpriced colour morph, what do I care. They come with their OS pre-installed. When a snake hatches, it immediately knows how to snake. It can see, it'll strike at you, it'll eat a cheeseburger if you offer it politely. A snake immediately snakes. A snake doesn't have to play or watch its mother in order to learn how to hunt. Snake just knows. Snake won't watch you and try to understand what you're doing, it won't imitate anyone.

And unlike barking, growling, waggings doggos and purring and hissing kitties, the antisocial snakes don't do an awful lot in terms of communication. Yeah, they'll hiss a bit as a warning signal, but that's about as good as it gets. They don't display any sort of mood, because they're not designed to be social in that way. So it's tempting to say they're simply very primitive and unfeeling. It's a bit difficult to find proof to the contrary.

Asshole and proud.

There's an interesting discussion going on among major breeders in the US, where people argue about whether or not it's okay for a snake to be kept in a drawer. Basically, imagine something like a sock drawer but warmer, with a bit of paper on the floor, a water bowl, a warm spot and absolutely nothing else. Behold:

Does the snake feel happy in there? Or claustrophobic? Can it feel anything at all?

Some breeders say that you could put a hidey spot or a decorative plant in there, but that the snake probably wouldn't care. If a snake lived inside a hollow tree, it wouldn't start decorating or have an extra hiding spot inside of its tree, either. Their words, not mine.
The thing is, though - that snake inside its tree can leave. It has an entire forest around itself. It does have actual plants everywhere, spots to hide, places to climb and all that sort of thing. Hell, I don't know enough about snakes to tell you whether or not that snake inside its tree would even care. Does it come out and explore? Climb on shit for the heck of it? Or does it just stay inside its tree all night and day, look at nothing, do nothing, interact with nothing? If nothing else, this video suggests that some snakes actually quite enjoy having a bit of a stretch by climbing on things.

The thing is - we don't know. Nobody knows for sure. Based on that, it's apparently okay to stuff them in a tiny drawer with absolutely nothing inside, because the snake *probably* doesn't care. I don't find that very satisfying. Yes, it might not care. It's unlikely. But that automatically means the snake just might care more than we can tell. We don't know whether or not snakes are even intelligent enough to get bored, but for as long as we can't rule it out 100% - isn't it a bit cruel to just put them away like wanky tubesocks?

One of these things is not like the others.

Now, in order for a snake to get bored or crave some sort of activity or entertainment it would have to possess a certain level of intelligence. Snake observes or experiences something and alters its behavior based on the acquired knowledge. Learning. I've seen something like that in our pet snakes three times, so I'll go ahead and list them from 'meh' to 'okay, that's pretty neat':

- I would occasionally feed Claire's garter snake a small cube of fried beef when preparing dinner. Eventually, the snake would come to the front of her vivarium and wait for a treat each time I cooked beef. To be fair, she may just have been excited about smelling food in general and would have come out one way or another. But whenever there was beef on the hob, she'd be out and about, waiting for her share. It seemed as though she had learned that certain smells from the kitchen meant she was about to be fed.

- Our royal python lives in a translucent box, meaning he can see you when you approach him from above. His natural reaction was to hide and completely lose his shit, because when you're a medium-sized snake, most predators will come from above. Being the asshole that she is, my cat would repeatedly jump on the python's box and scare the crap out of him. This worked for about two or three days. Nowadays, the cat can sleep right on top of his box and the snake is no longer afraid. It appears he has learned that the cat is not a threat.

- Our carpet python has a little cave inside her vivarium, where she curls up and goes to sleep when she's shedding or generally not in the mood to put up with us. The cave has to be placed *perfectly* underneath her heater at all times. If you move it anywhere else, she will put it right back where it belongs. She knows where the warmest spot in her tank is and places her favourite hiding and sleeping spot accordingly.

None of these examples are groundbreaking in any way. Our snakes don't help us file our taxes, they don't know how to operate heavy machinery and I reckon our garter snake never even understood French and just faked it when we asked her to pick the wine for her dinner. But - each of them displayed habits and changes in behavior, which wouldn't be of any use to them in the wild.

Utterly useless: My cat, two weeks after she was born.

I believe it's a safe bet that most snakes living outdoors won't come across a great deal of cooked dinners or somebody hand-feeding stuff to them, so a snake anticipating a treat based on a scent coming from the kitchen seems pretty remarkable to me. A snake which just stops going into full defense mode when something approaches from above probably won't get very old in the wild. I'm also not sure how to imagine a wild snake reliably moving its favourite hiding spot to a permanent source of heat. These are all things these animals started to do as they adapted to their lives in our house.

Assuming my observations are accurate and I'm not reading a whole lot of nonsense into these situations due to some form of confirmation-bias, I believe it's possible that these snakes are aware of their surroundings to at least some extent that goes beyond sleeping, shitting and lurking for something edible. It looks as if their programming may be suitable for more than simply striking at anything vaguely rodent-shaped. And if that's true, then maybe, just maybe it isn't such a nice thing to put them in some dark drawer with nothing but a bit of water and a newspaper and absolutely nothing ever happening around them. I've seen what sitting in a dark room with only the TV on day after day can do to some people. Most of these snakes can't even read their newspapers. I know, snakes aren't people. But based on what I've seen, I find it a bit reckless to simply go ahead and assume they can't get a little bit dull if you keep one like a sock. Don't do that to your snake. Don't keep it like a sock. You may most certainly keep it in a sock, of course.

A snock, if you will.

PC Gaming Can Fuck Right Off

With its ongoing controversies and fuck-ups, Fallout 76 has been getting bashed and (rightfully) made fun of for so long, I'm rather bored of the whole thing, to be honest. There's only one thing I'd like to bitch about real quick, because it absolutely baffles me how everyone else seems so okay with it - it's technically Fallout 4. With a different map, without a story or NPCs, with tacked-on multiplayer, but can we all agree it's Fallout fucking 4? It uses the exact same assets! Every creature, weapon, junk item, every model and texture, is being re-used from Fallout 4, save for a handful of "new" things like scorchbeasts. Which Fallout 76's code just so happens to refer to as dragons. Is this an acceptable thing now? Is it okay to sell what's basically a garbage, broken mod for an existing game, slap a AAA price tag on it and pretend it's a whole new game?

I mean, even annual games like CoD or Fifa don't do this so brazenly or am I going completely insane now? I get upgraded weapon and player models from one CoD to another, animations get overhauled and so forth - there's plenty to criticize about annual sequels and the publishers releasing them, but at least they're trying to make you feel like you're getting an upgraded, enhanced experience each time. With F76 it's all, hey, it's as glitchy as every Bethesda game, it's pointless, nobody asked for it, the engine is very (out?)dated, but I feel the problem begins at a much more basic level - it feels like an early access version of a mod made by three or four very inexperienced randos.

You can get a better experience for free.

This isn't automatically a bad thing. I mean, you can get a glitchy, far from perfect but still rather enjoyable experience with the fan-made Morrowind multiplayer project. It's a bit awkward, it'll break on occasion, but you can forgive it, because it was made by fans, there's no massive budget behind it and it costs you nothing. Then there's F76, made by one of the biggest, most renowned studios out there, which comes with all the preorders and special collector's editions - and it's shit. It's unfinished, half-assed, lazy, recycled, clueless, pointless, utter boring shit.
Funny side note - I've been voicing my opinion on F76 for some time now and Bethesda literally took me off their Christmas card list. I've received some nice Fallout-themed cards from them in the past, signatures and everything, but nothing this time. Probably just a coincidence, maybe they stopped the whole Christmas cards thing in general, I dunno. It's just funny.

This fucking thing.

2018 was the year of shitty Battle Royale games. Everyone made fun of the new CoD, then immediately claimed it was the best CoD yet, because it's aping Fortnite. Radical Heights came and went, DayZ has done a thing, but there was nobody left to even still care about it. I'm not even gonna make fun of the lack of creativity here, because I steal all of my jokes, too. But the industry can't even figure out why Fortnite is so fucking popular. It's not because hurrdurr Battle Royale. It's because it costs nothing and runs on everything. The game is fucking free, it runs on every device, ever, it's bright and candy-coloured and the only thing you can spend money on is shit like skins and dances. No lootboxes, no collector's edition, no bullshit. You can hate on the stupid game and its annoying, pre-teen community all you want, but OF COURSE they're gonna fucking play the one game that costs them nothing, OF COURSE they're gonna play the one thing all of their friends are already playing and OF COURSE they're not gonna try your weird new battle royale thing, because you want a piece of the cake. They have their battle royale game now. You can stop making them. Please. Just stop adding a fucking battle royale mode to absolutely everything.

There was the new Soul Calibur, which released with a roster, that has been shrunk down by nearly 50% compared to its predecessor, turned one of the series' regular characters into preorder DLC and added more DLC characters, which at the time of their announcement were simply referred to as Bonus Characters 1, 2 and 3. A game, which has been released with a bit of guilt trip on the side, basically saying it'll be the last Soul Calibur title if people don't buy it. Now that's what I call marketing! I have purchased and played every game of the series, including the original PSX one and the shitty PSP port, but this is where I draw the line. Capcom pulled this shit with Street Fighter V and I'm sick to death of paying 60 Quid for fighting games, which used to come with 40+ characters, only to get the most basic roster and have every additional stage, character and costume locked behind fucking paywalls and season passes.

Earning ingame currency now requires you to activate virtual advertising.

I'm sure 2018 also saw some good things happening in PC gaming. Forza Horizon 4, for one. A game, which, if you want all the DLC, extras and every bit of content instead of just a stripped-down basic version, will cost me a whopping 80 Pounds or 100 Dollars for you yanks out there. Don't get me wrong, the game looks absolutely fantastic, it's without a doubt one of the best out there, but this is nearly twice as much as other AAA games in a time, where people insist that the price of games has remained the same for more than a decade. Bullshit.

My personal high point in PC gaming was the Fortuna update for Warframe. This game costs absolutely nothing, it has one of the friendliest, most welcoming communities and I still release the occasional little guide video here and there when people specifically ask for it. I'm not a relevant YouTuber by any means and I honestly can't be fucked to create any meaningful content about this (or any) game, but the feedback I get for my Warframe stuff is almost always positive, friendly or, at the very least, productive and helpful. Apparently some of my employers are still considering some sort of Warframe guidebook, so I'm crossing all fingers and toes to get in on that one. Warframe still gets criminally low coverage in German media and the game desperately needs someone to tell potential newcomers how it's all done. I'd give my right nut for a chance to head to Canada and meet with the folks at DE someday.

Excalibros 4 life!

Here's something interesting - Warframe is probably the single-most visually impressive game on Nintendo Switch right now and one of the best ports on the system, if not the best. It's one of the reasons why I've been gaming almost exclusively on the Switch all last year. I had the best Christmas and New Years Eve of all times because of Nintendo's little hybrid console.

Christmas with Claire's family is always awkward. We all meet at her aunt's house. It's the definition of awkward. Take your shoes off. Use a coaster. Does anyone want a peanut? There's always something on the giant TV, but the sound is off for some reason. The living room is bigger than my entire house, so you can only have a conversation with whichever family member sits right next to you. Don't stare at the cat! You're not supposed to stare at cats, it terrifies them! I know, I've had cats for 25 years, why are you telling me this? I didn't stare at the fucking cat. Okay, I'm now getting a speech about why I'm not supposed to stare at the cat. Now, since it's entirely possible that somebody will rat me out to her aunt - I'm not trying to make fun or anything. But it's always awkward. Christmas is awkward. I'm awkward. Everyone is always a bit uncomfortable. Which is normal when you put three generations of family in one comically oversized room, it's fine, there's nothing wrong with it. You sit there, respond when spoken to, try not to make too much of an ass of yourself.

I brought my Switch. Claire and I played Ark. We spotted and tamed a giant flying dino, which is so large, you can actually build stuff on top of it. We brought it home and everything. Just like that. On the go. At a family Christmas thing. Claire's aunt taught us all sorts of stuff about the game while we were on there. Turns out she has sunk over 6,000 hours into the Steam version of Ark. Suddenly we had something to talk about. Also, did I mention we were playing some fucking Ark on the go and tamed dinos? This wasn't just Tetris or some shit. Not that there's anything wrong with Tetris, of course. But we had a multiplayer session on one of the most complex survival games out there. On the go. I can't fucking process this!

Multiplayer flight got.

When we went to her parents for Christmas, it took a few seconds to plug the Switch into the tv, hand out some controllers and get some Smash Bros. going. I fucking suck at it. I couldn't suck any harder at Smash if I tried, because I've got a dozen games on there or two, all of which I want to finish, but there's never enough time. Maybe this can be my resolution for 2019. Stop being so shit at Smash. Actually play it some more, practice, get better, that sort of thing. The game is too fun in multiplayer for me to get really salty over it, but I might enjoy it more when I'm not just fodder.

My absolute favourite couchgaming multiplayer game on there isn't Smash, though. It's Ultimate Chicken Horse. I love the idea behind it. Create a stage together, place a bunch of platforms, obstacles and traps. Make it so difficult, that only you, not your friends, can complete it. Then you race one another to see who reaches the goal first - if anyone. It's usually the most fun when everyone sucks too hard to even make it to the finish line. Like in this run, where Claire gets shot mere inches away from the goal, I misjudge a jump and suicide right off and Claire's sister, the chicken, spends an eternity panic-jumping around a patch of ice:

There's even a post-mortem bonus for when your corpse gets knocked over the finish line, while your fellow players get crossbowed in the face and/or sucked into gaping black holes:

And yes, it's one of those 'you had to be there' kind of things, there was just the right amount of alcohol involved, and I know it's also out on Steam and on every platform ever, but it's only portable on Switch, I can take it anywhere I want, play it anytime I want, then immediately switch (ha!) to something like Smash or the utterly brilliant Horizon Chase Turbo, which also comes with a fun 4 player splitscreen mode. The list of fun multiplayer games goes on, of course, and it's just a bit more convenient to bring them along with just a Switch and a pair of extra joy cons, than, say, packing a laptop or a PS4 and a bunch of extra controllers.

It's no Mario Kart, but ... oh yeah, that's on Switch, too!

The Switch is also making me fall in love with Sega all over again, which is something I didn't think was ever going to happen in this lifetime. I've recently re-played the original Phantasy Star on Switch, which is a bit overpriced for 7 Quid, but comes with helpful new features, like an incredibly handy automap, a list of all the gear in the game, what it does and which character it's for, as well as a surprisingly polished and well-written manual. It's not just some lazy, low-effort emulator, but somebody actually put some serious love and effort into this project, making it the best way to play Phantasy Star today. That is, unless you prefer the goofy PS2 Sega Ages version they had in Japan many years ago, but ... yeah. No.

It was a milestone RPG in its day.

I'm currently re-playing Phantasy Star IV on Switch, which is part of the Sega Classics collection, which comes with some 50+ Megadrive/Genesis games, quicksaves, as well as a fast-forward/rewind feature. Sure, it's a glorified emulator for 30 Quid, but seeing as most of you cunts paid more than three times that for shit like the (S)NES Classic Mini, I don't see how any of you are in any position to judge me.

Phantasy Star IV still holds up remarkably well in this day and age. To me, it was always a step ahead of 8/16bit Final Fantasy. Not that there's anything wrong with FF, of course, but I always felt that stuff like Final Fantasy VI was a bit overrated, especially through today's rose-tinted nostalgia goggles. Blasphemy, I know!

The 'anime' of my childhood.

It's just the right mix of Fantasy and Sci-Fi, with the occasional cheesy anime trope, goofy music and as much cleavage as you could safely get away with in the 90s. And I adore the art style until this day.

It's okay if you prefer Final Fantasy on the SNES. You're wrong, but I forgive you.

Sega have already announced that they're working on bringing back a whole bunch of other classics with the AGES line, including titles from the Saturn and Dreamcast era. I can't wait to play a prettified Panzer Dragoon! I'm really pleasantly surprised by Sega's attitude change. I remember when the good folks at Shining Force Central got in touch with Sega, sending them cakes, cards and tons of other presents, begging them to bring back classic Shining Force, and Sega's reaction was to completely fly off the handle and act all pissy and insulted. I have no doubt that this was merely a mix of miscommunication and cultural differences, but compare that to the Sega of today, which hired some of their most talented fans to create the incredible Sonic Mania and became shockingly funny and self-aware in Sonic Boom, which is way more entertaining than it has any right to be. 

And, while nobody pays any attention to Sonic Forces, because it's one of those 3D Sonic games we're supposed to hate, it's another one of those surprisingly playable, good-looking Switch ports, which are totally worth the 17 or so Quid they wanted for it over Christmas. Or, to put it in Claire's words, "I hate how much I like this."

Fap the Wolf is now on Switch. I still skip those terrible, terrible cutscenes.

Speaking of Sega nostalgia, how the fuck aren't more people losing their shit over how ridiculously awesome Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom turned out to be? I wasn't super sure about it at first, because the monster transformations are all a bit different compared to Wonder Boy 3, much of the music is so heavily remixed that you barely recognize the original tune behind it, but once you get used to that, you get what's easily the best Wonder Boy game out there and easily one of the best games of 2018. Also, it's got Banjo Guy Ollie! If there's one small gripe I have with this game, it's the incredibly dumb difficulty spike inside the volcano, which is ten times as demanding as every area that came before it. It's certainly no problem to anyone with sufficient platforming skills, but I'll admit it frustrated the shit out of me.

On the other hand, you get to play as a snake. Which doesn't suck, surprisingly!

Another game, which really surprised me on Switch in late 2018, was V-Rally 4. Sure, reception was rather lukewarm, its physics are a bit silly, the series is hardly relevant these days, but I'm surprised at how close it is to the 'big' versions. Some of the more visually demanding stages had a ton of trees removed, lighting is very flat and shadows have been scaled back a ton, but you still get your immersive dashboard camera if you want it, you have all the cars and tracks and, even with the annoying DLC added on top, you'll pay "only" 50 Quid for it, not 80. 

I'm not a massive fan of some of the game's more idiotic mechanics (you have to hire a crew and pay them a salary, which eats up most of your prize money early on), but if you're looking for a racing game, which is a little more serious than Mario Kart or Horizon Chase Turbo, then this may be worth checking out. If nothing else, it's not a garbage mobile port like the stupidly overprized Gear Club Unlimited (2). Seriously, Nintendo, start checking on some of the shit you allow on the eShop!

Of course my absolute favourite game on there, to the surprise of absolutely no one familiar with this blog, is still Ark: Survival Evolved. Yes, I know. Eleventy billion YouTube videos popped up the second it came out, "worst game on the system", "how is this legal", "stop selling this", blah fucking blah, cheap and easy clicks. I love how these same cunts moan when games journalists don't spend enough time playing or getting good at what they're reviewing, yet at the same time they fart out lazy videos about the shit graphics, without actually spending more than five minutes to see what the game is all about. 

Fuck you and your stupid opinion. My bronto wears a hat!

I could spend an eternity writing about how Claire tried to tame a suicidal unicorn, which ran face-first into every T-Rex and off every cliff in its vicinity. About our hunt for the cake recipe, so we can finally start taming snails. About Bernie and Ert and Salt and Vinegar, the new pack of allosaurs, which turned our camp into earthquake territory. Or I can just illustrate the sheer randomness that is Ark with this little video:

In closing, if you happen to be Claire's sister, buy a fucking Switch already. Christmas happened. You've got money. What are you gonna do with it, pay rent? Upgrade your ancient PC? What for? You show up on Steam every other month. WoW is gonna run like ass, no matter what hardware you get. All your favourite games are on Switch - and then some. Go on. Get it. You know you want to. You're the only one who hasn't got one. The four of us could be on Ark right this very moment. Instead, you're wasting time reading my stupid blog. What the fuck are you doing with your life? You're not playing Switch, that's what. Get a Switch. And Katamari. Katamari is good for the soul.