Ark: Big Game Hunter

Life on THEISLAND was good. We upgraded our birds to a level, where we could quickly ride them to just about any part of the world with little to no breaks on the go. We even managed to spot and safely return some dinos, which got lost on earlier expeditions weeks ago! Generally, there's no limit to how many creatures you can tame and bring along with you at any given time in the game. Of course traveling in a large group makes it more likely for one or several dinos to get left behind and decreases the likelihood of you noticing. By some weird magic, however, Ark doesn't despawn a dino when you leave it somewhere and ignore it for a while. If you lose a critter in any part of the world, or spot a wild one living somewhere, they will still be somewhere in that area the next time you go there, even days or weeks after, unless they get killed by a larger predator or starve to death.

I have no idea how the game does that, considering there are literally thousands upon thousands of dinos all over the place, but just the other night we spotted Claire's first ever dino, who got lost nearly a month ago. He was hungry and a little cranky, but otherwise okay, so we flew him back to camp.
Maybe life was a little too good. We had electric lights now, a working refrigerator and even a saddle for Alice Cooper, our T-Rex. No one could fuck with us, now that we had a T-Rex. Well, except for another T-Rex, maybe. The toilet still eats people, though. We even started to get used to the blurry, vaseline-covered visuals, so the game started to look ... nice, I guess?

There were only two more things we really wanted - a titanosaur and a jet engine. The former is a longneck so massive, it makes a bronto look like its cheap Chinese knock-off. The latter is a giant flying dino, which is so large, you can build stuff on top of it. We have no idea what they're really called, because they're usually way up in the air and really difficult to chase, let alone knock out. Still, both of these guys were really just something for the 'nice to have' section. The most important thing was our T-Rex - and we had one of those!

At this point we spent most of our time uncovering what few unexplored sections of the map we had left. We spotted a bunch of penguins and committed some more horrible crimes against nature in the attempt to tame one of them. There was this nice little family. A daddy penguin and a mommy penguin and a baby penguin. They looked fun, so we agreed to tranquilize one and take it home. Due to some minor miscommunication, however, we both ended up shooting daddy penguin at the same time, which knocked him out so hard, he never woke up again, much to the dismay of mommy and baby. They completely lost their shit and started to run away. I punched mommy penguin in the face a few times to calm her down. We knocked her out and dragged her off with one of our birds, leaving behind a traumatized, flightless baby bird, who just witnessed two absolute fuckwits murder its father in cold blood, then punch the crap out of its mother to abduct her. He's probably still sitting on his ice floe, alone, in the night, wondering what he had ever done to deserve any of this. I'm sure he'll be fine. All of this builds character. Perhaps one day an army of penguins, frothing at the beaks and murder in their eyes, will storm our camp and seek revenge. And we'll accept our fate. But in the meanwhile, there's a very distressed penguin lady in our camp, blankly staring at the sea. She's not interacting with the other animals, she makes no sound and barely eats enough to stay alive. We're horrible, horrible people.

I still think the game looks nicer since the most recent update, but maybe it's all just placebo.

Oh yeah, we also spotted two hilariously colourful sharks on the way back south, so we went and tamed those. Easily one of our most frustrating adventures, so far. The taming process itself was simple enough. As it turns out, you can't just lead a shark back home to your base on land or via air uber, so we had to get them to swim where we wanted them. Thanks to their incredibly shitty AI, however, the whole thing turned into an absolute ordeal. First, we hopped on our birds and tried to get the sharks to follow us. They poked their heads out of the water, kept gawking at us like idiots, swam into random reefs and cliffs and got stuck there. When we finally had them back in the open sea, we decided to perform a quick relog, which forces the game to save. It only auto-saves every half hour or so and we did not want to lose this progress to a crash.

Yeah well. I restarted the game and Claire's character spawned right above the ocean while she was still loading in. Her bird fucked off, Claire drowned and we spent the next hour or so trying to retrieve the gear from her corpse, which was floating above the sea, just high enough to be out of reach when swimming, but too close to the water for our bird to reach it. If you dip a bird in water, it'll throw you off and seek a safe spot to land. Meanwhile, the sharks were constantly getting attacked by other sharks, because apparently that's how sharks work, so I had to jump into the water and poke them with a stick in order to keep them away from our new pets.

They do not know how to shark.

Finally, Claire fucked off back to camp and returned with a giant prehistoric duckosaurus. These are super useful, because they can land on water and just float. Doing so allowed her to retrieve all of her shit off her floating corpse. Alas, the sharks were too much in awe at the sight of our glorious sabretooth duck and completely derped out, going all over the place, but refusing to follow Claire. In the end, I had to swim all the way to camp and lead Sashimi and Mr. Strawberry that way. Thank fuck the water is full of electric jellyfish, which will zap you and stun the shit out of you when you go anywhere near them, because I would have hated for this trip to be easy!

Funnily enough, you can craft saddles for these guys, so we have sharks now. With saddles. Ponysharks. Guess we'll be exploring the sea one day, once we have some scuba gear. In the meanwhile, we had our very own T-Rex, who was still the coolest, deadliest, most powerful predator on THEISLAND. Except, he absolutely wasn't. During one of our expeditions we tripped upon this guy:

Yay.

This is a giganotosaurus. It's easily twice the size of a T-Rex and ... actually, let me just quote the game's loading screen hint for when you encounter one of these. "If you encounter this creature in the wild while with a tribe member, just bola the tribe member and run." Let me quote the wiki for some extra fun: "Giganotosaurs will 'casually' stroll about the Island, slaughtering anything in their path, this can lead them to wander to just about anywhere on the Island. Their lack of natural predator, or really any form of threat to them, allows for their safe voyages across the Island."

The biggest thing we had tamed so far was a brontosaurus, which took about two dozen tranquilizer arrows. This guy could stand shoulder to shoulder with a bronto, but seemed slightly smaller overall, so we figured we may as well go for it and start attacking. He ate about fifty arrows as if it was nothing, murdered every single animal in its vicinity while we tried to take him down and finally walked away without a scratch, while we were all out of tranquilizers. Our T-Rex looked a bit shit now. On the plus side, if we ever did manage to tame one of these things, at least it was extremely unlikely we'd end up killing him by accident like we did with THEISLAND's entire wolf and raptor population, as well as a few pteranodons and a triceratops. They do not like water.

Here's an otter to cheer you up.

Giganotosaurus was clearly too strong for us, so we resumed exploring THEISLAND - for now. We found a cave, which was full of all the things everyone loves: bats, spiders, scorpions and lava. Caves seem to be Ark's version of 'dungeons', if you will. Problem is, they're so full of monsters, it's almost impossible to explore them as a duo. The game reccommends bringing a few extra tribe members, so we did the only thing we could do and went there with a bunch of animals. We brought our wolf pack.

Right. Remember how I complained about sharks being too stupid to navigate the ocean? Try maneuvering a pack of braindead wolves through a cave when the floor is lava - literally. After grilling most of the pack into a bunch of hot dogs, we finally decided to just use one of them as a mount and bring nothing but small, flying dinos for support, because at least those wouldn't get stuck or melt their faces in lava all the time. When we finally made it to the bottom of the cave, we found an artifact, which could be combined with other items from even more caves in order to summon a massive boss.

Problem is, that boss is so powerful, not even Alice Cooper would stand a chance against it. We needed something bigger. We needed a giganotosaurus!
We spent the next hour crafting tranquilizer darts. Claire went out to harvest all the flint and thatch in the world to craft what Ark calls stone arrows, because clearly, these should require no wood and no stone to craft, but only flint and thatch. Meanwhile, I confiscated all the spoiled meat our T-Rex was hoarding for some reason, then took a million or so narcoberries off our triceratops. He's got a bit of a drug problem. Probably, because he watched us drown his girlfriend by accident. Many of the bigger, smarter creatures in Ark travel in pairs and receive a mate bonus for being with a partner. His mate is rotting away at the bottom of the sea. Sorry 'bout that!

Armed with 350 tranquilizer darts, we flew back north, where we first spotted Lady Giga. That's what I wanted to name the dino in case we managed to tame it. And we knew we were close, because something was very, very wrong. It felt as though physics, gravity and friction refused to work properly, simply because they were so scared. Just look at this shit!

We spotted our prey at the very top of the tallest mountain in the area. Originally, we were hoping to ambush him from above, pelt him with arrows and slowly chase him down the mountain, but it was impossible to run after him without breaking every single bone in our bodies. The mountain was far too steep! In the end, Claire picked me up with her bird and dangled me in front of the dino as live bait. He was hypnotized, trying to eat me while I kept firing tranq darts at him.

The fact that something as ridiculous and stupid as this actually works is one of the reasons why I love this game so much. Claire was riding a giant bird, which picked me up in its talons, then waved me around above a giant, hungry dino as a tasty treat, which distracted the fucker enough to let me shoot him, at least for a while.
Ultimately, he started to realize he couldn't reach me. He probably wasn't a massive fan of getting shot in the nose, either, so he raced down the mountain, slaughtering mammoths, entire packs of wolves and other, lesser predators in his path. And then he got stuck in a ditch.

If you breathed fire, I'd call you Charitard.

The good news is, he was now completely stuck and after only 200 tranquilizer darts he finally went to sleep! The bad news is, he was still stuck after we had tamed him. Also, he was in fact a 'he', so I couldn't name him Lady Giga. We named him Chompy after our first pet lizard.

We spent several hours trying to get him unstuck. The interwebs suggests cheats when a dino gets stuck. We weren't massively keen on that for two reasons - one, we weren't entirely sure how to open up the cheat console on Switch. Two, even though we could probably figure it out, did we really want to cheat? It's a dark path. You cheat once, just to make your life a little easier, so what's to stop us from cheating again? Why go out and harvest resources or farm experience for level-ups when you can just cheat all of that shit? We had been 100% legit so far, apart from a little save-scumming, but no-clipping a dino out of his ditch would change all that.
Instead, we opted for the one thing we do best - crimes against nature! We axed down an entire forest and I started to craft a system of ramps and platforms everywhere around Chompy's ditch in order to help him get out. It took all night, but by 3 in the morning I finally had such a well-crafted system of ramps, one could simply walk out of the ditch without any jumping, climbing or Super Mario bullshit. But try and teach that to a dumbass dinosaur.

You're doing it wrong!

AAARRRGH!

In the end, Claire flew her bird right underneath the dino's enormous ass and kept pushing and pecking him up the ramp. Fucking finally!

The new guy absolutely towers above everything else in our camp, with the exception of our bronto. On a mildly related note, I will not stop playing Ark until I get a witch hat for the bronto and a pair of glasses on every pteranodon in our camp!
In the meanwhile, I'll take pleasure in the fact that we just tamed the biggest and meanest thing on THEISLAND. Sure, he's a bit dumb, but sometimes big and dumb is exactly what you want.

Ark: Operation Wolf

After two weeks of spending 8-12 hours on Ark pretty much every single day since its release on Switch, boredom finally started to kick in. At this point in the game, we just had it all. A T-Rex. A pair of raptors. A Dutch Oven. A watering system for our crops. Guns. Enough resources to gear up the entire Ark community on Switch - each of the five players! And, most importantly, a working shitter.

The thing about our toilet is that it's also a death trap, which gets one of us stuck more often than not. You get stuck inside the damn thing, with only your character's head sticking out. And if the other one notices it, well... yeah.

Claire watched a bunch of youtube videos and saw some people riding around on direwolves. So she wanted one. Unfortunately, direwolves hang out all the way north, where THEISLAND is covered in ice and snow. It only takes a few moments to freeze to death up there, unless you're clad in a fursuit and hug all the torches and campfires. The area up north also has some stunning blizzard weather effects. Snowflakes don't just float around, but you can see them stay on the ground and in the fur and scales of your dinos. It's one of those mind-boggling graphical features they kept in the Switch version, all while lowering the resolution scale and render distance to something just above zero.
As for the direwolves, I never really cared for them all that much, because they look like four-legged cavemen. That weird, ugly, dumbass face!

A wolf shouldn't look like this.

But heyho, the woman wants what she wants and we had nothing better to do, so we spent our virtual days growing out our hair, then cutting it, then turning it into armor. Not only that, but putting a tame otter on your character's body actually helps keep them warm. It's weird, but I like it. Rather than just making these shoulder pets decorative or have them help you in combat, they all come with their own unique little bonuses and effects. And then we went north, where everything is shit.

We live in the southern part of THEISLAND, which consists only of our little camp and about a trillion dodos. All the raptors died in freak accidents when we tried to tame them, all the boas died, because fuck those assholes, most of the triceratops and pteranodon population drowned due to surprise fatigue attacks happening too close to the water, which had absolutely nothing to do with our inability to humanely tranquilize stuff. Up north, however, is a fucking warzone. Titanosaurs, which make our bronto look like a shitty little toy, huge packs of hyenas, prehistoric boars and neanderthal wolves, hungry dinos and mammoths, all constantly fighting and murdering each other. How the whole place isn't completely deserted by now, save for a mountain of corpses, is entirely beyond me. There's so much killing going on everywhere, it's comical. Also, furry T-Rex.

Ugly in all the right ways. I may have to get one.

So we flew around on our birds and spotted this really angry pack of wolves, which murdered the absolute shit out of all the things. They ate a mammoth and immediately ran to murder a bunch of dinos, then murdered some boars. We chased after them, trying to pick one up with our birds. Flying mounts can grab stuff with their claws and... eh, lemme show you.

As it turns out, you can't pick up a wolf that is neither tamed nor tranquilized, so they pretty much just plucked us out of the sky, we had to fight them, the whole pack died and that was that.
So we spent the next 15 or so minutes searching for another pack, spotted it, tried to sneak up on them and shoot them from the top of some rocks, which they probably couldn't climb. Well. Turns out direwolves can climb. They can also jump. So we had to euthanize another pack in its own best interest. Maintain the balance of nature and all that. Also, they were gonna eat us, because we're shit at taming stuff.

We tried the kamikaze approach. Go get a pack of wolves while it's hunting dinos, because they'd be too distracted to come after us. Except we didn't even have the chance to land our birds this time, because the wolves were fighting a rex, the rex roared and spooked our birds, we lost all control over our flying mounts, which ultimately glitched and got stuck in mid-air. Claire jumped off her bird and died. I'm smart, so I relogged, got spawned on the ground and was immediately eaten by the rex and the wolves, who had suddenly formed some sort of alliance, which existed solely to end me.
500 dead wolves later, we had a genius idea - what if we actually hid in a spot the wolves couldn't get to before attempting to tranquilize them? So we pissed off another pack of them, five in total, as well as two carnotaurs, which are the ugliest dinos we've spotted thus far.

WTF is going on with these stumpy arms?

We parked our birds on top of a really tall cliff. The wolves and dinos went completely braindead and just kept on bumping into the rocks below, once again trying to kill us without actually fighting each other. And we had a hundred tranquilizer darts, so we did the only reasonable thing.
First, the carnos were way too large and always got in the line of fire, so we had to take those out first. We tranqed them, because hey, free dino, even if it's ugly. Besides, we didn't want them to change their minds and have them kill the wolves. Once they had gone to sleep, we both tried to knock out our favourite wolf. I spotted a nice husky-looking one with snow white and pitch black fur. Problem is, there were two extremely similar ones, so it was impossible to tell them all apart from the top of my cliff. I had to shoot all of them, just to be sure. Meanwhile, Claire had set her eyes on a brown one, who was always right in the middle of the pack, so she kept hitting all the wolves with her darts, except for the one she actually wanted. In the end, we had five sleeping wolves and two snoring carnos at the bottom of the cliff.

We went out to tame one or two wolfy mounts and came back with an entire hunting pack. And then it turned out that direwolves no longer look shit in Ark, because their models had been replaced by better-looking ones. It's nice when stuff actually goes according to plan for a change. Now to fix that fucking toilet!

The one on the right is deaf and has no clue what's going on.

Ark - Industrial Age

So we went and explored some of the furthest corners of THEISLAND. Constantly hanging around the same old beaches and jungles is only entertaining for so long, so we figured we should have a look at what else the world has to offer. And, once you get over the fact that everything is rather blurry on here, there are some spots with are actually quite beautiful.

We also made a few new friends along the way. I tamed a gigantic spino, which made Claire's hipster bird Edward almost look puny by comparison. The amount of detail on that dino is incredible. Not only can you make out every single scale on its skin, but it also has those fun little ear holes on its head, which real life reptiles have. I love the attention to detail.

We had quite the petting zoo with us on our journey. Both of us had our airplanes for the sake of making exploration a little easier, Claire tamed yet another diloposaurus, because it was so nice and red. I tamed one just for the heck of it and named it Dingleberry. I brought a spare bird for air support. Then Claire befriended one of those punchy little armadillo style punchosaurus things. And aforementioned new spino. We got ambushed while we sat down to rest for a minute. It looked like this:

I'm genuinely amazed at how all of this chaos just runs on the Switch without anything exploding. My screen is filled by over a dozen gigantic prehistoric creatures tearing each other to ribbons and, while the whole thing doesn't exactly run at 60 frames per second, it's certainly playable and not acting up in any way.
I've mentioned in a previous entry how, while resolution and things like shadow and vegetation draw distance were very poor, the Switch version sports a rather beautiful lighting system with beautiful, volumetric sunrays and realtime shadows, which are projected on to characters and dinos. Presumably, resolution and draw distance could be increased if the lighting and particle quality (and most, if not all shadows) were deactivated, but seeing as they're an important gameplay element, I can see why they decided to 'optimize' the game in that way. It's actually quite neat to look at, even if everything around it is such a blurred mess.

There's more ice and snow up to the north, which is where we want to explore next. We also want to tame a pair of direwolves, because they make badass mounts. Problem is, staying in the cold for too long literally kills you in this game, so we need all the fur, hair and pelt we can get in order to craft warm armor. I started by cutting Claire's hair. You can give players haircuts not just to give them a fancy new hairstyle (and change facial hair, where present), but to 'harvest' the hair for crafting. Nothing goes to waste.

I've also upgraded my airplane. Don't get me wrong, Ptetra the pteranodon is a war hero, she went on countless adventures with us and always came back in once piece and saved our asses more than once. But there's flying around on a croaking, prehistoric chicken and then there's this:

Meanwhile, Claire put a saddle on her whacky little clubosaurus. You can't just ride that thing and hammer other dinos to pudding with its mace-like tail. It can also curl up into a ball and roll all over the place. I may have to tame one and name it Samus Aran.

And since we were already in the middle of upgrading all our shit, Claire declared the industrial age and started by creating a watering system for our plants. We now have a fun little water cistern, which collects rain water and pumps water out of the stream by our camp. It then goes through some pipes and rains down on our crops. The next step is to install a working, flushing toilet. Not only is that a real thing, but you can also use it to fertilize the crops with your craps. Like I said - nothing goes to waste. Not even the waste.

We need to tame dung beetles to help with the poop harvest for our crops. Yes, that is also a thing.

Claire cooked some gasoline to power up our little fabrication engine, which I used in order to craft an assault rifle. Yep. We went from spears and crowssbows to assault rifles. Well. Personally, I'm more of a shotgun kinda guy, so everyone has their own unique boomstick now. I also put a saddle on our bronto, which was ... ahem, scary.

I took her out for a spin, but there's so much dino on the camera, it's difficult to see where you're going. Apparently you can build a huge metal platform on top of a bronto and then build a house on there, turning your dino into a mobile base camp and landing platform for flying dinos.
Lacking said platform, I decided to have our bronto help with the wood harvest. Knocking down trees and collecting a bunch of crafting resources actually helps raise the dino's level, which is fun. Work, get better, work even harder.

And now that I have a handy little helper that lets me collect large amounts of wood and other materials in no time at all, I can finally build something that's a little more interesting than just these little box-shaped huts we had all the time. How about an actual house with furniture, windows and a fireplace? Behold!

The next step on our list of pending improvements is actual electricity. Claire already set up a generator, next she'll be setting up working street lights, then we'll start crafting some real high level gear. Wonder how much longer it'll take till we get to craft working dino armor and weapons. Because yeah, that is also a thing on here.

It's weird. I'm usually too lazy to craft stuff, play house in a game, let alone do this whole survival thing where you have to eat, drink, even take a crap and deal with things like weather, temperatures and all that annoying stuff nobody enjoys in real life. But there's a real sense of achievement here, when you slowly move up from shitty little straw huts with shitty wooden beds to actual houses, a working fireplace, then a generator, proper armor and guns and so forth. I can't believe I never even had this game on the radar until now. Until recently, I just knew it was yet another open world survival thing (as in, the kind of game everyone was releasing before battle royale became the hip new thing) and people were pissed at the developers, who kept releasing paid expansions instead of taking the whole thing out of paid early access. I might actually look into the PC version and play that on maxed-out settings and in bearable resolution once we've had our fill on the Switch and feel that we've really seen and done everything. In the meanwhile, though, I am quite happy to limit our adventures to Nintendo's humble little hybrid.

Ark: Die Hard On Opposite Day

Yes, it's another one of those, because Ark is my life now.
Having tamed a pair of personal airplanes, we decided to check out what's on top of that giant mountain, which is located straight in the middle of THEISLAND. You know, take a bit of a break from Mission Raptor, just enoy a bit of exploration without death, drama and all the horrible everyday crap that happens on here.

I painted Ptetra's beak just for the occasion. Yep, there are actual paintbrushes for exactly that purpose in this game.

The top of the mountain was as surprising as it was disappointing. The surprising bit was how it's all covered in lava, because the mountain is actually a volcano - zit of the earth. There was a whole bunch of crystal and obsidian up there, all of which is super helpful when you want to craft some advanced gear. We were still using sticks and armor clobbered together from bits of dead trilobites. The disappointing part was the huge-ass locked gate that prevented us from exploring more of the volcano. The whole thing looked rather endgamey.

Well, at least nobody died for a change.

So we had a nice, uneventful flight back. Until we made an emergency landing at the edge of the swamp. Unlike modern airplanes, our pteranodons have limited stamina, so they get tired after a while. And then something bit me and I had a nice little skull and crossbones debuff icon and my character started coughing a lot. Claire noticed a green cloud around my head, came to inspect it and - boom! Both of us were down with the sickness. And all the time we were getting attacked by bugs, snakes and crocodiles. Claire lost her pteranodon in the chaos. It flew away, landed god knows where and we had no idea what happened to it.

Then we got fucked by trying to trick the system without fully understanding the system. We decided to have Claire log off, then I'd fly back to camp by myself and have her log back on, so she'd spawn in near me. Except that's not really how things work on here. When you log off on a running server, your character just stays there and goes to sleep on the spot. So Claire dropped on her ass and nodded off in the middle of the swamp. It took all of 20 seconds before she got swallowed by a boa. Now she was back in camp with me, naked and without her gear, both of our characters coughing their lungs out and her airplane missing. Time for a rescue mission!

Time to bring out the T-Rex!

I wasn't gonna dick around this time. I jumped on Horm, our Triceratops, who can just charge into a forest and send all the trees flying. I had our T-Rex, Alice Cooper, with me for added protection. Nobody fucks with the rex! Meanwhile, Claire rode her parasaur Ducky and brought Barry, the weird sausage lizard, because she doesn't have anything badass in her collection.
We were attacked by all the snakes. We were both sick and coughing, Horm got paralyzed and we sat around and protected him while Alice Cooper fucked shit up.

After way too much fighting, drama, poison and paralysis we finally got Claire's stuff back and found her pteranodon stranded on some rock in the middle of the bog. Alas, the adventure didn't end without casualties.

He died like he lived - a complete idiot.

Barry fucking drowned. In an ankle-high bog. I don't know why he didn't just swim to the surface or make it to the edge of the swamp. He chose to just sit there and inhale the fresh, clean swamp water or some shit.

Pictured: technology.

Back at camp, Claire used some of the obsidian we had mined earlier to create our first high-tech tool: a fucking pair of scissors. Which is fair, because hair just keeps on growing, so we both looked like we were on our way to a furry convention. Time to cut each other's hair. We also got some freaky glowy eyes customization thingie as a reward for curing our swamp fever, and I put some smooshed berries on my armor for extra colour.

Yes, we're edgy.

Now that we were super sexy and perfectly healthy again, it was time to fail Mission Raptor once more. So we went back out there and ... look, they're basically killing themselves now at this point instead of letting us tame them. The closest we came to actually catching one of them was knocking it out, then it got eaten by those tiny fuckers, who look all cute and friendly as they surround you and rapidly grow in numbers before they finally decide to attack. So we ended up doing what we always do when we attempt to tame a raptor and killed a bunch of them, then came back with something we never wanted in the first place: birds!

So majestic!

Like most of our pets, this guy up there was special. He had his head stuck under a massive rock, so we just tranquilized his ass, then got rid of the boulder to free him. He's a super high level airplane, so we cannot even fly him yet. We just took him back to camp for the time being.
Before we went home, though, we spotted this huge snowy mountain in the distance, which made a nice change from all the redwood and tropical island stuff we had encountered so far. So we figured, heyho, whatever, let's just go check it out. And we headed north.

Temperatures started to drop rapidly. We noticed, because the game loves to nag you about it. Hurrdurr, it's cold, go someplace warm. You get little snowflake and ice cube symbols and shit. Sometimes you get a little flame icon when you're hot. We never really noticed any ill side-effects, apart from stuff like increased thirst levels and the like, so we ignored it and moved on. A miracle happened on the way there. A raptor showed up out of nowhere and started to eat Horm. He sat still and took it while Claire tranquilized it. Technically, she tranquilized me, the triceratops and half a dozen other creatures until she knocked out the fucking raptor, because this game doesn't have motion controls for some reason. And in a shocking turn of events, nobody killed the raptor by accident (or intentionally) this time. Had we reached a point where things would finally change for the better? Could it be?

And then there were two.

In a moment of breathtaking creativity, Claire named her raptor Ripper. Well. At least it wasn't Alfred or some shit. Moments later, another raptor showed up, so we decided to do that thing with the Triceratops again. You know, send him in first, have the raptor chew on him for a bit while we knock him out. We repeated this little game a third time when the ugliest sabertooth cat attacked. I'm not even joking. We've seen pitch black sabertooth cats. We've seen orange, tiger-looking ones. The one I tamed was fucking green, because of course it was. Everything I tame ends up being green.

For fuck's sake, out of all the possible colours!

The snowy tundra is a shitty place. It's full of wolves and giant warthog things and mammoths and other shit that wants you dead. We tamed an ankylosaurus and I named it Poundland, beause it pounds stuff to pudding with its spiky club tail. And then we started dying of hypothermia, because temperatures actually do have ill side-effects after some time.

We set the entire place on fire for warmth, then quickly started to retreat. Sadly, our newest friend got left behind and was quickly torn apart by a pack of hungry direwolves.

Well that's a bit of a bummer.

Oh well, at least we had our raptors now. But it became pretty clear that fighting with sticks and dead animal bits for clothes wasn't gonna cut it anymore. So I went and tamed another pack animal - Polygon the stegosaurus. Her animations are weird. She struts and swings her tail, flaunting her stuff all sassy-like. We brought her and Horm and just about any dino that could carry a bit of stuff and completely loaded them up with iron ore. On the way back I tamed the most worthless, annoying pet, yet. A hyena. Or hyaenadon, as the game calls them.

They're worthless, because a single one of them doesn't do much. You need several of them in order to trigger their pack buff, mix their genders a bit for the mate buff, then have a pack leader for maximum efficiency. I didn't know it at the time and kept Claire awake until 5:30am that night in an attempt to tame the fucker. We knocked one out, which does absolutely nothing. You have to sneak up on it and pet it. Once every 30 seconds. Failing to re-pet after 30 seconds means you rapidly lose taming progress, forcing you to start over. Getting in touching distance with a hyena for more than literally two seconds will cause the critter to freak out and run away, which also ruins your current taming attempt and forces you to hunt it down all over again. I was at it for hours, only to learn on the wiki that a single one is practically useless. After the fact. Oh well, only gotta repeat this nonsense twice or thrice more. Can't wait.

You can put bags on them, which will keep your meet fresh 8 times longer than your regular inventory. A fridge on legs!

I also tamed an animal, which turned out to be surprisingly useful - a giant scorpion! It can paralyze dinos, causing them to become entirely helpless to your taming attempts. So we just ran around the place for a while knocking out whatever got in our way, taming most of it in the process. So we have a giant prehistoric crocodile pet now! Yay!

Repeatedly stinging them also deals a lot of damage, hence all the blood.

We've got metal armor now. Claire has a sword. I crafted a shotgun and spent most of the night crafting ammunition. I shotgun-blasted a sabertooth tiger and nuked it into orbit. Life is good. Well. Not for the tiger, but you get the idea. I can't wait to see what we'll encounter next.

They're about to drop an epic album.

Alice Cooper Ate My Snake

(Part 1)
(Part 2)
(Part 3)

All the raptors, which used to live in riding distance of our camp, had been killed in weird and mysterious ways. While we may never know how, why or where they all disappeared and what tragic fate must have befallen them, I can honestly say that it almost certainly, kinda, probably, most likely didn't, but maybe just a little bit had something to do with us being so useless at taming raptors and getting them drowned, crushed, eaten and pulverized in the process. But hey, live and learn, right? Well. Not the raptors. Poor things.

It was time for a new plan. We prepared our air force once more. It was time to head north in order to explore a huge land mass past the swamp and some river full of asshole crocodiles. Scout things out. See what awaits us there. Maybe figure out whether or not THEISLAND still had any raptors at all. Find a good spot, park our airplanes in a safe spot (or back at home), make our way to the raptors and tame one at long last. It's gotta work out at some point!

Adjust your poop sliders, everybody. It's gonna be a long trip!

We came to an ancient forest, which had some stunning, massive trees, much bigger and more impressive than anything growing back at our base. There were some old ruins we checked out when our dinos had to land for a stamina break. The place was almost beautiful, but, you know, low resolution, massive pop-in and all that. I think I'm gonna stop going on about it, because that dead horse has been mashed into a fine paste by now.

The place was inhabited by all sorts of herbivores. Most prominently, a bunch of annoyingly loud elky things. Or moose or something? Furry things with antlers, which wouldn't shut up for some reason.

The forest was also home to a bunch of dire bears and some annoying pricks literally named terrorbirds. They weren't quite as massive as stupid Theon (Claire renamed him to Edward because of his scissorhands now, which is honestly kinda cool), but they sure wanted some of that sweet Ptetra ass.

We didn't bring any other pets, seeing as we just wanted to explore the area and not have any of our hunting dinos get lost by making them try to keep up with our flying mounts. Making the pteranodons nice and tanky really paid off. And then Claire spotted it.
There was a beautiful, perfect raptor just sitting there, waiting for us to tame it, so we captured it and took it home and everyone was happy and that's the end of Mission Raptor.

Just kidding. There was a fucking T-Rex, and it absolutely fucking destroyed everything. I dismounted Ptetra, because I'm a fucking idiot and I wanted to have a closer look at the Rex. And he tolerated that for a few moments as he munched his way across the forest, happily eradicating bears, elky things, frogs, turtles, snakes and just about everything else that existed. Then he spotted me. Started charging right at me. With animal-like reflexes I sprinted back to my pteranodon and hit the inventory button instead of the mount button. Twice. Opening your inventory in the Switch version of Ark causes the entire game to freeze for two seconds. I peed a little.

Once I was back up in the air, big boy Rex quickly lost interest in me and began to maul the absolute fuck out of a nearby brontosaurus. The bronto slapped him with his long neck as if it was a limp dick, because what else was it supposed to do? So I jumped off my dino and immediately began to pelt the Rex with tranquilizer arrows. The bastard didn't even care. He tore the bronto to pieces, then ate him. Not that I'm complaining or anything. He just kept on feeding for a while, so I continued to feed him tranquilizers, until he realized that something wasn't quite right. That's when he started to run. Who's the apex predator now, bitch? The T-Rex was running away from me, so I fired one last shot at him.

From there it was the same old song and dance. Stuff him full of meat, make sure he eats, wait for him to love us. The whole thing went a lot quicker and was a lot easier than it had any right to. We sat and waited for hours taming things like our hipster bird dino or a stegosaurus, but Mr. Rex liked meat so much, he just happily gobbled it all up in his sleep.

I'm not gonna make fun of him. Us sleep-eaters have to stick together.

And after surprisingly little effort, the greedy little T-Rex was ours. Not entirely sure why we even care about raptors anymore at this point, but coolness factor, I guess? Completion? Anyway, meet Alice Cooper:

Such a winning smile!

And we made even more new friends while we were there! Still mourning the loss of Jerry, the otter Claire had tamed and then killed with her own spear, all within a window of 38 seconds on her very first day in this game, we had never been able to spot another otter. Until now. There was a whole bunch of the little shits going about their daily business, with all the nasty predators around us completely ignoring them for some reason. They were still fucked, of course, since Claire and her spear were here. But she was a little more careful this time around, tamed one of them and decided to wear it as a scarf. Like so:

And since we were already in the process of taming ALL THE THINGS and I had to go back on foot (Alice Cooper can't fly, after all!), I tranquilized one of the elks, who immediately ran into the river, fainted and drowned. So I shot a second one, named him Steve MacDonald and was now the not so proud owner of the most pathetic beast to ever roam THEISLAND.

I'm not sure whether it's bad karma, a broken AI script or the fact he's extra delicious, but Steve immediately began to attract every single predator in a 20 mile radius. He defended himself by wildly flailing around, hitting everything in his path, friend and foe alike. He started by squishing a giant snail Claire was attempting to tame. It left quite an impressive trail of green goo all over the place when it died.

It's a shame, because they're actually quite pretty. They only eat cake.

The journey home was as chaotic as it gets, because fucking Steve pulled everything, forcing Alice Cooper and our pteranodons to swoop in and kill predators non-stop. Imagine a whole bunch of giant herbivores panically escaping in every single direction, a T-Rex trying to keep up and shaking the earth with every step and stupid Steve just panic-stampeding all over the place, squishing and killing random shit wherever he went. It looked a little something like this:

Claire scouted ahead on her mount and had her dino chomp bugs and flying ants out of the air. I had to stay on the ground and protect Steve, so most of my gear had fallen apart. Meanwhile, Steve attracted all the snakes in the land, got paralyzed and went to sleep for an entire night and an entire day, forcing us to sit and wait around his useless ass.

God damn it, Steve!

It's now way past bedtime, but we finally made it home. I put a saddle on Steve and parked him next to our other mounts. I can't craft a saddle for Alice Cooper for now, because holy fucking level requirements, Batman!
Here's the thing though. For as much as I hate micromanaging shit, taking care of all those annoying survival things you have to remember and what have you - coming home felt good! Putting some shit on the crops, throwing some potatoes in the trough, throwing some steaks in the smoking chamber, checking on all the pets, making repairs and so forth. I absolutely hate chores. But just enjoying the safety of our camp, basic maintenance, not having to worry about getting swallowed alive by snakes or having to worry about the Steve murder club for a change was exactly what I needed at the time. We've got a T-Rex, baby! Still no raptors. Chris Pratt would be disappointed.

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.