Poop, Cannibalism And Dinosaurs - Now On Nintendo Switch

Ark: Survival Evolved is the ugliest game on Nintendo's hybrid console. I'm aware there are awful ports of crappy little mobile games on the system, but none of them have characters, which look like this:

There's low resolution and there's whatever the fuck this is.

And okay, fair enough, it's one of the most complex games out there, you gotta compromise to make it run on the weak-ass hardware, which is fine, for as long as they're honest about it, right? Yeah, about that. Here's one of the screenshots from the Nintendo eShop:

It's like they're advertising a different game.

Alright, so they're advertising the game with the power of bullshots. That's not great, but everybody does that these days, right? It's annoying, but hey, seeing as it's easily the weakest version of the game out there, certainly it's gonna be a bit cheaper than ... oh.

What a steal!

So I did the only reasonable thing and bought not one, but two copies of the game, because why suffer all by myself when I can drag Claire into it?
I don't like survival games. I've annoyed the absolute shit out of everybody when I had to help with a guidebook on Fallout 76, because not only is it a terrible game, but it's also a genre I hate. And I'm only happy when everybody knows how I feel! Also, I knew absolutely nothing about Ark. I have watched Vanoss' gameplay video three and a half years ago and figured it's some kind of grotesque caveman simulator. I did google some Switch version gameplay videos, but all I saw was a bunch of blurry, choppy awfulness, lots of freezing and people giving up on it after 5-10 minutes. Can't say that I blame them. But while I was looking at all that stuff, I also tripped over a tiny bit of footage, which showed a T-Rex clad in cyber armor. It fired laser cannons. The whole thing lasted all of two and a half seconds and it's all I needed to get hooked. There's an awkward sex analogy if you ever wanted one.
So I shelled out 90 Quid, spent the next hour downloading this garbage and created my alter ego: Wankshark. That name originates from Mutant Football League, one of my favourite games on the system.

It's the character's actual name, I did not come up with it and put it there.

The first thing we noticed in character creation is that it's impossible to generate something that at least remotely resembles a human being. Even when you don't completely fuck with the proportions and give yourself gorilla arms or tiny Trump hands, there's always the face that'll ultimately fuck you. The faaaaace!

Your mother might say she loves your face. But she's lying.

Claire forgot to name her character, so she was henceforth known as Human. And thus began the adventures of Human and Wankshark.
We began our journey on the shores of some place referred to by the game files as THEISLAND. I punched trees and fondled random plants like I've seen in some YouTube videos. I made a pick. I punched a rock with the pick. I made an axe. I punched a tree with an axe. I made a spear. Claire made a spear. Claire punched a dino with a spear. The dino punched back. Claire died.

Apparently, corpse runs are a thing in survival games. You die, you respawn naked, you walk back to your corpse and pick up all of its stuff. Just like Bear Grylls! So Claire did that. Then she took an axe to her now useless corpse and turned it into meat. We threw her meaty chunks into the campfire we set up by the beach. Then we ate Claire. Survival. Sometimes you have to eat your own corpse in order to stay alive. There was a fart noise and suddenly there was a massive turd next to Claire. She said she found a poop command. I tried to activate mine using the game's super-awkward and impossible to control ring menu. I cheered instead. We stood there and cheered at the shit Claire had taken after she had cooked and eaten herself.

Eat, shit, build primitive straw hut, sleep. Alright, so where's the WiFi?

Morning. Breakfast time. Time for eggs. And maybe some chicken nuggets. So we went and tamed a pair of dodos. The taming process is really weird in Ark. Basically, you knock out a critter, shove a bunch of food up its unconscious ass and hope for it to eat before it wakes back up. If it eats enough, it'll become your pet. So I went and did that with a girl dodo and named it Doris. Doris the dodo. Meanwhile, Claire tamed a male bird and named him Eric for some fucked up reason. She later tamed a dinosaur and named him Greg. If I had allowed her to name our RL cats, their names would probably be Susan and Mrs. Miller.

So Doris laid a whole bunch of tasty eggs (all of which also came out with a fart noise), but we wanted to breed chicken nuggets, so we tried to get Eric to shag her. So Claire threw her boy dodo at my girl dodo, hearts started flying, they were about to get it on, then Eric forgot his viagra and ran away and Doris took a shit in frustration. That's 100% how it happened and I have video proof.

But hey, fuck the nuggets - we finally understood how to tame animals! So I went and tamed one of those spitting dinos, which murdered Newman's stupid face in Jurassic Park. Meanwhile, Claire bribed an otter into becoming her friend with the help of some gross, dead fish. She named him Jerry, because of course she did. Look at his stupid happy face!

Prehistoric sabretooth otter.

For as ugly as the game looks on Switch, you gotta love how the little fucker animates.

Jerry died in a tragic spearfishing accident less than 30 seconds after this video was recorded.

Okay, I gotta start cracking wise for a bit now. Yes, Ark is absolutely hideous, the draw distance is a joke, everything is blurry and washed out and most of the vegetation is either invisible or displayed as some sort of green blob unless you're in touching distance. Also, it floats, because the green bits on every tree are rendered waaaay before the trunk. But I think I get why it's doing that.

First of all, Ark probably uses the most incredible-looking lighting system I've seen in any Switch game so far. Screenshots don't really do it justice, but even with all the ugly blurriness going on, the volumetric lighting looks insanely good.

And it doesn't actually come out of a random mountain like it does in Fallout 76.

Same goes for the game's shadows. Yes, their draw-distance is almost non-existant, but these shadows are accurate, they're displayed on players, the plants, the grass, everything. And the realtime-lighting and shadow system plays an important part in the game. Night time is pitch-fucking-black. You need torches. Portable torches. Tiki torches. Campfires. Forges. Stuff actually illuminates the area. When Claire and I explore at night, one of us will carry a torch, while the other one pokes stuff with a spear. During daytime, parts of the island will get so hot that you have to sit in the shadows to cool down. Going prone in a shady area makes it more difficult for creatures to spot you. This stuff isn't just eyecandy. It's a gameplay element. Unfortunately, in order for it to work and show up, you gotta accept some massive drawbacks in other areas of the game. As in, plants, dinos and people barely still resembling plants, dinos and people. It's stupidly blurry.

It probably helps that Claire and I never even acknoledged the game's existence on other platforms, because knowing how good it can look on the PC or an Xbone would probably ruin it even more on Switch. Instead, we're exploring THEISLAND with  childlike wonder. "Holy shit, it's a giant longneck! Aaaand it catapulted me into orbit!" Not only that, but the world seems to 'remember' everything you do. Leave some loot, destroy a bunch of trees, knock out a dino - you can run away from it, out of rendering distance, come back and it's all still here. This may not sound very impressive, but compare it to a game like GTA V, where a bunch of exploded cars will despawn the second you turn the camera away from it, because performance. That's perfectly acceptable in a game like GTA, but Ark must remember where you plundered resources, where you planted new ones, where you set up a camp, where your tamed dinos are grazing and so on and so forth. It's taxing on the system and the performance budget is limited.

During its best moments, Ark feels shockingly alive even on Switch. Watching a bunch of pteranodons circle over a body of water, then dart down to disappear under the surface, only to come back up with a massive fish, is absolutely amazing. Big predators will hunt down dodos and peaceful herbivores, gore them and eat them. There was one massive dino, we called him assholosaurus, who decided that our cozy little spot on the beach was now his home, so he repeatedly murdered us, trashed our house, ate all of our stuff and left shit everywhere.

We're still trying to grow vegetables in order to tame one of these guys for protection.

In its worst moments, Ark isn't just ugly, but it's also incredibly frustrating. Claire and I learned how to turn animal hide into armor. We smelted metal and made better weapons. I had Nova, my little spitty dinosaur, who helped me kill stuff. We fucking owned the beach now, baby! Time to explore!

So we went and climbed some mountain, explored a jungle, stalked some friendly plant eaters and just enjoyed the many sights and sounds of THEISLAND. Then we got thirsty. We spotted some water in the distance, because it's pretty much the only distant thing the game actually manages to render. So we went down there to refill our water skins. A giant prehistoric crocodile looking fucker leapt out of the water. It didn't just casually rise and waddle out of there. It fucking jumped right out of the water, countless feet into the air and landed right on top of me and gored me. All my precious leather armor, my metal tools, my weapons, everything gone in seconds. I couldn't even fight back.

Not my Harley Davidson, though, thank fuck.

A reasonable player would have accepted defeat and spent ten or so minutes re-crafting all of the shit I had just lost. An even smarter player would have crafted a lot of spare gear in order to cope with this exact situation. Me, I sprinted back to the horror beach without any weapons or clothes on. I wasn't even halfway there when I got pounced by a raptor. It gored me in unter two seconds. It was almost cartoony. This drama repeated about half a dozen times until it got dark. So I punched some more trees for wood, picked up some fiber, blah, blah, fucking torch, hello raptor, BURN, YOU FUCKER! The bastard pounced me again, but this time I burned him to a crisp with my mighty torch. And then ...

"An error has occurred and the software needs to shut down."

Yeah. Ark isn't massively prone to crashes, but it does shut down on occasion. Not only was the raptor alive again when I restarted the game (we lost about 30 minutes of progress), but assholosaurus was now roaming the area. I must have died several dozen times in the attempt to retrieve my gear. When I finally made it back to where the weird crocodile thing ate me, I got reunited with Nova for one last moment. We got jumped by a bunch of dinos and torn to shreds. RIP, both of us.

On the next attempt, I crawled back to my gear on my nipples at an agonizingly slow pace, put all of my shit back on, minus all the stuff that got broken, got up in order to gtfo and the weird crocodile thing leapt out of the water again.

It took several hours to retrieve all of my crap, where I could have crafted all of the same stuff in under ten minutes, but heyho, that shit is mine and I wasn't gonna let THEISLAND take it from me. Then Claire and I tamed a bunch of extra hunting dinos and we went to have our revenge on assholosaurus. Glory to us!

I like how, while we both have a couple of the exact same dinos to protect us on our travels, each of them have unique colour pattens and look a little different than the rest.

A green, a red and a purple one. Dino #4 got stuck under a rock, which happens now and then. They eventually reappear out of nowhere.

I crafted a triceratops saddle. According to the wiki, these guys like vegetables and all we've found so far is a bunch of berries. Claire found some carrot seeds, though, so right now we're collecting all the poop for the crop plots in our camp. We'll grow these carrots someday. We're also mixing tranquilizers in order to knock out a raptor without killing it. A pet raptor is our next big goal. And yes, there's also a raptor saddle waiting in our storage box. Now all we need is someone to put it on.

Ark: Survival Evolved on Switch is frustrating, hideous, overpriced and shouldn't be played by anyone. I'm fully aware of how terrible this version of the game is. That said, I've spent an entire day playing it and I'm going right back to it as soon as this post goes live. I want to ride a raptor! I want to forge metal armor! We need to tame flying and swimming dinos! We have to explore THEISLAND and uncover all of its treasures and mysteries! Yes, it looks like ass. It runs like ass, too. I don't even care. I can play with my pet dinosaurs, make dodos fuck and throw T-Rex poop anytime, anywhere I want, thanks to the Nintendo Switch. I remember the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours Claire and I have spent on the 3DS version of Terraria. We're gonna do the exact same thing with the Switch version of Ark now. Play it in bed. Play it on family trips. I could be playing this on my decent gaming PC. I'm not even tempted. I'm playing a far inferior version, simply because it's portable. ♥