So I Completed Jurassic World Evolution on Switch

I don't like city and park builders. Not because I don't enjoy the gameplay, but because I enjoy it too much, causing these games to quickly take over my life for several consecutive days and nights, meaning I don't sleep, work or function properly until I've done absolutely everything one can do in these games. So when Jurassic World Evolution landed on Switch, I tried to dodge that bullet by putting it on Claire's console and getting my fix from watching her play. 

Naturally, this strategy never works and is exactly how I ended up with my own Switch in the first place. Back when Nintendo's hybrid was released, I bought one for Claire, watched her play Breath of the Wild, then very quickly ended up having one of my own. Suffice to say, I was fully hooked on my own copy of Jurassic World three days after gifting it to my significant other.

I find it very difficult to resist these guys.

I was never a huge fan of the movies. I mean, I find it very difficult to be a big fan of most things, because most things are stupid. I liked the original Jurassic Park, second one was okay, third one ... right. I'm already feeling the strong urge to post a massive hate blog about how much the third film sucks, how little sense it makes even for a film about modern day dinosaurs and how incredibly hateable some of the supposed protagonists are, so let's quickly move on. Jurassic World. I like the artwork and some of the dino and building designs, hate the weird plastic bubbles they drive around in and absolutely fucking hate the 'story'. The Indominus Rex - the new park's main attraction, people from all over the world allegedly come to see, so they give it the ability to cloak itself like the Predator. Because you want the best, most popular creature of your prehistoric zoo to be invisible, apparently. Little did I know at the time that things would get so much dumber in the sequel.

Anyhow. It's all about the gameplay and the dinosaurs and there's plenty of both in here. Thing is, I really didn't bother much to inform myself about what this game really is all about, so my expectations were a bit off. See, if you follow the movies, it usually boils down to dinosaur parks going horribly wrong due to greed, ignorance, incompetence and gross mismanagement. Not once or twice, but what's soon to be six times, because if there's one thing people absolutely refuse to do, it's learning shit from history.

Some of them are as tall as buildings and their favourite food is people. Let's invite ten thousand visitors!

Here's what I thought I was gonna do: Set up nice little areas for all of my favourite dinos, make sure they're happy and properly looked after and well-fed, so they won't go on a mad, stompy rampage, murdering countless people and other dinosaurs in unbridled rage.
What I actually had to do: Become dinosaur Hitler.

See, the game starts with you doing pretty much what I had hoped one was supposed to do. But then it introduces three characters, who quickly dictate every single thing you do on each of the five islands: Science Lady©, Entertainment Dude™ and Security Guy®. They all give you various tasks and missions, which you should complete if you want to unlock all possible dinos, upgrades and rewards, as well as finish the story and progress through the game. And it's easy enough at first - attract more visitors, make sure all the dinos are nice and visible, generate enough profit, that sort of thing.

It all goes wrong once you hatch your first carnivore.

But things get very weird very quickly. It starts when Entertainment Dude™ asks you to deliberately get two of your dinos to fight. You know, maybe put a harmless plant eater in the raptor paddock and see what happens. You can refuse, but that means you also pass up on an opportunity to gain reputation with the guy. Don't rank up your rep with all three of these people and you won't get certain unlocks and rewards. What's worse - they will straight-up sabotage you, if you refuse to accept their missions. And this is where it gets really fucked up. Get Security Guy® to dislike you and he'll knock out your power stations, meaning none of your important facilities will work for a while. That's really great when you need to medicate a dino or transport it somewhere safe. And you can't. Because no power.

Meanwhile, Entertainment Dude™ will simply open every single gate in your park and let all the dinos out if you ignore him for too long. Because nothing's more entertaining than having your face torn off by a velociraptor. Last, and most certainly least, there's Science Lady©. Earn her scorn and she will poison your dinosaurs. I'm not making this up - as a scientist and researcher, she can't think of anything better to do than to make your dinos violently ill, causing them to die if you don't medicate them quickly.

And things devolve so much further from there. For instance, when Dr. Wu makes an appearance. You know, the actually rather friendly guy, who was a minor side character with 30 or so seconds of screen time in the original movie, only to be turned into some sort of super evil villain mastermind in the new films. Basically, he asks you to breed a very specific selection of dinos, then carries them off by helicopter for a while. You get them back a while later, only to realize they're all half dead, dehydrated, starving and infected with rabies. He tells you to 'deal with it', because knowing what happened is 'well above your pay grade'. Which feels a little bit weird, coming from a gene-splicing laboratory scientist underling talking to the facility manager, but heyho.

Don't get attached to any of your dinos.

Towards the end, you're told to deliberately torture dinos, make them miserable, then create catastrophic dinosaur moshpits and keep them alive and unhappy for as long as you can. I'm not making this up. There's a mission where you actually have to lock up some dinos and deprive them of food, water and company, then keep them contained and alive while a timer ticks down. 'For science' or some shit. In a later mission, you're asked to perch up a huge amount of dinosaurs together, which will cause them to be incredibly agitated, meaning you'll spend most of your time fixing the walls and facilities to prevent the dinos from breaking out. And then you're asked to release a hungry carnivore right in the middle of them. If too many of your dinos die or you get too many visitors killed when a dino inevitably breaks out, the mission fails.

It doesn't help that you perform all of these questionable deeds whilst constantly getting moaned at by Jeff Goldblum. Yes, he's right and I agree with him, but you either keep Goldlbum happy or you finish the campaign - these two options are mutually exclusive. Also, I can just picture everyone crowded around the sound booth when they recorded his lines, egging him on to 'say the thing'. Because 'finding a way' is mentioned gratuitously in this game. 

Basically, you only win this game by not giving a shit. Don't care about your dinos, don't give them individual names and colour patterns. Treat them like stock. A means to an end. Otherwise, things get depressing fast. I mean, you're supposed to lock up a single dino without food or water, watch it scream and lose its mind, watch it starve, then tranquilize it and put it back in its cage if it manages to break free. I know it's only a game, but virtual animal cruelty is still a very strange form of entertainment. It also made me incredibly creative in my methods of torture, just so I could actually beat the game.

The DLC is where I peaked.

There's a 'what if' scenario set in the 90s, where the original characters return to a failed Jurassic Park to give it a second shot. You get the original main characters voiced by their actors, as well as some guy attempting (and failing miserably) to sound like Richard Attenborough. "John? Damn, I thought you said Richard Hammond!" He's not great, but at least he's trying a little harder than 'generic young white guy' voice actor standing in for Chris Pratt in the game's main campaign.

One of the missions in the Jurassic Park DLC puts you on an island inhabited by dozens of herbivores. You're supposed to build paddocks around them, keep them safe and alive, which is pretty much impossible, as the island is ravaged by hurricanes and deadly diseases. Also, locking up the dinos causes some of them to feel miserable due to overcrowding. Some dinos end up feeling lonely, because there aren't enough of their kind. And you can't breed any more of them, because the mission doesn't give you the tools to create more of that specific kind of dino. And then you're told to add three more dinos to the mix and keep their happiness-meter up high for a certain amount of time. Did I mention one of these three dinos you're supposed to add is a carnivore?

You're meant to add a carnivore to an island full of vegans, whilst keeping the lot of them content. Which works just about as well in Jurassic World as it does on social media. Basically, what I resorted to in order to win the mission was to tranquilize the two enormous longnecks, who were constantly miserable due to being lonely (as in, they wanted more longnecks, but I couldn't breed any). Now they weren't miserable, because they were knocked out. Meanwhile, the carnivore was super happy, because he was eating the sleeping longnecks. Mission accomplished!

For what it's worth, the final mission and ending to the Jurassic Park DLC is so glorious (if totally stupid) and such a nice homage to the film, that it was still a pretty satisfying experience and I'm glad I finished it. I'd love to describe it in more detail, but since the two and a half readers of this blog actually play the game themselves, I'm gonna keep the spoilers to myself.

And now that I've pretty much 100%ed the game, I finally get to use it all in sandbox mode, set up a park where the dinos are actually cared for and make up for my horrible crimes against virtual animals. Yay. 

Now don't get me wrong, I actually quite like this game, even though I'm absolutely baffled at the motivation behind some of these missions. I mean, some of the characters in the movies (and novels, presumably) had to be fundamentally stupid and/or evil for the plot to play out the way it did. But I don't remember any of them suggesting to actively torture any of the exhibits, let alone get them to kill one another. That said, I find the dinosaurs in this game rather fascinating and quite a step up from Ark: Survival Evolved.

They have some impressive fighting animations. You can watch them drink and see their fully-animated tongues. An iguanodon will get on its hind legs and grab leaves with its weird hands. And every now and then you can catch the more sociable ones gathering in circles, where they make noise and motion at each other like they're socializing. And sure, you might be tempted to say that's a bit silly, because certainly that's not a thing dinosaurs actually did. Well, about that...

Bunch of frogs totally not socializing.

You get the iconic musical score from the films, all the original dino noises and Jeff Goldblum doing whatever the fuck Jeff Goldblum does. Yes, I know most people find him delightful, but the internet has seen a bit of a Goldblum oversaturation over the past two or three years, where the guy somehow ended up in every podcast and every YouTube video, ever. It's, um, fine, but you should ... ah ... give it a bit of a, you know, break. 

The game is also a bit of a technical marvel on Switch. Not only does it look and run significantly better than, say, Ark: Survival Evolved, but it's also one of the very few games in my collection of 100+ titles on this console, which I absolutely cannot seem to crash, even during an 8-12 hour play session. And yes, these absolutely are a thing. For as much as I love the Switch, many games are a little prone to crashing. Even quality ports and decent games by experienced studios will ultimately crash out every 3-4 hours with that dreaded message, 'The software was closed because an error occurred'. Which really isn't a big deal or anything, it's just a thing the Switch does during extensive play sessions. I managed to get two or three infinite load screens on Jurassic World when rapidly moving between fully maxed-out isles, but that's it. No crashes, game-breaking glitches or any other major issues, which is rather remarkable for the little system.

Well then, I'm off to start my sandbox. Without sabotage, hurricanes or some prick©™® telling me to kill my dinos. Good thing I haven't got any plans for the coming week.

Do Snakes Talk?

 

When you think about it, a snake is really just a bendy straw, which hisses on occasion. I mean, they're so basic and primitive, they just decided that there's no need to evolve past being a head and a spine. This isn't entirely fair, as, upon closer inspection, they're actually pretty sophisticated in their set-up. For instance, the tails on our three snakes serve as a hand of sorts. They hold on to things with it, secure themselves, stay 'grounded' in a way. Each one of our snakes feels a lot more calm and relaxed if you let them hold on to you with their tail when you pick them up. There's also a lot going on with their scales, depending on whether a snake is designed to hang around in trees or spend most of its life down on the ground. Our Burmese python is downright fluffy, which isn't a term I ever thought I'd use when describing a reptile.

What I find even more interesting are the signs of apparent intelligence I get to catch as I interact with them on a daily basis. Reptiles are smarter than most give them credit for - something I experienced first-hand with our pet monitor lizard, who would play with his own collection of toys, climb up on the sofa for social interaction and carefully take food straight from our hands, always avoiding to bite the hand that feeds him. He was housebroken and roamed around the house just like any cat or dog would. We could walk him outside and he'd know the way back to our house or the way back inside the pet shop, when Claire took him to work. For all intents and purposes, having a tame monitor lizard really isn't that different to owning a pet cat or dog, apart from certain reptile-specific care requirements. 

He'll chill with you on the sofa like any other pet.

I'm fully convinced that he was capable of dreaming. Just like a dog would occasionally 'run' in its sleep, our lizard would often twitch, make noise and hiss to himself while he was sleeping. So while I wouldn't necessarily ask him for help with a tax return (they can count to about six), I'd certainly put him one one cognitive level with our more regular, furred, four-legged companions. 

And it's starting to look like snakes might be a lot more intelligent than you'd expect your average toothy fleshlight to be. Did you know that certain snakes can tell each other apart, make friends and clearly prefer hanging out with some snakes more than others? Because the garter snake absolutely does all that.

When it comes to our own pet snakes, we have started to spot certain interesting behaviours, which could be interpreted as a means of telling us about their needs and wants. Or it could mean absolutely nothing. When a cat jumps on top of you in the middle of the night, bats at your face and meows at you with awful animal breath that reeks of fish and death, it's fairly obvious the furry fucker wants to be fed. I had one cat in particular, who, after having her bedroom privileges revoked, would walk all over the telephone or the tv's remote control, trying to get them to make noise in order to force me out of bed to turn them off. And, since I was already up, I may as well feed the damn cat. Snakes have to be a bit more subtle than that for obvious reasons.

Cats hate you.

Our carpet python has picked up this weird habit, where she'd sit in front of her water bowl and stare at me whenever the bowl is empty or there's a bunch of straw in it and it got all messy and stale. She'll sit at the edge of the bowl and just stare. Snake scorn. So I open her tank, clean the bowl when necessary, get a pitcher of water and she'll sit and watch me give her a refill. Then she'll immediately start to drink. This has turned into a ritual, which we repeat on a regular basis. Snake sits there and makes me aware of the water situation, demands service, has a drink. 

Then again, isn't it just as likely the snake checks out her bowl for a drink, finds nothing in there and just stays there because she has nowhere else to go? How much of her behaviour is communication, signaling that she wants something? How much of this means the snake is saying, 'hey, gimme a refill' and how much of it is really just 'snake wants a drink, bowl is empty, so snake hangs around, not sure what else to do'?

Some snakes prefer tea.

There's our Burmese python, who is a lot more social and spends more time outside of his vivarium than our other snakes. He'll come to the front of the tank, you can let him out (after making absolutely sure there are no cats in the room), he'll have a look around and even go to sleep in your lap. And he'll go right back inside his vivarium when he's had enough. Of course there isn't always the time to banish the cat, close the doors and let the snake out. So he'll get a little impatient, he might give you the death stare for a while, and if all else fails, he'll tear down his light.

He has a little LED light strip in his tank, which is attached by magnets. That way you can easily remove it in case you want to clean or replace it. Of course this also means that our snake can remove it without too much effort, meaning one of us will have to get in there, sort it out and interact with him. 
What do you think? Is that him just wanting attention, knowing he'll get it when he dicks around with his lights? It's a fairly easy connection to make, right? Light comes down, human comes in to fix it, pays attention to snake. Or is it a mix of coincidence and wishful thinking? Snake gets bored, derps all over the place, unintentionally knocks down his light and is happy to see someone checking on him to fix it, without understanding that one event lead to the other? It's difficult to tell with these guys.

They're too damn busy surfing the web all day.

Our Burmese python is also the most likely to sit still and put up with your shit when you're trying to help him. For instance, he's incredibly messy when he sheds his skin. Our other snakes just slide off the old skin like a condom. But our big guy explodes into huge chunks of skin, some of which just stick to his body and remain there until you peel him like the world's longest potato. On another occasion, Claire had to open his mouth and remove a piece of bark, which had got stuck in there. 

Have you ever tried opening your cat's mouth to shove a pill in there? I'm not saying there aren't any cats out there who would actually let you do it, but in most cases, the experience isn't going to be pleasant or peaceful. Now try forcing open the mouth of an animal, which is large enough to eat a whole pig and strong enough to kill you entirely by accident. And yes, he did try to wiggle out of it, tried to get away, he huffed and puffed a lot, but in the end, he gave in. Most importantly, though, he didn't bite.

Claire says he ultimately put up with it, because he knew she was helping him. Can that really be true? If nothing else, is he intelligent enough to make the conscious decision not to attack? Or is there no intelligence at play and it's just his fight or flight instinct choosing the latter? 

He's got plenty of space for brain matter up there.

I'm fascinated by this. He's big and strong enough to seriously hurt you. He could do so to immediately get you to stop whatever it is you're doing to him. But he doesn't. Why? The damn cat won't hesitate a tenth of a second before fucking me up if I dare touch her belly one too many times. Snake just moves out of the way, doesn't have time for my shit. He reminds me a lot of our old family dog in that way. Kids, little cousins, all sorts of brats climbing all over the poor thing, poking and prodding it and the dog, while clearly not enjoying it, would peacefully sit it out and hope for it all to be over, soon. 

You'd say it's a good, friendly, patient dog, who is smart enough to understand a small kid means it no harm. There was our giant monitor lizard, who would gently pick up tiny prawns you held out in front of his face, because he was smart enough to understand you're being nice to him - and you'll be more likely to continue feeding him if he doesn't hurt you. Is it possible a snake can be smart enough to consciously decide against biting you, knowing it'll benefit from it in the long run? Understanding that it pays off to be on good terms with the human that feeds you?

It would certainly explain how this feral snake clearly recognizes a guy, who hand-feeds it some fish, which the snake takes quite carefully and gently before disappearing again. Doesn't look like something a stupid, primitive animal would do.

Puking is fun: I got myself an Oculus Rift S

Wanting to learn what Virtual Reality gaming is like through YouTube is like wanting to learn about shagging through PornHub. Sure, you witness which bit goes where, how the mechanics and logistics work and how fun it is to most people experiencing it, but you actually don't understand how it really feels. Because of that, my own personal understanding of VR was extremely limited and lead to me not only not giving a shit, but outright disliking it. I mean, what is commonly known about VR? It causes nausea and migraines in lots of people, it supports a bunch of games and apps you've never even heard about, people in VR gameplay videos on YouTube always fumble about with the controls and drop stuff - and all of that is prohibitively expensive to boot. What complete and utter muppet pays 400 quid to violently throw up whilst playing some unknown garbage game with shitty controls? Well ... me, apparently.

I'm a greedy pig
So you may have heard I make some money here and there as a games journalist. And as it happens, some readers at the magazine I work for have been complaining for quite some time about the lack of decent VR coverage. Not enough news, reviews, just articles on the subject in general. Not a lot of people are knowledgeable in this particular field. What I'm trying to say is - if I were to start writing articles based on this subject, there'd be a paying audience. Basically, the hardware pays for itself within one or two articles, then starts making me money. So, you know, fuck it. I can take a bit of nausea if it means I get to sleep slightly more peacefully at night.

So, (temporarily) 400 quid poorer, Claire and I anticipated the arrival of our new Oculus Rift. It was probably gonna suck. Yay, you stick two tiny screens into your face, play everything at shitty resolutions and get head tracking instead of controller or mouse movement. How good can that possibly be? The installer was already crap (15 gigs just for the damn software!), the stuff on their store front couldn't have looked more alien. Dafuq is Robo Recall or BBC Bear Island? Why the hell would I want to experience Google Earth in 3D? Yeah well.

VR dinosaurs were one of the reasons we gave this a shot.

Slow burn
First steps were a bit unimpressive. First of all, the headset was a bit cold and I was not, so the lenses immediately fogged up. Great. Then there's a tutorial for people with special needs. Left controller goes in the left hand, right in the right. You don't fucking say! The A-button is the button with the big letter A on it. Yeah, yeah, I've played videogames before, get on with it already! Next was a bit of pink wireframe imagery in front of a black screen. A whale, a bit of scenery, all very simplistic and stylized, nothing too overwhelming. I didn't know this at the time, but it does make sense for this sort of thing to start small, because not every can handle too much action when using VR for the first time. But we'll get to that.

Eventually, I found myself sitting at some sort of desk, which was surrounded by screens and covered drink cans, random toy cars and other garbage, not entirely unlike my real work environment. I picked up a little car, held it up in front of my face and immediately began to realize how little I actually knew about VR. You don't just have two tiny screens in front of your face, on top of a bit of head-tracking. You get stereoscopic 3D. The result was, that I was suddenly holding the single-most realistic object I've ever seen in a videogame. Not because the textures were so super high quality or the model was so insanely detailed (none of this was the case), but because it had proper depth to it. My brain absolutely believed I was holding an actual, physical object. 

Great stupid minigames
Moments later, a little robot sprang to life and started floating about the room. I waved at it, we fistbumped, stuff happened naturally without me really thinking about it. Then the little guy handed me a bunch of disks for a 3D-printer, which generated little toys for me to play around with. It printed out a little ping pong paddle and a ball, which, you know, whatever. Then it created a gun and lots of little targets appeared around me. So I held and pointed the gun, shot the targets and had stupid amounts of fun with it. Tried it with both my left and right hand. I don't really use my left very much in real life, but for some reason I seem to be ambidextrous in videogames. Probably because you always use both hands when gaming? No clue. Meanwhile, Claire secretly watched, laughed at and filmed me.

She followed my gameplay on the big screen, not knowing how shockingly real it felt with the headset on. It gives you an unbelievable sense of depth. Attempting to describe it would be like describing the color red to a blind person. You have to try it, because no 2D footage, no video, no explanation can possibly convey what it's really like. So I had Claire put on the headset. "Wow!" That's all she said. Then she started exploring around the desk, knocked over items and dropped stuff as she tried to get used to the weird controls. Fortunately, we've both spent large amounts of time playing with Wii Nunchucks and Nintendo Switch joy cons and motion controls, so it only took her about five minutes to get the hang of it. After a while she was shooting targets, throwing balls and fistbumping robots like she had been doing it all her life. To be perfectly honest, none of us would have enjoyed any of these little minigames and toys for even ten seconds if it wasn't for VR. But experiencing them in that way was actually quite exciting. Maybe it wasn't all terrible.

Scary Dinosaurs
Next up was a little demo reel inside a program called Dreamdeck. Once more, it started off with the absolute minimum. A bunch of animals in a forest, surrounding a little campfire. No textures, very low detail, pretty but very simplistic. You just get to look around, it's not really interactive or anything. Then the scenery changes. Suddenly you're up in space and there's an alien talking to you. And it goes from cartoony, stylized to full realism. There's an actual alien in front of you, in the flesh, babbling away in god knows what language. You can see his starship and spaaace and then it all disappears again before you have any time to process WTF just happened. And then you're standing on top of a skyscraper, watching over a huge metropolis at night. A lot like what Batman would see when watching over Gotham City.

Except, you know, Batman isn't a huge pussy suffering from vertigo. You look down, see tiny cars zipping by, the sense of height is terrifying up to a point where you could quite easily crack walnuts with your sphincter. And it all ends with a MASSIVE FUCKING T-REX stomping all over you, roaring at you and getting so close, its spit flies all over the camera. It's so close, you could swear you can touch it. It was quite easily one of the most intense moments we had ever experienced in any game, ever. You could probably find 2D clips of it on YouTube, a bunch of screenshots, lots of footage which will never do it justice. You don't give a shit about VR until you try it. I just want to invite the whole family over and have them sit down just watching the Dreamdeck Demo. Just to see how they react. Holy shit.

You don't even know.

Actual Games
I tried Project Cars 3 in VR, which basically works just like you'd expect. You see super detailed car interiors, you get to look and wave at the other drivers as you pass them (there's currently no button to raise your middle finger), it feels like you're sitting in an actual car and it's a very flattering experience, because my avatar isn't a fat, lazy freelance writer, but a fit race driver. And it feels a little less weird than playing characters with massive tits.

We also dicked around on Google Earth for a bit, which is insane. You have the entire planet at your fingertips, spin it around like one of those globes your grandparents have, then zoom in literally anywhere you want to get a full 3D view of every house, street and tree in the area. We spied on our own house, checked out Claire's old school, nursery and workplace, visited her grandmother's house, then had a quick look at Tokyo and Disney World, because hey, why the fuck not. It's not the prettiest app you'll ever see, but it's a small technical marvel and really fun to use. And an affordable way to explore the world!

Screenshots really don't give you much of an impression of this.

And then we moved on to Ark Park. Basically, it's as close as you can get to Jurassic Park, using only assets from Ark: Survival Evolved without getting slapped with a cease and desist order by Universal Studios. Claire fed dinosaurs by hand, rode a triceratops, rode a monorail across the sea whilst being followed by a gigantic mosasaur, then ripped the headset off her face, which resembled a pint of milk. She was as pale as death himself, covered in cold sweat and ready to vomit like a watercannon. She asked me to take over for her, as she wanted me to experience what had been a really fun game until she got motion-sick. I walked around just fine (you can teleport in most games to help fight motion sickness, but I find that utterly unimmersive, so I choose to walk), then proceeded to juggle random objects in both hands. Toss them up into the air, catch them, I'm so stupidly good with my hands in these games, I honestly can't explain it. Videogames, I guess? Funnily enough, Claire approaches VR like real life, using only her dominant hand. Funny how our brains handle it all in different ways.

Welcome to Ark Park doesn't sound stupid at all.

I'm a Norse God
There are tons of weird and wonderful apps and programs we still want to try. BBC Earth's Bear Island is free and it's about bears, so I'll give that one a go. Heck, lots of stuff in the store is free, premium titles range from 10 to 30 quid, which is dirt-cheap. I went and bought Asgard's Wrath, simply because I wanted to beat the shit out of something in VR. And it's ... fuck me, man, it's so goddamn awesome! It's a proper, hardcore, dungeon-crawling action-RPG, which isn't just the single-most impressive thing I've ever seen in VR, but one of the best games I've ever played, full-stop. 

You're a Norse god, who takes control of various viking heroes, helping them take revenge and right the wrongs in their lives by hacking and slashing legions of baddies with swords, axes, fire and an impressive array of ranged weapons, if that's how you roll. Combat is absolutely incredible! You start out by swinging a sword at a bunch of fairly harmless zombies, which is pretty fun right there, because you actually have to move your controller like a sword in order to attack. A little while later you get a shield, which you could just use to block enemy attacks, though I much prefer to charge at them and bash enemies to pudding.

Best damn game, ever!

If you're a badass like me, you'll go pick up a second sword and learn how to parry blows with them, rather than hiding behind a shield like a coward, then wait for an opening and slice and dice your opponent into a million tiny bits. Or you can just throw axes, grenades, shoot a bow, whatever you feel comfortable with. It's exciting, because rather than spending points across skill trees, teaching your character how to master certain fighting styles, you just try them out for yourself and see what works best for you. 

There's also a bunch of companion beastmen like a saber-wielding shark and a fireproof turtle, who will fight by your side. And in between adventures you go to Asgard, hang out at the local tavern, have a cold one with Loki and flirt with elves, dwarves, ogres and other fantastic creatures. It's an amazing, beautifully detailed tavern, which is so eerily realistic, it kicks off all my social anxieties the moment I stare at a random patron for too long and they get all annoyed with me.

Baby Steps
Everything is still incredibly new and a bit overwhelming. Claire has been fighting her motion sickness through teleportation and ginger ale. Meanwhile, my arms are falling off from all the intense sword-swinging (no euphemism). There are still a few kinks here and there. It's difficult to put the headset into this 'sweet spot', where stuff looks reasonably sharp and not too blurry. Because things do tend to get a little blurry around the edges, no matter how much we play around with the settings. There's also a sort of microscopic wire mesh, almost like viewing through some sort of mosquito net. I think it's from having tiny screens so close to your eyes, you basically see the individual pixels. So it's not perfect. There are some drawbacks. There are also millions of things we still want to try. I absolutely must play a decent online first person shooter. Browsing the web and watching YouTube in VR is a weirdly satisfying experience. We'll see how it all feels, once the novelty of it passes and we become a little more used to it. Frankly though, right now I find it hard to imagine I'd ever want to go back to playing on a flat screen with a mouse and keyboard, when VR is an option. It really is that good.

I guess we're a raptor farm now

 Yes, of course I'm dead! How did you know?

Things have happened.

Okay, so two dumb things we like to do for fun spiraled out of control a bit and ... look. You know how we've sunk thousands of hours into Ark: Survival Evolved, right? Not playing it competitively on a public server or selectively breeding all of the rarest and strongest dinos or anything like that. We basically tamed everything we thought looked fun, raised base dino health a bit to make sure our virtual pets won't die the first time a random mosquito farts at them and mostly just played house where the average player would tear through the content for rapid progression or just straight-up spawn all the good shit with cheat commands and get bored of the entire game ten minutes later. I mean, we did end up completing caves, bosses and ascension and shit in the end, but that was after a good year of just derping around not doing anything related to progression. 

And then there's another thing we like to do for fun. You know how wealthy people can afford a car and going on vacation and shit? Well, we can only afford ghetto entertainment. So a couple times or so each year we go to B&M and buy random garbage. I'm not even kidding. Place is full of discounted crap they couldn't shift at the bigger stores, so every now and then we go there and come back home with a crappy Nerf gun or something. Or 500 tubs of dried onions and a plastic dinosaur.

What, you thought I was making this up?

I don't like Jurassic World. They're making what now, the third, fourth film in that series? With this and Jurassic Park, they've re-opened the same damn park, which always ended in catastrophic loss of life and calamity ... seven times? Is that correct? I mean, that's almost as stupid as opening Disneyland in the middle of a fucking pandemic or something!

But hey, we like dinosaurs and we were utterly blown away by the quality of this discounted plastic indoraptor. See, when I was a kid and Jurassic Park wasn't a thing, my brother had a Dino Riders toy,  which wiggled one of its feet a bit when you pushed a button.

Don't you just want to put it out of its misery?

Meanwhile, Claire had one of the original first generation licensed Jurassic Park raptors and, while it was certainly better than most of the cheap lump of plastic dino toys with zero articulation you could get back then, it reeeeally hasn't aged all that well.

It's stiff, it's derpy, the feet are weird.

Now there are worlds between this guy and the disgusting little freak from Dino Riders, but in the end they were both hard, rough, stiff plastic-y things with very limited articulation. Which is fine, because who even gives a shit when you're five years old? Besides, back in the 80s, most of the action figures we had weren't dinos. They were excessively muscular, handsome men wearing nothing but fur thongs. Which, I'm sure, contributed absolutely nothing to the fact I'm living my life alongside a woman who acts, talks, pisses and cuts her hair like a man. Just like the fact she grew up watching Xena had absolutely no impact on her personality and, ahem, interests.

The girliest girl who ever girled. We are shaped by stuff we like, is what I'm saying.

And suddenly there was this indoraptor. With swively arm joint things, which allowed you to pose and move its arms in ways we've never seen on a toy like this. Elbow joints, posable wrists, separate joints for the neck and head, two joins in the tail ... you get the idea. Insane articulation. On top of that, the mold itself was of a much higher quality than on the legacy Jurassic Park dinos. Muscles, skin folds, scales, little spikes, just a lot more detail and softer materials, which felt a little less coarse than the solid plastic shells our old dinos were made of. Basically, the sensation you get from a current-day toy when the last plastic dinosaur you've seen was in the 1990s. 

The 90s dilophosaurus is just a bit terrible.

So we had this new indoraptor and Claire loved and treasured it and it became her new favourite thing in the world until she even retrieved her ugly old Jurassic Park toys from her childhood bedroom and had me replace the batteries in them. She's also still completely obsessed with Ark and her dinos on there, so I wanted to do something nice and searched the interwebs for Ark-inspired toys. You know, a feathered raptor, a tek-triceratops, the sort of stuff you encounter on there all the time. But no such luck.

While I'm generally fond of shops like Etsy or Redbubble, most of the stuff you can find on there is just some screenshots printed out and laminated or put on a shirt. Nobody is gonna build a model techno trike from scratch and for reasons I cannot quite understand, Wildcard doesn't seem to have a contract with any toy companies in a day and age where you can have your WoW characters and even your star ships on Star Trek Online 3D-printed in just a few clicks. Hell, Digital Extremes sent me an actual RL Clem nogglehead, for fuck's sake! Please, DE, never stop sending me free shit, no matter how much I bitch about your garbage content updates!

I'm only strict with you because I care.

So I did the next best thing and searched Amazon for licensed Jurassic World merch. I hate the films, but I'm genuinely impressed with the quality of their huge-ass indoraptor. So I went and ordered a current-day raptor figure. And since it's illegal to keep only one raptor at a time, they quickly turned into two. Their articulation was crap and basically just limited to the arms, because they have springs in their legs for some weird jump attack gimmick. 

The overall model, the paintjob and the soft, rubbery plastic were absolutely sublime, however. They were even more detailed than the indoraptor and incredibly satisfying to touch. You can't really pose them or do much with them beyond making them jump at the stupid cat, but the level of detail on these things went way above anything we've ever seen. By comparison, the original Jurassic Park raptor looks like their inbred little cousin.

Posable neck, jaw and arms. It's something.

If you can't understand how blown-away we were by these figures, scroll back up to the Dino Riders figure and look at them side by side. And yes, the modern ones have clearly-visible seams, the different materials don't match perfectly in colour, Blue is a stupid merchandise device that exists solely to sell terrible films to 12 year olds and the Chinese. But it's a damn 15 Quid action figure, which makes all of our childhood toys look like shit. 

Impressed with these new raptors we went and ordered something called a dracorex, because we thought it had personality. That one turned out to be slightly more posable than the raptors, sans gimmicky action features, and quickly became the new favourite.

The legs, arms and head can be moved. Which isn't a lot, but you get a few decent poses out of it. The level of detail is stunning.

After that, we decided to be reasonable, mature grown-ups and stopped buying toys for kids, because we have bills to pay. Haha, just fucking with you! We bought another raptor and the indominus rex, both in what's called the 'Super Colossal' series. In case you can't imagine why, these guys are massive and about a meter in length from the nose to the end of the tail. So, that picture at the top of this entry? These aren't two normal-sized dino toys surrounding tiny dinos from a Kinder egg. These are normal sized dino toys, framed by super colossal dinos, which are bigger than our fucking cat.

At the risk of sounding like the proverbial broken record, these are unlike anything we have ever seen. You see individual scales, wrinkles, muscle, the detail being as close to the real thing as it gets. We shared our house with a giant savannah monitor for many years, so we're pretty aware of what a large reptile looks and feels like. And these super colossal dinos ... hang on.

We put him in our living room and you'd swear he's moving a little when you watch him from the corner of your eye.

Funnily enough, this picture hardly does this thing justice. I can't begin to describe how ridiculously real and life-like these guys look in person. I mean, look at this Amazon picture and tell me it doesn't look like that kid is playing with an actual dinosaur.

The velociraptor is the one on the right.

Now that our list of recommended products on Amazon had exclusively turned into dinosaurs, they showed us one more thing, which was even crazier than these colossal toys. They call it the Amber Collection. These figures are a bit more expensive than the regular action figures and are aimed more at enthusiasts and collectors rather than children. They're even more detailed, have even better paint, better materials and have as much articulation as you could possibly get.

You can remove the weird, rubbery, movie reference head camera thingie, fortunately.

There's just one flaw with these. See, since these figures have insane articulation, from countless joints and hinges to a wire in the tail, they can also be put on a little stand. Generally, it's entirely possible to put them in a pose which lets them stand up all by themselves, without having to prop them up on their tails or anything. But if you wanted to put them in a running or jumping pose and still show them off, you can attach a stand to prevent them from falling over. And it comes with a bit of a flaw. Can you find it on the picture?

For dinosaurs of a certain age, who wish to lead an active lifestyle, try the new Tena Rex.

Right. So. The 'amber' stand looks like a big yellow puddle, which just so happens to spring from the dinosaur's crotch. I'd love to know the story behind this one. Like, was the person who came up with this stand so incredibly innocent and blind, they really didn't notice? Did none of the people, who approved of this thing before production, think it might look maybe just a little bit weird? Or did all of them think it looked like the dinosaur is taking a giant piss, but nobody wanted to be the one to point it out? 

This is a dinosaur taking a piss. And there's no way in hell I'm taking this 'amber' stand out of the box and attaching it to the figure. The figure is the true masterpiece in this weird little collection we never planned to have, so I won't let one design flaw ruin it for us. I'm just glad there aren't any other awkward extras coming with some of these Amber Collection dinos.

Oboy.

Scorched Earth Done - Some Closing Thoughts

The boss is dead. Time to move on.

After spending hundreds of hours on THEISLAND, we just finished Scorched Earth over the course of a week. Only three artifact caves, one boss battle, very little variety in the landscape - it's downright tiny compared to the base game. Seeing as this was paid DLC, released while Ark was still in Early Access, I can see how it rubbed the fan-base the wrong way.

There are glitches. I watched some of the Neebs Gaming videos from 2017, where tames get stuck inside random wildlife, characters get stuck and hover in the middle of nowhere - we're getting all of that in 2020. Some days that sort of thing wouldn't happen at all, only for one of us to get stuck every other minute or so, making for an incredibly frustrating experience.

The vast majority of explorer notes are hidden in these dunes. Everything about Scorched Earth feels a bit rushed and lazy.

Difficulty is all over the place. On the one hand, resources like silica pearls just appear out in the open, no longer forcing you to dive into shark-infested waters or venture into a dangerous snow biome like the base game does. Oil can just be pumped out of the grounds at plenty of nodes.Early encounters are tougher. Dilophosaurs and dodos are now raptors and terrorbirds. The toughest areas are guarded by rock golems, which are borderline invincible.

So far, so Ark. But then there are the artifact caves. One of them is a complete joke, containing only a handful of relatively weak critters. The one small platforming section will leave you injured if you fail one of the two jumps, but not enough to kill you.
Then there's a cave, which is full of golems, insane amounts of random trash, then throws a platforming section with bottomless instakill-pits at you for good measure. We've lost more time, nerves, brain cells, items and tames to that shit, none of the caves on THEISLAND came even close. It's a bit of a Goldielocks situation, as the third cave is just right, offers just the right amount of enemies and platforming without being impossibly difficult or an absolute cakewalk.

Our wyverns, Ember and Venom, redeemed themselves in the end.

Once we had all three artifacts, it was time to move all our toughest dinos from THEISLAND to Scorched Earth. This is when I came really close to uninstalling this mess of a game and moving on with my life. In theory, all you do is move a dino to an obelisk (or transmitter), hit the upload button, your dino will disappear from the ark and rest inside the obelisk in digital form. In practice, more often than not, my uploaded dino didn't despawn despite being uploaded, meaning I had essentially cloned them. So now I've got a whole bunch of cloned T-Rexes, allosaurs, carnos and I hate it, because it's cheap, it's kinda (accidental) cheating and it's a hassle to organize.

I mean, our long-term plan is to finish all the content, then retire on Ragnarok, bringing all our trophies, artifacts and dinos. Now I've got duplicates of lots of them, spread across two arks. It's a known glitch, which has been reported for as long as the upload feature existed and it still isn't fixed. But they keep arting out new paid content. Great.
What's worse, when I uploaded all of Claire's powerful tek gear, then took it back out on Scorched Earth, the game immediately crashed after transferring her last item. And thanks to the game's stupid save system, it had immediately saved the now empty item storage of our obelisks, yet it had not saved my character's inventory as I crashed, effectively deleting Claire's full set of customized and dyed Tek armor, her tek weapons, as well as a bunch of upgraded tools, tonics, all the good shit you want to take with you on a difficult adventure.

Her cool Iron Man armor? Yeah, that shit is gone.

The duplicate dinos ... fine, whatever. Once we decide on a final ark and camp as our retirement location, I can take just one version of each retired dino. Or take their clones behind the barn to Old Yeller them. But that lost gear wasn't just some basic hide armor you can just make up again from scratch. Unlocking full tek required us to defeat all three original bosses on their highest possible difficulty. Hundreds of hours preparation, artifact-hunting, boss battles, not to mention endless resource grind just to craft that shit. What really pisses me off is how this has been happening since 2017 across all platforms.

The one redeeming factor about this whole mess is that I'm now aware of these problems, meaning I can create emergency backups before messing with any more item or dino transfers in the future. This won't help prevent unwanted clones, but I'll be able to to restore lost items, at least. Right after I said we'd stop the save scumming. Though I feel it's fair game when it is done in order to circumvent glitches.

My raptor is a wizard!

One reason we're still moving on to Aberration this weekend, rather than playing something a little less frustrating and broken, is the incredible, too awesome for words, you kinda had to be there alpha chimera boss battle. Holy shit!

We entered the boss arena with our rexes, allos and yuties, a healing pig, mostly the same team composition as with previous boss fights, plus some extras. But I'll get to those. The boss fight started with us standing around like idiots while the chimera just flew all over the place. I'm still new to ark on PC and I haven't memorized all of the hotkeys, so I had no idea how to get all of our dinos to follow me and/or go after the boss. I asked Claire to tell me the hotkey or get them to attack our dinos and she ... honestly, I have no idea what she was doing, so we just bitched at each other for a while. As you do.

Someone had to pick up the slack.

While we were just sitting there being useless, our wyverns started chasing after the chimera and battled it up in the air. It was easily one of the coolest things I've ever witnessed in this game. They didn't last long - the chimera poisoned them with its stinger and knocked them out fairly quickly, but it was enough to piss it off and get it to attack the rest of our dinos. Meanwhile, Claire and I each brought a mantis.

These guys are fucking awesome boss battle tames. I alternated between attacking the boss with my mantis' dual swords and blasting the crap out of it with my shotgun. Where previous boss battles were mostly just a rex rush with the occasional handful of trash that just died in the mayhem, the wyvern fight constantly alternated between close and long-range combat, the "trash" was comprised of deathworms and rock golems, and the boss arena allowed flying tames for the first time. I'm not sure it's as exciting to watch as it was to play, but there it is:

I've got video footage from our first logon to Sorched Earth to base building, to every artifact run all the way to the final boss. I'll throw it all together into one short and sweet video over the weekend. I doubt anyone is going to care, but it'll give us something nice to look back at.

Ark: Scorched Earth - New Beginnings

We've finally done it. It's weird, really.
Change is important, right? Progress. Evolution. Ark itself embraces that, has evolution right in its title. So how come most of us, as a species, dislike and straight-up fight change? Clinging on to the status quo, reminiscing about the good old days and shit. Anyhow, we've left THEISLAND for the next part of Ark's story: Scorched Earth.

There are a few things about Scorched Earth, which immediately put me off. First of all, it's set entirely in the desert. You get some mountains and canyons and dried-up river beds, but there's simply no way around the fact it's all a bit samey and gets old a lot faster than the varied landscapes and biomes of THEISLAND. Another problem is that moving to a new ark always means you're going back to the stone age.

Downgrading from tek gear to whatever this is.

The good thing about expecting the absolute worst is how it means you're already somewhat prepared. So we chose the east midlands as our starting point, as we live in the east midlands of the UK. Once more into the fray. Spawning completely naked. No guns, no kickass lightsabers, no jetpack. Punching trees, breaking off rocks, making basic caveman tools. At least this time we had an idea what we were doing, which made a big difference. It also helped that our characters already had a hundred levels under their belts, because Scorched Earth doesn't pull any punches.

Where Ark's first map gently pushes your survival instincts in the starting areas by throwing the odd dilophosaur at you, this time around we were immediately attacked by a raptor. Claire knocked it out with her bare hands. Maximum difficulty, no cheats. Apparently, a level 100 survivor is strong enough to take out a level 8 raptor using no gear whatsoever. Interesting. While Claire was taming her raptor, I took out a bunch of giant prehistoric boars using only a spear. Again, interesting. I remember dying countless deaths to raptors and pigs back on THEISLAND, even when we had actual weapons and armor. I didn't expect our levels to make that much of a difference.

We built a base in no time at all.

We followed the old river bed until we managed to find some water. That's where we decided to set up our base. I built a giant wall to section off the dried-up part of the river, then used the water and the surrounding cliffs to ward off the rest of our camp against potential intruders. I built a nice little stone house. Claire built a wooden house, which resembles a penis. The tip of her cockhouse has a little window in it. She can leave her dick house through the tip-window. She says she did none of this on purpose. Maybe it's all in her subconscious.

Definitely not a penis: Claire's house.

Scorched Earth has a handful of new creatures we haven't encountered before. One of them is a stomach-turningly cute mammal called the jerboa. It's basically a small kangaroo with the head of a fennec fox. You tame one and put it on your shoulder and it'll warn you about each of this ark's impending stupid weather conditions like blinding sandstorms and tech-disabling electrical storms and other such crap. I tamed two of the little shits, as the first one immediately disappeared into the foundation of our base camp, becoming one with our home for all eternity. Great.

Next, we tamed a thorned dragon, because they look like a cross between a lizard and a pinecone, they're really good at harvesting stuff and they can put things to sleep with a ranged attack. In other words, they instantly make other popular workhorse-dinos like the triceratops obsolete. Which is fine, seeing as trikes don't seem to spawn here, anyway.

I miss our old friends!

Speaking of stuff that doesn't exist on this ark - we went and transferred some stuff over from THEISLAND. Obelisks and tek transmitters allow you to move gear and dinos between worlds, making things a little easier. We brought some of our worker dinos for resources, as well as our otters. They are incredibly helpful when dealing with extreme temperatures. For the time being, we left our tek gear where it was. For as fun as it is being borderline immortal, having the ability to fly without the help of dinos and shooting every possible threat with a plasma rifle, we didn't want to just completely stomp the place and eradicate all challenge from the very beginning. In that same spirit, we didn't bring our giga, a T-Rex or any other super powerful dinos for now.

Pinecone reminds me of some of our RL pets. I like him.

We also brought our flying dinos upon realizing that the giant moths in Scorched Earth are as adorable as they're useless. They're agile and all, but their stats are fairly unimpressive and they don't fight, because they're moths. So we went and grabbed our argies, then flew all over the place to get a better idea about our surroundings.

We're bringing freedom and democracy to Scorched Earth.

As we went and explored the desert from above, I spotted one of the coolest creatures in the entire game: a mantis. You know, big, green, googly eyes, deadly sickles for arms and apparently they like a little head during sex? I wouldn't want one for a pet in real life, as they're a bit on the fragile side and I doubt they're the bonding type. But in Ark? A specimen big enough for me to ride into battle? Fuck yeah!

I'm not massively keen on insects, but these guys are awesome.

So apparently, in oder to tame one of these bad boys you need bits of a creature called a deathworm. Well, that sounds easy enough, right? Let's go find and kill some of these deathworms and tame us a mantis!
Now, before you give me shit about underestimating something named deathworm, let's have a quick look at Ark's nomenclature, shall we? Because everything is already named giga, mega or titansomething. It means nothing. A titanoboa is largely harmless once you've gained a few levels and you've geared up a little. A megaloceros is something you punch in the butt and then laugh at as it panicks and runs away. So I'm not gonna be intimidated by some worm, no matter his forename. Well, about that.

We flew around the desert for hours. Actual, literal, real earth hours. Then we finally found some weird dust clouds in the sand. We flew a little closer and there was a rumble. A split second later, an alpha deathworm appeared, broke all of my gear and killed me in one hit. Just like that. I didn't know they were the size of a skyscraper or that there was an alpha variety. All I saw was this:

Except, from the inside.

Having sunk several hundred hours into Ark, my attitude towards items in this game has changed a lot. You see, in most games I play, items are everything. Picture any max level character in World of Warcraft. Put him side by side with another max level character of the same class, remove all their items and they become identical. Exact same stats, same skills, save for a handful of very minor, meaningless, non-permanent choices in their talent trees. Now clad one of them in green quest trash and the other guy in raid gear and suddenly there's a world of difference between these two characters. Same thing applies to most (*coughs* actual) RPGs to varying degrees. You get your skills and your attributes, but a huge part of your power, if not the biggest, always comes from items.

Ark, at least from a PvE point of view, doesn't give a shit about your gear. If anything, you'll wear it for utility. Stuff that protects you against hot or cold environments. Scuba gear for deep sea adventures. Camouflaged armor to sneak past predators. When that worm chewed through my riot gear? Fuck it. If you're lucky, heavy armor will protect you during one or two hairy encounters that might not kill you outright. After that, all of your stuff will be broken and require so much in resources to repair, it's basically not worth the effort unless you're part of some huge tribe, who mass-produces items on an industrial level. But I lost something else. Something I wasn't prepared to go without.

You'll be missed, little buddy.

Fishface was my otter. He was one of the first creatures I tamed all by myself, all the way back on Switch. I never went anywhere without him. He saved us when Claire and I lost our mount on THEISLAND and got surrounded by raptors and boas. I'm not even exaggerating. That damn otter fought long enough for me to wake up after getting knocked down, bought me enough time to grab my shotgun and helped me fight off that pack of raptors before they ate us.

The worm ate him. I wish we had dived in there to grab him. Got close enough to whistle at him to run away or to at least fight back. To do something. We couldn't save him. Everything, everyone dies in the end, one way or another. Didn't make it any less of a punch to the gut. Look at his stupid, happy little face. The worm doesn't care. It just wants to eat. Nature is fucked up, in real life and in videogames.

Not even penis house cheered me up that night.

Claire said I could always have one of her otters. Or just get a new one from THEISLAND. And that's true. But I don't want to replace Fishface. Guess I'll just be otterless for a while. Doesn't have to make sense to you. It makes enough sense to me.

On a less depressing note, we ultimately caught our mantis and these guys are incredible! Not only are they really great harvesters and fighters, but you can even equip them with tools and melee weapons, so now I'm riding on this giant black insect, which chops all the dinos to tiny bits with his swords. I named him Chakan.

A glitch is making it look like he's wielding swords and axes at the same time, because this is Ark.

Okay, children, time for a bit of videogame history. Chakan: The Forever Man was a game on the Sega Megadrive/Genesis and the Sega Game Gear based on a comic book character of the same name. The game isn't every good, it's brutally difficult, the music is some of the worst in any videogame ever. The reason why this game has stuck with me since the day it was announced is its unusually dark setting and character. Chakan was this incredible swordsman, who would beat anyone in a fight until he ran out of opponents and challeneged Death himself to a duel. Upon defeating the grim reaper, Chakan demanded his ultimate prize: eternal life.

And since you don't fuck with death, the arrogant fencer soon regretted his wish. He continued to age, undying, ceaselessly withering away. In the game you have to fight your way back into Death's realm to defeat him once more in order to find eternal peace at last. How fucking cool is that? In the 90s, a decade dominated by mascot platformers and cheesy, 'radical' coolness, there was this game where your ultimate goal was to die. And check out that character art:

The megadrive cover art was reason enough for us to buy the game back in the day:

There was a sequel planned in the early 2000s, but in the end it never happened. Rumor has it, that much of the artwork meant for the new Chakan went into Blood Omen 2, instead. And that concludes today's history lesson.
So, inspired by some scrotum-faced badass, who fucks shit up with two nasty swords, I'm now riding around on a giant mantis, which is doing pretty much the same thing.

 The hat is important.

Having watched what my new pet of choice can do, it only took Claire five minutes before she wanted her own mantis. Hers is bright orange and lunges at stuff with two giant lances.

Imagine that thing flying at you like this.

This beastie is bright orange and chops its enemies to bits with heavy medieval weaponry. Obviously, there can only be one correct name for such a creature and that's Choppy Orange. Claire, however, decided to name him Ziggy, which is ... also a name, I guess.

Poor you.

Next to moths, killer insects and pinecone lizards, there's one more thing you'll definitely want to tame when you come to this place: a wyvern. Suffice to say I couldn't wait to go out on an adventure, fly into one of their lava-filled nests and steal one of their eggs, which is the only way to obtain one of these suckers.
Except, Claire went and did all that during a 16-hour Ark session while I was working. I'm not kidding. Started the game one evening, stayed on there until midnight, talked about how we should probably stop soon, fought deathworms until 4 in the morning, tried our new mantis pets at 5, by 10am there was absolutely no point in going to sleep and by 1 in the afternoon I requested a break, because health experts suggest frequent pauses and I could really use a two hour nap after all that.

Having deprived me of one of the cooler things you can do on this ark, I was stuck raising one of the little fuckers from a tiny baby to something the length of a grown-ass bronto. And while I won't deny that wyverns look cool, they're probably the only thing I dislike more than all those bionic robo-dinos. First of all, from a conceptual point of view. I enjoy Ark, because most of the creatures in this game used to exist for real at some point. Not all in the same time period, not exactly the way they're depicted in the game, but it's fun to watch them and to imagine what the world may have been like back in their day. Robots and mythical creatures just don't fit into the picture for me.

I like dinos. And I like dragons. But I don't want them mixed together. I'm not putting bacon on top of my ice cream, either.

I also find them underwhelming from a gameplay perspective. Not only are they the size of a flying oil tanker, but they also handle like one. They have a turn radius of 'see ya in three weeks' and while it's nice of them to come with various flavours of elemental breath attacks, their damage really isn't anything special by the time you have a level 200something argentavis. It'll take your dragon an eternity and a half to catch up in terms of raw stats and then it'll still handle like ass. And, much like gigas, you can't take them into boss battles, so what is their point in pve?

Owning dragons for the sake of owning dragons.

We've also encountered our first cave, which, compared to the caves on THEISLAND, was a bit of a letdown. There were about five enemies and a small platforming section in there, which wasn't much to stop us from obtaining our first artifacts. Two more to go, then it'll be time to fight the one and only boss on this particular ark. And that's okay. The desert is nice and all, but I wouldn't mind a change of scenery. We've got what we came here for and I'm sure that some of our new friends will move to a new ark with us once we're ready to relocate. Next one on the list is Aberration, I think. But we still have a manticore to fight before we worry about that.

I've recorded several days worth of video footage showing pretty much all of these events as they happened. I might convert them into another supercut when I find the time. Not that it really matters, it's not like anyone really watches these. It's still fun putting them together, if only to have a reminder of all the crazy shit we get up to in this game. Right now, the plan is to complete all story content present in each of the official arks, then build a retirement base on Ragnarok and settle there with all our surviving favourite dinos from all the arks we've explored. There's still so much to do!