Mission Raptor

Claire and I bought the Switch version of Ark: Survival Evolved in a moment of insanity. Next thing I remember, it's 4am on what was suddenly Monday and we had spent our entire weekend crawling through dino shit and getting eaten by giant prehistoric snakes. The game is still so ugly, it physically hurts just to look at it. But at this point it has become one of my favourite games of all time.

After an incredibly rough start we finally had a humble little base camp. There was now a little wooden house next to our shitty straw hut. We set up some storage boxes, which contained extra resources for when the next death would inevitably claim all of our gear once more. We both had a pair of tame dilophosaurs as hunting partners, a fresh suit of hide armor and pokey sticks made of metal to replace our old wooden ones. Claire set up a mortar and pestle, so we ground some rotten meat and narcotic berries into a tranquilizing paste, which can be applied to arrows. We were ready to start mission raptor. Our goal was to sneak up on a raptor without getting eaten, shoot it with a tranquilizing arrow and capture it. We had already looted a raptor saddle from a crate earlier and having our own pet raptor as a mount and/or hunting ally was gonna be the best thing since tits!

Things didn't go as planned.

We headed to the forest, which lead to horror beach. We've been murdered by raptors there countless times, so if there was any spot for us to find our prey, this was it. And then I got distracted by this really awesome black triceratops. It was almost entirely pitch-black, apart from some cool red markings here and there. And hey, we still had to test those tranquilizer arrows, right? How about we shoot this slow, harmless plant eater before we go after a raptor? Yeah, about that ...
The arrow did nothing. Neither did the next six or so. Or the rocks I fired at him with my slingshot. Or my club. The dino charged at me once, then my gear was destroyed. Not lost, not dropped on my corpse - fucking destroyed. On the plus side, the battle took place just around the corner from our camp, so I could just run back after respawning there and go at him naked and with my bare fists, which went about as well as you'd expect. Finally, after what must have been another half dozen deaths or so, we knocked the bastard out. Unfortunately, the unconscious dino slid right into the stream by our camp and got submerged under the water. The game flagged him as unconscious, he played a breathing animation and I shrugged it off, because heyho, videogames. We stuffed him full of food in an attempt to tame him. A few moments later he showed up as dead. Right. Turns out unconscious creatures can drown in Ark, it just takes a moment. RIP triceratops.

But now we knew we had the power to knock out one of these bad boys. And we knew they could drown. So we stalked another one, who wasn't as cool as the black dino we just murdered, but at least he was still alive for now. This time around we attacked him from opposite directions, pelted him with arrows and started kiting him for a while. Then I hid behind a shield and ate a few of his attacks to give Claire an opportunity to finally knock him out. I put a saddle on him and tried to name him Horny, but dumb fingers and dumb touchscreen controls turned him into Horm. Honey, I'm Horm!

So we parked our new friend back at base camp, because we didn't want him to get slaughtered while we were in pursuit of our raptor. This time we wouldn't let anything allow us to get sidetrac... hey, is that a stray parasaur right outside the camp? I wonder how many tranq arrows it would take to KO one of these guys. Besides, who wants one mount when you can have two?

Right! This time we'd get our damn raptor! Except, Claire spotted a giant sausage-looking lizard, which she tamed just by chucking random bits at food at it. She rode it back to camp entirely without a saddle or anything. She grabbed another, smaller lizard for good measure. We named it Desklamp. It performs a little backflip when you pet it.

Fuck my dignity, I'm riding a sausage.

We checked horror beach. No raptors. We checked dodo beach. Dodo beach used to be dilophosaur beach, but we murdered all of the predators there and now the dodos are breeding like crazy. They're all over the place, because they have no more enemies around there. The irony! No raptors, though. We ended up stalking pteranodons, instead. They're surprisingly docile. One of them would occasionally land right next to me and inspect me, squawk and stare and waddle off again. I clubbed it over the head. That didn't knock it out. It flew away and so did all the other pteranodons. They still circled the water looking for fish, but they refused to land whenever we were around. So we laid down in the shadows and waited. And waited. And waited some more. Finally, one of them landed mere feet away from us. Arrows to the face! Again, he didn't go down. Instead, he crawled into a nearby jungle. We went after him, but all we managed to find was roots, trees and snakes. Not a trace of the pteranodon.

We lured another one, then another, but they'd always crawl off into the jungle after the first arrow or two. Finally, when we nailed one of them, it started to fly away for a few feet, then crashed face-first into a rock. It was out cold. I shoved all the fish I could find up its ass and 'nursed it back to health', by which I mean I manipulated it into thinking I was a caring friend, who wanted to help it get better after it had been hit my a mysterious projectile, which clearly came out of nowhere and had nothing to do with me. A brand new hunting buddy and future flying mount!

Ptetra is the best!

Mission Raptor was going insanely well! The only thing missing now was, well, a fucking raptor. But we were pretty good at capturing dinos now. We crafted a bunch of awesome crossbows to tranquilize and/or murder even more critters with and went out once more. We had to explore some new locations if we wanted to spot another raptor. So we went out into the swamp. That's where the shittest snake in all the videogames bit me. A titanoboa.

I love Ark. But the people making it have no idea how boas work. Titanoboa will bite you, which paralyzes you. It will then proceed to kill you and then do the exact same thing to your hunting party, your pets and everyone you love. By biting everyone to death. That's just not a very boa thing to. And yes, I know, gameplay before realism and all that, but if the fucking snake kills me, why does it continue to hunt and kill absolutely everything? I make a perfectly acceptable meal! And I know that from experience, because over the many hours we've spent on here, we've chopped up more than just one of my corpses and cooked it and fed it to everyone at the camp. They're all still alive or died of unrelated causes.

Titanoboa had lots of friends in the swamp. We left all our hunting buddies back at camp, because we didn't want them to get hurt. We also didn't want them to completely fuck up our raptor, because we only wanted to capture it, not rip it to shreds and eat it. But right now we were grossly outnumbered by giant snakes. And each other. The next boa came at me and ate my shoes. I'm not even kidding, they just disintegrated with the first strike. Then I made the boa eat my sword and everything seemed fine until Claire hit me with her tranquilizer arrow. She immediately knocked me out, which attracted more and more predators.

The arrow hit me right in the dick and I keeled over backwards. Still holding up my sword, though.

Claire spent the next ten minutes defending my sleeping character against more boas and a bunch of helicopters, which may or may not have been prehistoric dragonflies. We had to accept that it was too dangerous to go alone, so we punched out a pair of stray dilophosaurs. And one of them just so happened to be the prettiest one we've ever found.

Check out my cool new pet! Huh? What's this 'Mission Raptor' you speak of?

So here's the thing. We had a whole bunch of green dilophosaurs. Purple ones. Red ones. This one was black, with nice orange markings. She was special. Claire said she wanted to breed her, because she was too rare and too awesome to lose. Mission Raptor? Fuck it, let's protect our new pet and take it home before the boas kill us all! And it only took an entire day to get back home, because it was now night time and we had no idea where the hell our camp was.

So we parked our new dino, had a bit of a rest, I crafted a new pair of boots and the next morning we decided to give Mission Raptor another shot. On our way back to horror beach we spotted a new longneck, who had made her nest in the sand. She was guarding an egg, which was bigger than my character. I picked it up, having no idea what to do with it. "It doesn't say it's fertilized. Should I eat it?"
- "I guess?"
There was this tiny, nagging voice in my head, telling me it's probably a bad idea to eat an egg right in front of the bronto who laid it. But my finger was faster than the voice. And then the world ended.

Having one of these giants chasing after you doesn't mean you just casually get to walk away. You can't just turn around and kill it with your spear. The earth shakes. Trees get trampled like broccoli. That dino was pissed! Again, the egg wasn't even fertilized, so I really just ate one of her periods, but apparently there was a principle involved. She did not want me to live! Claire pelted the beast with arrows to no avail. It kept on chasing after me. Finally, after what must have been well over a dozen tranquilizers, one of our arrows knocked it out.

Long story short, we headed out to tame a raptor and came home with this:

We'll never fail to spot our camp again. Ever.

We now had a new problem - keeping all of these new pets fed and healthy was a huge pain in the ass. Horm eats vegetables, Ptetra wants fish, the gang of dilos wants meat and how the fuck were we gonna feed that longneck? In the end, I crafted a feeding trough and put everything in there. Meat, fish, berries, vegetables, fuck it. And what do you know, all the animals around the camp just take their favourite stuff out of the trough. While I was at it, I built a house made out of stone, we put up a protective fence to keep the Mexicans out and Claire grew the world's largest potato with the power of bronto crap. I'm not even kidding. Our newest friend produces people-sized turds, which help grow people-sized taters.

We also gave breeding animals another shot. We grabbed two dodos and put them in our log cabin, closed the doors and listened to a whole bunch of squeaking and squawking. It didn't take long and we had a fertilized egg. Problem was, the egg was rapidly losing health, because it was cold. Claire put it next to the campfire, which worked for a while. But then it got dark and the egg was cold again. 

Um... push? Hang in there? I don't know what to say, this is all new to me, too!

I lit my torch, which actually helped warm up the egg! At least for a while, then it started to rain. Now Claire lit another torch, I fired up enough tiki torches to attract a Trump rally and finally the egg was stable. And then this happened:

We hatched our first McNugget! And it immediately tried to cook itself, too! All it took was the power of our little log cabin. From now on we'd put all our animal couples in there for mating. It was time to give the place an appropriate name.

Oh yeah!

Our camp is quickly turning into a fortified little village. And I believe I can safely say that we have achieved all of our goals 100% thus far. We've got dodos, dilophosaurs, a triceratops, a parasaur, our own bronto, the world's largest potato and trusty Ptetra. Complete success on all fronts. Still, I can't help but feel we're forgetting something. Eh, it's probably nothing.

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. ♥

Agatha Knife And The Gaping Plot-Hole

I knew I wanted to play Agatha Knife the second I started watching the trailer. The game's main character loves animals, but she also loves meat. I can totally relate! Agatha lives in her mother's butcher shop, and she hangs our and plays with the animals there. She also kills them. The animals aren't massively keen on that part, though. Who woulda thunk?
So Agatha does what any reasonable person would do and creates Carnivorism, a religion, which teaches animals that dying in order to become meat will lead them to absolute and eternal happiness.

I actually kinda like how religion is depicted in this game. There's this elderly couple in a church, which spends a lot of money on candles made out of cheese, because that way the Time Lord will forgive them their sins and grant these oldiewonks eternal life (after death). Of course the Time Lord doesn't exist and that whole religion was made up by some guy with a failing cheese factory, who is finally turning a profit again, now that people believe that all of their sins will be forgiven if they purchase enough cheese. Everybody wins - the oldies have something to believe in, the cheese guy rakes in the cash, everyone is happy. The characters clearly state that all deities and religions are made up. It's a tool to control and manipulate people. Sure, that's rather cynical, but personally, I find it difficult to disagree.

The game repeatedly surprised me with how dark it is. There's this veterinary clinic in town, which houses the saddest, most miserable cats, dogs, lizards and ferrets you'll ever see. It's a depressing sight, but as Agatha remarks, "Oh well. The vet is going to make them all better." Yeah, about that...
Halfway through the game you learn that the vet has a deal with the local supermarkets and restaurants and he's actually selling off unwanted pets as meat. People take their animals to his clinic, ask for them to be fixed, then change their minds when they learn how expensive proper treatment would be and just abandon their animals. And let's be honest, people abandon their pets for much pettier reasons in real life, so this isn't exactly far-fetched.

What's worse, when you go and tell people that the local stores are selling dog meat, most people simply don't give a shit. "So what? It tastes alright and it's cheap." And is that really so surprising? Lots of people buy discount meat, which costs next to nothing. The animals are treated like absolute crap, stuffed with hormones and other garbage, but the meat is cheap, so what the hey. And sure, there was a certain amount of outrage when it turned out that lasagne sold by Findus actually contained horse meat instead of beef, but most people were really just angry about the deception, not the fact they're eating horse. That's still quite a step away from eating a cat or a dog in our culture, but if the price is right, I can see a certain amount of people being okay with it.

Then there's Agatha's best friend Nika, who sparks her creativity with the power of hard liquor, which is a bit of an unusual hobby for an elementary school kid. Nika's mother has basically lost all brain activity with the help of daytime reality TV. There's a widower, who turned his deceased wife into a stew and ate her with his now traumatized son. That's a subject, which comes up a lot in this game - why is it okay to eat a pig or a cow, but you're a horrible monster if you eat a dog or a person? It doesn't really give any answers, beyond Agatha's opinion that some animals are for eating and others are not. Not the most satisfying answer and that's okay. I'm not sure there is a good answer to this kind of question.

I really enjoyed playing this game. The writing is clever, the humour is dark, it's a fun, nice little snack to play on the sofa or on the go. Granted, many of the puzzles aren't challenging at all, there's waaaayyyyy too much fed-exing and padding involved and the two biggest puzzles are more annoying and stupid to figure out than they have any right to be. But I can forgive all that in a fun little budget game. What really bothered me, though, is this utterly stupid plot-hole.

Somewhere around the second half of the game, Agatha heads to the zoo, because there's a machine collecting dust there, which can turn animals into mincemeat, which would allow Agatha to make those 2000 hamburgers a day, which a local restaurant ordered from her butcher shop. Wanna know why the owner of the zoo no longer uses the machine? Because she invented another machine, which can CREATE ANY MEAL OUT OF THIN AIR! That's literally how they describe it. You just feed the machine a recipe and it will materialize the dish from random molecules in the air. Because science. And Agatha is all, "Okay, cool, can I have the mincemeat machine now?"

What in the ass?
Let me repeat this one more time: there's a machine, which creates food out of air! Without hurting or killing anyone! The entire game is about Agatha not wanting to scare her animals when she has to kill them for meat! The answer is RIGHT THERE and she just shrugs it off, goes through the ordeal of inventing a religion, literally drugging a pig and brainwashing it into agreeing to get butchered in front of all the other animals in some ritual, then turning every single one of her beloved animals into hamburgers.
With this machine she wouldn't have to do any of that, she could stop actual cats and dogs getting slaughtered for cheap meat AND she could also fix plothole #2: all the animals she turns into burgers at the end of the game are stolen and nobody seems to care.

You see, the animals for the big showdown ceremony all come from the farm where Agatha and her mother used to buy their critters for the butcher shop. Problem is, the butcher shop is no longer making money and they can't afford any more animals. So Agatha just goes to the farm, talks to the animals and coerces them to come to the butcher shop by their own volition. Because, you know, if I come to your house and make your dog follow me home, it's perfectly legal and there's nothing you can do to get it back. And sure, the game ends with their shop selling lots of hamburgers and paying off all their debt and nobody seems to mind that they've suddenly got a ton of meat while their former #1 supplier has lost every last one of their animals over night. Wonder how they would have explained that one, had they bothered to get into this at all.

I'm guessing there are about five other people who bought this game and nobody is ever gonna read any of this shit. But damn, this annoys me! Yeah, sure, maybe Agatha didn't want that magic wonder machine, because it would jeopardize her butcher shop and the entire industry. Or maybe she would have accepted that sacrifice for the sake of the animals she loves so much. Of course there's no way we'll ever know now, because in the actual game, she barely acknoledges that invention's existence. So we get to butcher a pig in front of a live audience of hundreds of animals, who all want to become meat in order to experience eternal happiness. Woo! :D

Yay Sonic! Fuck Octopath Traveler!

Ugh. I'm having one of those days again. You know, where the world and all the people in it just get on your nuts a bit too much. Starting with all those YouTube "celebrities", who now fart out Warframe videos around the clock, even though none of them actually ever played the game for more than five minutes. Warframe is completely burying Destiny 2 right now, TennoCon 2018 got people more hyped for the game than ever before, it's the 'golden age' of Warframe and its popularity is turning into a bit of a meme right now. So of course you get all the YouTube parasites milking the absolute fuck out of it.

There are a few decent videos out there. AngryJoe's TennoCon coverage is fun enough, especially since he doesn't pretend he's a die-hard fan, who is playing the game non-stop. SkillUp's TennoCon interviews are absolutely worth watching. And then you get a bunch of maggots without a single creative bone in their bodies, who just blatantly copy just about everything everyone else says in their videos, steal a bit of random gameplay from other YouTubers without asking for permission or giving credit, all for that sweet, sweet ad revenue for farting out a quick, lazy video praising a game they don't really know anything about, but heyho, it's trending and people are gonna click it.
You know, cunts like Cleanprincegaming, who stole several minutes of my Warframe gameplay straight from my channel, never asked my permission, didn't bother to give credit for ANY of the footage he's using in his shitty video and then go rake in that sweet, sweet cash from their 500k subscribers, you lazy, talentless bastard!

Or even lazier folks such as Downward Thrust, who crapped all over Warframe in one of his videos for clicks until people checked on his account and called him out on the fact that he barely played the game for five minutes. After TennoCon he went and made another video, explaining that he has played "over 50 hours across multiple accounts" (yeah, right), saying he was wrong and he actually enjoys the game now and "he cannot really explain why". I'm sure it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Warframe is currently more popular than tits and YouTube is absolutely flooded with videos telling people why they need to play Warframe. And 90% of them just repeat the same thing and use other people's gameplay. I fucking hate YouTube.

Speaking of things I fucking hate...

In other news - Octopath Traveler. I read some 90something % reviews claiming this game is an absolute love letter to old console jRPGs and what have you. Uh-huh, great. I'm a bit surprised I seem to be the only person on the planet who is bothred by the INSANE amount of depth of field effects, which turn everything that is ever so slightly in the fore- or background into a blurry, awful mess. Or the fact that the game might just tell you that the character, whose story you'd like to continue, requires you to grind for another ten levels, before you're strong enough to continue said story. But hey, how about you play some other freaking character's story instead? Damn you, Square Enix! Why are you letting me choose from all those characters, if you're forcing me to play every single one of them, anyway, with the only alternative being tedious, monotonous grind?

The voice-acting, where present, is great. The music is phenomenal. I absolutely hate the visuals, though people are already begging for remakes of older Final Fantasy titles and Chrono Trigger, so apparently true beauty lies in the eye of the idiot who doesn't know any better. There's also no interesting story here, no surprise twists or any characters, who aren't absolute clichés of themselves. But if that and the weird visual style don't bother you and you want to experience all of the 8 stories in a single playthrough anyway, then you'll probably enjoy this one and that's okay. It's okay to be wrong. I forgive you.

It gets worse.

Gekido is currently on offer in the Switch eShop, so I bought and instantly regretted it. The cutscenes are entirely devoid of sound, the controls are crap, level-design is unnecessarily labyrinthian, confusing and full of bottomless pits and other annoying shit and the fighting... well, Streets of Rage it ain't. I can forgive a button-masher for being a button masher if it's at least somewhat fun and satisying to beat the crap out of your enemies, but Gekido just overwhelms you with sheer numbers of bad guys, which just spawn all over the place at random moments. Sometimes they drop orbs for you to collect, which may result in something like a temporary power-up or a speed boost or they may just reverse your controls or completely remove your ability to attack for a few seconds, because who doesn't want to be rewarded with power-downs for defeating a bunch of bad guys?

Who wants some pork?

Then there's Agatha Knife, a game, which probably rubbed some vegans and religious types the wrong way. Agatha is the butcher's daughter and she's facing a bit of a dilemma: she loves animals, but she also loves meat. She butchers the animals to help her mother sell the meat, but she doesn't want the animals to be sad and scared when they have to die.

And that's when Agatha learns about religion. A made-up deity and a set of rules to give people something to believe in and to help the inventor of said religion achieve personal gain. The game's wording, not mine. So Agatha goes and invents Carnivorism and teaches it to her animals, so they'll be okay with the whole getting butchered thing. It's a pretty dark, cynical little point & click adventure, which is exactly why I like it.

And of course...

I love Doom on the Switch so I got Wolfenstein. There's nothing that hasn't already been said about how impressive this port is. That said, yeah, it's a blurry mess, up to a point where it can get difficult to even see who is shooting at you, because everything gets so muddy, especially in handheld mode. It's amazing how much we're willing to forgive when you add "...and you can play it whilst taking a shit" to a game's title.

Speaking of shooty stuff, Fortnite now has motion controls on the Switch. I absolutely hate Fortnite, but I also have moments where I absolutely love it, because I'm hanging out in the eye of the storm with the last five or so players. I don't think I'll ever really get into it, but it costs nothing, it looks and plays alright, I'm not gonna complain.

Encore Mode is the best way to play Sonic Mania.

Then there's Sonic Mania Plus. It adds Ray and Mighty as playable characters. Not entirely sure what the point of Ray is, seeing as he glides like Knuckles, but is ten times harder to control and doesn't scale any walls. Mighty reflects projectiles and survives spikes, what with him being an armadillo and all. He's a lot more fun to play than he was in Knuckles Chaotix on the 32x.

Most importantly though - Encore Mode. Play two characters at a time, with one of them being controlled by the AI and you can switch back and forth between them at anytime. Get one of them killed and they'll instantly be replaced by one of the other three guys, if you've unlocked them in a fun new pinball minigame, which replaces the fucking awful blue spheres bonus stage. Stages get slightly altered colour-palettes, bonus stage rings have been moved, the 3D bonus stages are now a bit more challenging and run at a locked 60 FPS on Switch. To me it's easily the most satisfying way to play Sonic Mania. Of course things would be even more fun if Encore had "1.5 player coop" like Sonic & Tails mode, so I'm crossing all available fingers and toes this might get added in the future.

Still waiting for the release of Titan Quest on Switch. According to reviews, the console ports so far have been broken, buggy and surprisingly incomplete (apparently, the latest expansion is simply not present at all). Sooo... I'm trying to curb that enthusiasm a bit. But I've been craving a hack'n'slay title on the Switch for as long as I had one, so it's about damn time I'm getting one! I'll drag Claire into it for some jolly cooperation. Though, if all else fails, I'll just have to soro it. You know, like on Warframe.

Okay For an Hour - Warframe: The Sacrifice

Warframe's new story content skips all the padding, gets straight to the point and woooosh! It's over!

Plains of Eidolon drove me away from Warframe. A giant, majestic, sprawling landscape full of ore to dig out of rocks, fish to catch and other stupid resources to farm for days, weeks and months in order to get the most out of a feature I never cared for - Tenno powers. As in, peeling your annoying little space-child out of their warframe to fight the enemy without superpowers or protection, because reasons, I guess.
I farmed Eidolon for two or three days, then got too bored to continue. Look, I get it. Warframe is the grind. Without it, there's no game. It's just that I didn't care for the reward at the end of it this time around. Farming for a cool new gun, an awesome new Warframe, that shit is fun. Farming to get a new pea shooter for my space brat? And I need to catch fish and use a mining laser instead of murdering stuff? Fuck that shit.

Like me, Eidolon is stunning to look at, but ultimately hollow and pointless.

So I took a bit of a break from the game to do other stuff. You know, like racing my bulbasaur car in Forza.

And then they finally released a new story quest. 'The Sacrifice'. To put it bluntly, it's a story the developers had to pull out of their asses to justify the introduction of 'Excalibur Umbra' to the western version of Warframe. This one may require a bit of explaining.
When Warframe was released in China, they offered a special edition of Warframe's posterboy Excalibur. That special version, dubbed Excalibur Umbra, was all black and edgy and came with a flowy scarf, so folks outside of China started wondering when they'd be able to get their hands on him. Originally, it was stated that Excalibur Umbra was really just slightly altered (visually) from regular Excalibur and there was nothing special about him apart from that.

Surprisingly, people in a game about edgy space ninjas still wanted a western release of this guy, so developer Digital Extremes said they didn't just want to throw him in there without explanation. Instead, they promised there would be a bit of lore to introduce him in a way that makes sense. Which is cool, of course, but that was also something they announced so many years ago, that the whole thing turned into a bit of a running gag.

So edgy.

But lo and behold, The Sacrifice is here and it doesn't just allow everyone to grab Excalibur Umbra for free, but it also continues the story of The Second Dream and The War Within. And unlike the previous story missions, The Sacrifice cuts right to the chase and shows you the good stuff without too much annoying padding and repetition. Basically, you're on a quest to chase after Excalibur Umbra to find out why he's such a huge jerk, to learn about his past and to ultimately stop him.

As with previous content of this type, the presentation is absolutely superb, from tons of action-packed cutscenes to fantastic voice acting. Gameplay itself is more of what you'd expect from Warframe. Go someplace, kill some stuff, scan a few things, craft something. What's cool is how there are no artificial time sinks in place in order to encourage people to spend real money. You get to craft your own Excalibur Umbra as part of the storyline and there is no endless grind for resources required, no 24+ hours construction time for you to skip with real cash or any such nonsense. Just play, finish the story, get your free Excalibro all leveled up and with a sexy new katana to boot!

Though my one true love will always be Rhino.

For better or worse, the whole thing won't take you much more than an hour to complete. Previous story quests would often stretch over an agonizing amount of samey bog-standard missions with a bunch of expository monologue by one of the main characters going on for an eternity and a half. The Sacrifice is all about 'show - don't tell', which I appreciate. Even when the game reveals Excalibur Umbra's story, you get to experience it through a character's eyes and there's a bit of interactivity. This makes it easier and a lot more fun to follow the story than in previous quests of this kind.

I much prefer it this way. I'd rather spend an hour playing through fun new content, which is full to the brim with awesome cutscenes and story than spend three or four hours repeating copy-pasted missions where the villain of the month keeps blabbing about his latest project or whatever. That said, there were two (minor) annoyances during my playthrough. First of all, you can only fight Excalibur Umbra as the Tenno. As in, without your warframe. I have no idea how this plays out on a properly upgraded space-kid, but since I never got into Plains of Eidolon, my brat is grossly underleveled and Excalibro kicked the absolute shit out of me.

I need my warframe to compensate for certain deficiencies.

Not only did he basically oneshot me again and again, but in the unlikely event where I actually survived a single attack, he'd just spam follow-ups, making it impossible to get away or retaliate. You can't ever really "die" when your Tenno gets their ass kicked and these missions are set up in a way where you just try again and again, chipping away at your enemy's shields one pixel at a time, which is an exercise in frustration, but I suppose they had to shoehorn a way for people to enjoy their powered-up Tenno weapons in there somehow.

The other problem was that, as with all story quests right after release, the dark side and light side dialogue choices were all over the place. You defeat a main villain and according to the UI, the light side dialogue option is, "Squirm like the maggot you are!" Clearly there's something wrong here.
The whole light vs dark side thing has no known gameplay effect right now and knowing the developer, it's at least gonna take another 3-5 years before that changes. And there will certainly be a patch for this, if there wasn't one already. Still, it felt a little weird to have all the asshole options associated with light side points and all the kind answers with the dark side.

I could really eat a Mars right now.

Finally, I had a look at Khora, the newest addition to the roster of playable Warframes. Her passive ability allows her to bring a battle pet, a (hideous) space cat, to all missions. The cat deals decent amounts of damage and functions pretty much exactly like the kavat and kubrow pets you can breed and use on all Warframes. In fact, Khora can use one of these regular pets on top of her cat, so she's the only warframe to get two active pets at once. She's also incredibly tanky, so I went and played a 1 hour solo survival, where enemies went all the way up to level 100 and higher in the end. Depending on when you're reading this, the video might still be converting to a watchable quaity, because a 1 hour video file in 4k takes a while to convert, apparently.

There's also a new Onslaught mode, which is basically like playing Nephalem Rifts in Diablo 3. You quickly hop from one randomized environment with random enemies to the next and try to make it as far as you can until time runs out or you run out of respawns. It's a fun new way to farm so-called relics, which are required to obtain the powerful primed warframes and primed weapons.
It's my favourite way to play right now, because you really just fight your enemies, the clock and your old record as you try to progress further and further each time. No objectives, no consoles to hack, no NPCs to babysit, no bosses endlessly talking to you - just instant action. And sometimes that's just what I want.

If you want to know why people are leaving Destiny 2 in droves and feeling very little excitement for Anthem right now, you need to look no further than Warframe. Not only can you (realistically!) play the entire game without ever having to spend any money at all - you can earn LOADS of premium currency just by selling off unwanted gear and mods you find while playing the game. Yes, player trading is deliberately awkward, with a chaotic trade chat and shitty face-to-face bazaars, but I'd rather post a bunch of WTS messages and get my premium currency that way, than shell out $100 for some AAA title featuring season passes and paid cosmetic shit on top.

Warframe is free, the content updates are free and you can earn tons of premium currency for free.

Being the lazy bastard that I am, if I want any particular new guns, mods of warframes, I'll shell out some small amount of money on a bit of platinum and insta-buy that stuff, because I can't be bothered to grind for it. Maybe I'll spend five bucks on a fun new skin for my favourite warframe. Because, you know, in a game that costs me absolutely NOTHING, I'm perfectly happy to spend some small amount of money on some cosmetics or a bit of new gear every six or so months. This is how you monetize your shit.

And I'll be happy to play Warframe on Switch when it releases on there later this year. The folks at Panic Button are in charge of the port, so I have no doubt it will be a very blurry experience with (mostly) stable FPS and absolutely all of the content intact. Just like Doom and Wolfenstein 2. They also ported Rocket League, which is absolutely fantastic on Nintendo's hybrid and supports cross platform play. That's not really something we've ever seen in Warframe, but who knows? I certainly wouldn't mind having access to my original account and its progress when playing it on the go.

Forza Motorsport 7, The Male Ego And My Descent Into Madness

For the past week or so, YouTube has been doing this weird thing where it keeps recommending videos of racing games. Probably because I clicked some E3 footage of Forza Horizon 4, which looks stupidly awesome. Then I saw some 4K footage of the PC version of Forza Motorsport 7. Fuck my life. Seeing as the standard edition of that game is currently selling for around $30 if you know where to shop, I figured, hey, why the hell not.

Damn. This game is the most stupidly beautiful title I've ever run on my PC. There's this argument going on about how visuals in games have stopped improving for a while now, because resolution can only go so high and at some point textures are simply "photorealistic" and you can't get much better from there, but I disagree. If you compare everyone's favourite car porno from 2015, Project Cars 2, to Forza Motorsport 7 just in terms of visuals, Forza looks quite a bit better. It's definitely not the fairest comparison and both games have different physics, handling and a different target audience, but I still remember how everyone on my Facebook, myself included, drooled over footage from Project Cars (2) and Forza looks even more incredible. Of course games don't automatically look better every year or two. Heck, The Crew 2 actually has been downgraded visually when compared to its predecessor, which is absolutely nuts.

Also, fuck the soulless piece of junk that is The Crew 2.

Being the old fart that I am, I also believe that our perception of what counts as 'photorealistic' changes as graphics keep on improving. For example, and I'm not making this up, back when Microprose released Grand Prix 2 on PCs, I'd see my dad, his friends, my friends, everyone just gathering in front of the PC with their eyes and mouths open, because we absolutely couldn't believe how the game looked almost exactly like watching a race on tv!

You know, this.

That was back in 1995, where pixels on objects would just grow to the size of an entire house if you came too close to an object. But back then, seeing this game in action was so unbelievable and so utterly breathtaking, we almost couldn't believe what we were seeing at the time. That shit was almost photorealistic! The game was so close to the real thing, I still know the Monaco GP by heart, because I've played it TO DEATH on GP2. We kept playing this game for years, constantly modding and updating the cars and the roster of drivers to reflect the new seasons. Yep, we actually passed around floppy disks containing fan-made seasonal content updates.
Okay, back then, photos, our tv signal, tvs themselves, our eyes, everything was much lower quality than it is today. But at the time, GP2 was the single-most realistic-looking racing game we had ever seen and it stayed that way for quite some time.

Yes, THIS up there!

So for a start, I got Forza 7 because it has amazing visuals and I got it at a reasonably affordable price. And then I started driving, not wanting to go below medium difficulty settings. Basically, I disabled all steering and braking assists, kept the race lines, because I don't know any of the tracks, disabled the rewind-feature, because if feels like cheating to me, and left the AI on its default setting. And raced. Doing my best not to drive like a complete asshole, attempting to stay on the track, not winning by ramming the competition out of the way and being an overall dirty prick. With mixed results, but my first attempts went okay. I was so proud when I won my first post-tutorial race, I actually recorded the replay.

I'm only winning, because the AI drivers suck even harder than I do in that race. But I was happy, because I was still learning, I was successful enough and, while Forza isn't exactly a die-hard simulation, it's a bit more challenging than, say, Need for Speed. And it all ended when the game pointed out I was really just winning because of my AI settings. Long story short, Forza recommended changing AI skill to "above average". And that's when everything went to shit.

Up to this point, I did the best I could to actually race around the track in the exact way you're supposed to race, not taking any shortcuts through the grass or other weird shit, which would get you penalized or disqualified in any serious race. Because even on the higher difficulty settings, the AI is super fair and shows remarkable sportsmanship. They stay on track, they avoid contact, just good, clean racing displayed by all the bots around you. And I tried so hard to play along! Usually with one of two possible results: 1) I fail to take a turn properly, fly off track, crash into a stack of tires and end up so far behind the pack, I may as well just start over. Yes, if I win, it's either without rewinds or no win at all. Or 2) I try my best not to hit anybody, not to end up in a bed of gravel or a stack of tires and just stay stuck in the middle of the pack or worse, resulting in a very dull, frustrating racing experience. That's because I'm a noob, I'm not very good with the tracks or the driving physics right now, I have difficulty keeping up, I get fucked.

Prague is one of my absolute favourite tracks. On a tangential note, excessive bloom can really fuck up a screenshot.

Ultimately, constant failures and restarts will eventually lead to 3) Anger. So if I can squeeze past a car on the inside of a turn, go way too fast and then just lean on the guy on the outside, pushing him off the track and gaining a position in the process like an absolute asshole, it's only a matter of time until I will. Some guy is hitting the brakes before a hairpin turn right in front of me and I've got way too much speed? Who needs brakes when you can ram the guy in front of you off the track? So over the course of every cup I slowly devolve from a highly motivated driver, fully intent on displaying nothing but the finest sportsmanship to an angry troglodyte, who will push you right the fuck off the road for his own advantage.

Funnily enough, what annoys me the most is how the game lets me get away with this. So I end up winning one cup after another by being a ruthless, cheating cunt, while all the AI drivers around me are far more skilled and perfectly fair. So after every race I tell myself, alright, this time we're gonna be good, no more shortcuts, no ramming, no contact, let's pretend this is a serious race and win through superiour skill, not brute force.

Five minutes later...

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!
Of course I could just set the AI back to 'average' and win without being a total jizzbag. Nobody will know, no one is gonna judge me, my dick won't fall off, even if it'll feel that way. There's no shame in lowering the difficulty. But I can't. I won't. I'll totally beat the above average drivers fair and square eventually, because I'm so totally good at racing!

The Top Gear sticker makes my car 20% faster. Everybody knows this.

In the end I just went completely insane. I tricked out a 1990 Renault Alpine (for nostalgia, my old man had one IRL) to a point where it could compete with any 1000hp hypercar.  Of course the car was never built for anything like this, it feels impossible to control and shoots all over the place, but it accelerates like a fucking space shuttle. Then I went and raced some "above average" hypercars with it. I basically ended up flying right past the entire field, rocketing all over the place. Again, I genuinely tried to stay on track, tried to avoid contact as much as I could and you can see in the video below, how I'm getting a little better with the race course in every lap until I eventually stop mowing the lawn all the time.

I love this game. I'd love it hell of a lot more if I wasn't too stubborn to lower the stupid difficulty already. But picking any one of the game's 700+ cars, tricking the absolute shit out of it and racing some of the world's most expensive and powerful supercars is as ludicrous and stupid as it is satisfying and fun. The game is called Forza Motorsport 7, so I reckon that at this time, everyone who ever cared about this series is probably a bit tired of it now, while I'm only just starting to discover it. But hey, that's me. Maybe I'll start playing Overwatch by 2020!

And Then There Were Two

So here's a nice surprise - Claire downloaded Quake Champions without even telling me. Played a few rounds and it turns out she's doing a lot better on there than she does on any CoD game. She's even topped the scoreboard a few times. So that's neat. :D

My dick has permanently grown 2 inches after this one.

Getting into Paladins on the Switch some more, as well. I still hate having to control it with an analog stick and I reeeeeeeeeeally hope they're gonna add fucking gyro aiming already. Still, it's nice when things actually go right and the game broadcasts a little bit of your gameplay as the moment of the match to every player at the end of a round. A feature the cunts at Activision Blizzard are trying to patent now, because we can't have nice things.

Watch as I put you in your place!

My thing I'm currently doing and hoping to blog about if it succeeds is going surprisingly well. I'm halfway done. The positive changes are already kicking in. Life is good.

In other news, I'll be attending Gamescom in Cologne this year for the first time in my life. For work. Got a TON of people wanting to meet me in person. Nobody from any of my writing and magazine jobs, none of my German friends, pretty much no one outside of family has ever met me IRL, because I've got zero social skills and all the anxieties. Trying not to think about it too much right now. Yay.