witcher 3: Stay hydrated, bitch
Apr. 25th, 2020 11:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2S7Mz30
no, i’m not a gamer. But, Dr. Friend is.
One Saturday in the year 2001, probably, over the summer, I was sleeping in because I’d worked the closing shift at a gas station, and my slumber was disturbed by a weird repeating sound. As I came to wakefulness, I realized it was a cartoon villain voice saying something.
I eventually got out of bed and deciphered that it was saying “your creatures need a bigger lair”. I went over and knocked on not-yet-Dr Friend’s door and solemnly told him to build his creatures a bigger fucking lair, and went back to bed. This has passed into history but I still occasionally bother him about building his creatures a lair. Especially at the moment, where in a fit of self-improvement, he rendered the children’s basement playroom unusable and has been procrastinating restoring it to usability by removing carpet from various rooms of the house instead, while the children have been locked inside for five weeks unable to access one of the major locations of the house where they can run wild. DUDE YOUR FUCKING CREATURES NEED A BIGGER FUCKING LAIR, my man, this is no longer just a weird inside joke but actually a deeply relevant situation. Paint the furnace room floor already and quit fucking around!
Anyway. Yesterday he brought down the X-Box console, which he’d had hooked up to the TV in his bedroom but had determined wasn’t really doing him any favors up there, because their daughter’s been refusing to sleep in her own room to the point of them finally setting up a cot for her in the corner of their bedroom, which means he can’t use the Xbox in the evenings, and so he’s been using it during breaks in the middle of the day, and he’s finally conceded that this is both antisocial and unproductive behavior. So now the Xbox is downstairs.
So he set it up and was scrolling around looking for a new game, and I was like “do Witcher! do Witcher! but only 3, that’s the only one where Geralt’s hot and the plot isn’t predicated largely on misogyny!” and he wasn’t particularly listening but I left the room because it was Pajama Time and when I came back down, his pajama-clad wife had just convinced him that he should, in fact, download Witcher 3, because she also wanted to see it. (Pajama Time is an important ritual, y’all.)
So he did, and we both watched in delight as the opening scene features Yennefer’s completely bare ass and also a bunch of gratuitous lingering shots of Geralt’s naked torso. For some reason he decided to do the game on Death March difficulty mode, which seemed ridiculous to me, especially when he then proceeded to spend the intro wandering around the bedroom running into walls and failing to climb bookshelves. MathMom went to bed early and missed out on the other bit of the tutorial, where Dr. F managed to get Geralt’s ass entirely kicked by Vesemir and throw a bomb directly into the middle of Lambert and Eskel’s sparring session. (They seemed remarkably unconcerned.) He kept having to put the controller down and get out his phone and look things up, and then go scroll through all the controller explanation screens to figure out the buttons, and such.
I was extremely dubious about how this Death March Difficulty was going to go, but dutifully passed along a bunch of excited tips fromakilah12902 who has been a fantastic source of Witcher 3 info for me on here this whole time when I’ve wanted to use video game canon to flesh out the worldbuilding in the MDS series, and then all of a sudden when the game really began and a bunch of ghouls swarmed onto the screen, Dr. Friend fairly handily despatched them and proved that he’d really just been fucking around this whole time.
(This is kind of a running thing with Dr. Friend, where he’ll willingly just sort of make an ass of himself for a prolonged period and look like he’s just this whole disaster of a person, and then some situation will arise where he actually needs to be competent and he’ll just casually do that and it’s extremely confusing and I fall for it every time. I have known him twenty years and still am so prone to absolutely falling for it when he pretends to be a fool! In my defense, he’ll maintain the foolish pretense long past what I’d consider to be an emergency, so I’ve been present for a fair amount of actual fuck-ups because he hadn’t turned on his Be A Person mode in time.)
Then he picked a bunch of flowers because i told him he should, and we were both disappointed to discover you can’t pick flowers from horseback. Once we reached the inn, only then did he explore all the inventory screens, and discover that if you want you can un-equip most of Geralt’s clothes.
He put Geralt in underpants, gauntlets, boots, and nothing else, and said, “Look! It’s Pennsic!” but then decided that since clothing gives you a defensive stats boost he’d probably leave it on. He also realized that all the equipment has durability stats too, so conceivably your pants can actually wear out, so that’s a thing to worry about. (I want to know what happens if you actually wear out a pair of pants.)
That’s as far as we got, except for accidentally bodychecking the friendly innkeeper into a wall. Oh, and he was like, ok the ghouls took a big chunk of my health and i need to replenish it and don’t have any obvious healing potions, what do, and after wandering around the tavern for like twenty minutes, he finally tried taking a drink of water and the health bar went “zoop” almost all the way back to the top. “Oh,” he said. (akilah12902 responded to my ??? about this with the extremely apt observation “STAY HYDRATED BITCH”.)
So anyway. I’m actually really hoping that he uses his time painting the furnace room floor so his creatures can have a bigger lair, but maybe I’ll get to be amused by more of Geralt’s hair animations tonight, we’ll find out.
no, i’m not a gamer. But, Dr. Friend is.
One Saturday in the year 2001, probably, over the summer, I was sleeping in because I’d worked the closing shift at a gas station, and my slumber was disturbed by a weird repeating sound. As I came to wakefulness, I realized it was a cartoon villain voice saying something.
I eventually got out of bed and deciphered that it was saying “your creatures need a bigger lair”. I went over and knocked on not-yet-Dr Friend’s door and solemnly told him to build his creatures a bigger fucking lair, and went back to bed. This has passed into history but I still occasionally bother him about building his creatures a lair. Especially at the moment, where in a fit of self-improvement, he rendered the children’s basement playroom unusable and has been procrastinating restoring it to usability by removing carpet from various rooms of the house instead, while the children have been locked inside for five weeks unable to access one of the major locations of the house where they can run wild. DUDE YOUR FUCKING CREATURES NEED A BIGGER FUCKING LAIR, my man, this is no longer just a weird inside joke but actually a deeply relevant situation. Paint the furnace room floor already and quit fucking around!
Anyway. Yesterday he brought down the X-Box console, which he’d had hooked up to the TV in his bedroom but had determined wasn’t really doing him any favors up there, because their daughter’s been refusing to sleep in her own room to the point of them finally setting up a cot for her in the corner of their bedroom, which means he can’t use the Xbox in the evenings, and so he’s been using it during breaks in the middle of the day, and he’s finally conceded that this is both antisocial and unproductive behavior. So now the Xbox is downstairs.
So he set it up and was scrolling around looking for a new game, and I was like “do Witcher! do Witcher! but only 3, that’s the only one where Geralt’s hot and the plot isn’t predicated largely on misogyny!” and he wasn’t particularly listening but I left the room because it was Pajama Time and when I came back down, his pajama-clad wife had just convinced him that he should, in fact, download Witcher 3, because she also wanted to see it. (Pajama Time is an important ritual, y’all.)
So he did, and we both watched in delight as the opening scene features Yennefer’s completely bare ass and also a bunch of gratuitous lingering shots of Geralt’s naked torso. For some reason he decided to do the game on Death March difficulty mode, which seemed ridiculous to me, especially when he then proceeded to spend the intro wandering around the bedroom running into walls and failing to climb bookshelves. MathMom went to bed early and missed out on the other bit of the tutorial, where Dr. F managed to get Geralt’s ass entirely kicked by Vesemir and throw a bomb directly into the middle of Lambert and Eskel’s sparring session. (They seemed remarkably unconcerned.) He kept having to put the controller down and get out his phone and look things up, and then go scroll through all the controller explanation screens to figure out the buttons, and such.
I was extremely dubious about how this Death March Difficulty was going to go, but dutifully passed along a bunch of excited tips from
akilah12902 who has been a fantastic source of Witcher 3 info for me on here this whole time when I’ve wanted to use video game canon to flesh out the worldbuilding in the MDS series, and then all of a sudden when the game really began and a bunch of ghouls swarmed onto the screen, Dr. Friend fairly handily despatched them and proved that he’d really just been fucking around this whole time. (This is kind of a running thing with Dr. Friend, where he’ll willingly just sort of make an ass of himself for a prolonged period and look like he’s just this whole disaster of a person, and then some situation will arise where he actually needs to be competent and he’ll just casually do that and it’s extremely confusing and I fall for it every time. I have known him twenty years and still am so prone to absolutely falling for it when he pretends to be a fool! In my defense, he’ll maintain the foolish pretense long past what I’d consider to be an emergency, so I’ve been present for a fair amount of actual fuck-ups because he hadn’t turned on his Be A Person mode in time.)
Then he picked a bunch of flowers because i told him he should, and we were both disappointed to discover you can’t pick flowers from horseback. Once we reached the inn, only then did he explore all the inventory screens, and discover that if you want you can un-equip most of Geralt’s clothes.
He put Geralt in underpants, gauntlets, boots, and nothing else, and said, “Look! It’s Pennsic!” but then decided that since clothing gives you a defensive stats boost he’d probably leave it on. He also realized that all the equipment has durability stats too, so conceivably your pants can actually wear out, so that’s a thing to worry about. (I want to know what happens if you actually wear out a pair of pants.)
That’s as far as we got, except for accidentally bodychecking the friendly innkeeper into a wall. Oh, and he was like, ok the ghouls took a big chunk of my health and i need to replenish it and don’t have any obvious healing potions, what do, and after wandering around the tavern for like twenty minutes, he finally tried taking a drink of water and the health bar went “zoop” almost all the way back to the top. “Oh,” he said. (
akilah12902 responded to my ??? about this with the extremely apt observation “STAY HYDRATED BITCH”.) So anyway. I’m actually really hoping that he uses his time painting the furnace room floor so his creatures can have a bigger lair, but maybe I’ll get to be amused by more of Geralt’s hair animations tonight, we’ll find out.
