So apparently this is a gaming blog now. I have made a category for it.
The big news from the prior entry: Miss Mac, intrigued by all the pictures of adventure cats and my nattering on about dinosaur trouble, decided to pick up Monster Hunter World and join me in my Jurassic Park nightmare.
This is supposed to be a multiplayer game, so playing with your friends should be easy, right? I used to play WoW. I figured the multiplayer mechanics might be kind of the same.
Spoiler alert: they weren’t.
Miss Mac ended up going off on some adventures on her own with her Palico, Tonks.
Anyway, we did get everything working eventually and found our characters a spot to hang out in the Gathering Hub, which is basically the rooftop bar perched over Boat City. And since we couldn’t quite get the chat working, we talked to each other (and Mr. Truck) in Slack.
“Can this just be my life?” Miss Mac asked. “Drinking a big pint on top of a ship on top of a mountain, with my Palico at my side and a cool pink bird perched on random bones behind me?”
At some point one of us discovered the list of poses and gestures you can have your character make. OK, cool, I remembered this from WoW. Except the mechanic is a little different in MHW. Your characters don’t stop making the gesture or pose. Like ever. Until you tell them to.
I smacked a bunch of keys to no avail.
“Oh no, she’s stuck clapping,” I said of my hunter.
“I’m stuck in ‘pumped up,’” Miss Mac reported. “But fun music just started, so I’m gonna roll with the idea that the music is just for us.”
My hunter kept on clapping. Kraken clapped, too.
“She won’t stop!”
“You’ll tire yourself out before battle!”
We decided to go into the arena to hone our skills (and not have to deal with joining quests for the time being). We picked our armor and weapons. I decided to give the big hammer a whirl and selected some vaguely bone-like armor that I regretted as soon as it showed up on my character.
“Oh my God, I look like a triceratops,” I said.
Miss Mac wasn’t keen on her gear, either: “I look like a…frog?”
Judge for yourselves:
Anyway, they stuck us in the arena with the pukei-pukei, who as you may recall ditched me when the Anjanath came upon us both. I was hungry for revenge. “He pukes poison,” I warned Miss Mac.
Our characters stood atop the arena. “Do we just…jump in?” Miss Mac asked. “And die?”
“I think so,” I said. “May the Force be with us.”
My hunter jumped in. Miss Mac…kind of got stuck at the top of the arena and just had to kind of watch me fight the birdy for a while.
MM: I CAN’T GET TO YOU.
EM: HIT F??
MM: THAT JUST COCKS MY GUN!!!!
She did eventually make it in just in time for us to realize something else:
Pukei-Pukei doesn’t just puke poison. He also farts it.
A lot.
We staggered through the purple gas, the purple spit, the screeching, and the attacks. And somehow, through the power of friendship (or maybe the continual spamming of the keyboards) we closed in on that damned gas mine and smacked the shit out of it.
FATALITY!!!!!!
Er, wait. Wrong franchise.
VICTORY!!!!
Miss Mac’s husband, who is a gamer but has not played MHW, saw the last bit of the fight and was apparently a bit stunned by the beating we delivered.
“What did that poor bird ever do to you?” he asked.
“Farted purple acid on us,” Miss Mac replied.
And thus a new gamer was born.