Dead Island Riptide: E-E-Elec-Electrical Scraps!

[Part of the Dead Island Diary]

It's side quest time on the island and thank the developer gods that they decided to include a fast travel system in this game, otherwise this would be literally hours of walking through horrible disconnect zones. The walking itself isn't that bad. Getting d/c-ed is BS. Other than doing a few of the instanced locations for nice loot and saving random trapped people, we accomplished a few things this session, the first being that we discover Jacqueline is an idiot. She didn't come with the rest of our team and instead opted to stay again in her theatre. This is only slightly better than the handful of women that opted to remain in Halai Village, just waiting for the plague to blow over. Even telling them the fate of their missing friends did nothing to change their minds.

We also helped out the Zombienator, a local "superhero" retrieve his cape, shoes and fish to help him fight zombies. There was another guy in an apartment who kept asking for stuff too, but by the third iteration of him going "oh... I don't remember what these are for, but could you get x now?" we decided to let him rot. Our most important sidequest this round though was a simple delivery trip to Dr. Kessler back at his Dome lab, where he wants the rather commonly found electrical scraps item for his non-descript inventions. Given the late stage of the game and the number of these items we had on us, we went to town unloading on the good doctor.

"Electri... E... Ele... Electrical Scraps, bring them to me," he would say - or try to because giving him the next one forced a line repeat leading us to believe that the good doctor is actually a robot. This must have been the single most rewarding quest though. Each scrap gave 30+ thousand XP (same as canned food and painkillers but those items are more rare). In comparison killing one of those "dangerous" screamers gives 6k.

Congratulations, you have just won at life!

This is a perfect example of why levels should be done away with, as it meant handing the doctor something in my pocket increased my skills far faster than fighting any zombie present on the island. ELECTRICAL SCRAPS - It's the stuff of heroes!

Dead Island Riptide: Criminal Scum deserve Death

[Part of the Dead Island Diary]

With the tunnels drained it was finally time to descend into the darkness to light and clear the way for the rest of our NPC team. The zombies were to be expected, but the gun wielding smugglers at the very end were a welcome surprise. Between the four of us they were easy to defeat and as a bonus provided us with some much needed firearms.

Upon reaching the exit we radioed back for the rest of our people to come through but obviously some zombies respawned on them as Wayne had not only been bitten, but he'd also been pushed into some deadly chemicals by Harlow in an attempt to protect the group. He rapidly mutated into what the game calls a "wrestler", which in my opinion was an improvement - too bad he had to die for us to progress. Took a fair bit to kill him though as he survive a full fuel tank of my chainsaw on him plus a few rounds of rage.

So THAT'S where wrestlers come from.

Once he was out of the way we could progress to the nearby ferry dock which was held by escaped convicts. They were surprised that anyone could survive coming through the tunnels, because obviously only tough customers could accomplish that feat. As expected they then tried to rob us (because criminals are morons) ignoring the fact that we had guns trained on many of their men during the whole conversation.

It was a brief but loud affair, one that saw all those fools put down like the animals they are. Having rescued a captive ferry man it was time to call the ferry, but this involved preparing some high level defences since apparently ferries are loud bastards that summon swarms of zombies. Not to mention that the ferry itself was carrying zombies when it arrived, including a new variety - a screamer, dangerous if you didn't silence her right away. Fortunately with the sudden surplus of ammo, none of this proved troublesome at all and soon we were finally crossing the lagoon to the city of Henderson.