who the hell is that

Saturday, June 27, 2009

2.00pm
i'm playing madworld and one of the commentators is greg proops.

Saturday, June 20, 2009

⎳

MASTERFUL

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

12.53am
twilight princess really is outstanding. i keep expecting a short but wonderful delight, like every zelda game i've played since OoT, but instead TP is seems to be shaping up to be as epic a journey as OoT. it just keeps going and going. i went to the zelda wikia to check up on the backstory and how OoT links to TP, because i thought i was almost done with the game. instead i'm running into spoiler after spoiler, which is agonising because i've sucessfully avoided them for so long now.
and another thing about how OoT links (LINKS) to TP... i've had a couple of dreams before where i'm walking through my neighbourhood, 50 years in the past/future. TP plays like one of those dreams. familiar places, but aged. ruins of buildings from OoT. descendents of OoT characters. the lay of the land is still recognisable. it's all just good stuff. onward ho.

on that note, none of the shops in j8 still stock gamecube memory cards. zzz. and i'm wondering how wind waker will seem next to TP. i was hoping to play it first, but oh well.

whaaat

Monday, June 15, 2009

6.31pm
really need those dvd-r's. wasted two dvd+r's that won't even register in the machine.

twilight princess is awesome.

what's up with the tubes

Sunday, June 14, 2009

9.22pm
fucking internet. insufferably slow. webpages fail to load. google.com is offline? sif. must be the school holiday and all the schoolkids free to surf porn during the weekday. singnet, fucking get to work.

went to nus for some talk by the school of design and environment. they got some supposedly top-ranked student to give us a little talk. he spent 30 minutes rambing on about what Architecture ("with a capital A") meant to him. i guess to be an A (no pun) student you have to be a pompous windbag with an unyielding self-important attitude, and then you'll have the professors fawning at your feet. seriously, he was a total holier-than-thou jackass. next some guy from industrial design gave a talk to the id students. he couldn't speak as well, but he gave actual useful information instead of poetic nonsense. in any case, i'm now even more psyched that this is perhaps the best choice i've ever made in my life; for once my academics will rely on something i fucking enjoy.
..then again, i might not enjoy it much by the end. the workload sounds indeed as crazy as others have said. 24/7 projects projects projects. ID guy told us that his ID batch had about 30 people, and the graduating class that year has 18. mr A-student commented "if you can't take it... just quit lah!" and then laughed it off with "just kidding, just kidding." what are you really saying dude? gtfo if we're not as good as you?
luckily, there were like, two guys i knew there. clifford, from ri. one rjc guy from my camp who's going to ID. and one other guy that i kept eyeballing because i couldn't place a name to the face. then the guy from my camp told me he was the mp at our camp. small world. oh, a certain famous jayden is also in archi.

also, i now own a wii. i still need to buy:
another wiimote
a gamecube controller
a gamecube memory card
some dvd-r's

grit those teeth

Saturday, June 13, 2009

1.15am
after half an hour or so of lying in bed failing to fall asleep thanks to these elephants tapdancing on my temples, i went out to get some panadol. and i figured out why i have a headache on the way from room, so of course i must instead come back and blog about it.

now i get to use the phrase "it all started with...".

it all started with a bag of funsized m&ms packets. i don't mean one fun sized packet, which, as the old joke goes, isn't all that fun. i mean a bag of those packets, each of whose mass and volume seems precisely calibrated to be just short of the amount of chocolate required to sate off further pangs.

strange how using one word in italics always follows with a need for more. must be some narrative switch in my brain, a vile disability caused by reading too much david eddings, may he rest in piece.

anyway, eventually i found myself to have polished off the whole bag. it seemed to last forever, but in fact i believe it was about three days. despite being hereditarily chinese i know jack squat about TCM (although i can use words like hereditarily and phrases like jack squat), but i'm at least vaguely aware that chocolate is 'heaty'.

that was a week or so ago. a few days later i got an ulcer. and my gums are a bit puffier and a bit more sensitive. which is bad when i've got those annoying new teeth threatening to poke out of both the back sides (hee hee backside) of my mouth. now, every time i bite down fully, one of my old molars is piercing some gum that's covering those back teeth. aren't molars supposed to be grinding teeth? well i've got this annoying punk ass molar that's sharper than my canines, which are rather dull. that bloody molar has this one corner that wouldn't be amiss on those deadly coffee tables that poke out toddler eyes. and it's not blinding annoying brats, it's poking ME. IN THE MOUTH.

now, strangely enough, i would've thought my brain/body would be smart enough to go around slack jawed, but apparently what i've been unconsciously doing is clenching my teeth tight, which actually helps more, because keeping that barb constantly impaled in my flesh numbs it to some extent, so chewing food isn't a refreshingly new burst of pain every mealtime. or, possibly, clenching my teeth is a reflex reaction to pain.

either way, it was stupid, because all that clenching has been causing this headache. i'm not sure how common this is to other people, but i should have realised it sooner, because i used to get headaches from chewing too much gum too, whenever i went to malaysia. and there was this time when i was younger and practicing somersauts in the swimming pool, i used to emerge with the hugest fucking splitting headaches, and it wasn't till i figured out the gum chewing business that i made another link: i was gritting my teeth super hard whenever i did somersauts. like, bite-my-own-teeth-in-half super hard. i guess in response to the fear of water going up my nose. why didn't i just keep a steady stream of air going out my nose? i did, but i was young and naive and was attempting to go ten rounds forward and backwards on one breath. it was a brave endeavour. and stupid.

and now i really must go get those panadol.

ass effect

Friday, June 12, 2009

11.26pm
after about a week of downloading at sub 5kbs speeds, mass effect finished downloading, and one annoying 7 gig unrar, an image mounting, game installing, and crack applying later, i finally played this game. i thought i'd try it out because the sequel was announced at e3 and everyone's socks were apparently knocked off. a day later, i'm here to... bitch.

first off, i didn't terribly enjoy kotor or kotor2. bad signs. so i don't really enjoy this too. this time round the rpg elements are improved, like swappable weapon upgrades (ie enchants)but i'm still hardly engaged by it. talent systems and guns just don't mix. i'm missing my shots because i don't have points in accuracy? then don't make me aim a crosshair. this is like playing fallout 3 all over again, but worse. and it doesn't help that i chose the shotgunner class with ridicunormous spread. okay, ignore real life physics for balance in an fps, but since this stupid game already calculates my accuracy for me there's no reason my 90% accuracy with a shotgun can still miss from just a room away.
so, combat: weak rpg deal on top of a slow, unresponsive faux-fps.
oh, and the screen bobs to sumilate running around when moving with a weapon drawn, which must be pretty nice on consoles, but 60cm from a computer screen, it just gives me a headace.

next: environment. nice details. boring and repetetive to look at after running through once. the minimap is useless. i'm pressing M to open the map every 10 seconds to make sure i'm going the right way thanks to the fact that every level feels the same. big signs with HOTEL or CONTROL ROOM or SCIENCE LABS would have been nice, but no, there's just lifts everywhere, with maybe a panel next to it that you have to talk to for it to display, in text, where it leads. or you could open the map and mouseover the generic lift icon to see where it leads.

puzzles are stupid. talk to this guy to get to that guy and do something for another guy. mandatory quests to open doors that block your way. to 'hack' computer locks you play a frogger minigame. it's boring after two tries.

finally, story and characters. pretty interesting, actually, considering i'm no scifi fan. but i'm on one sidequest now and it's just dragging on and on with lots of frustrating combat and no plot advancement, i'm guessing because its a sidequest. i'll probably rush the main quest once it's over. characters are decent, and voice acting is superb, every single line of conversation is voiced. which, unfortunately, becomes a minus when i just want to skim through mindless babble, especially when i can read the text twice as fast. also, i wouldn't have noticed this before, but they've siad how mass effect 2 has conversations that are actually fluid, and don't entail the characters standing rooted to one place while the camera flips back and forth between two talking heads. so, thanks, it realy stands out now.

i play games to have fun, so i'm probably going to find a trainer soon and cheat my way through the story.

and i've got a unexplained headache. worsened by the aforementioned screen bobbing.

oh, hey

Saturday, June 06, 2009

11.56pm
happy d day

wut

Friday, June 05, 2009

8.03pm
looked for more l4d2 videos. the pump shotgun seems to be some sort of hybrid again like l4d1 but shinier. apart from that, it's like they've purposely changed every other weapon just because they can. apart from the unforgivable auto shotgun change, they've also chosen the fn scar for the assault rifle instead of the m16. the uzi is replaced by a mac10, which is silenced, for weaker shots, wow. the scoped rifle is a hk g3 as far as i can tell, i had to google to doublecheck.

also, every single video i watched had one thing in common: a horrible player. it's disconcerting because some of them are supposedly by the l4d team leader.

it's been half a bloody year

6.23pm
time passes so fast when you're doing absolutely nothing

got some huge freshmen guide shit from NUS. a lot of stuff i'm not sure if i should bother about bothering about. the key thing seems to be the camps they're advertising. the sde's print ad is horrible. the site and that video should give an idea of how terribad it is. use as many fonts as possible! random colours! forget size and spacing and readability! steal clips from movies! give no coherent message!

but i'm probably just bitching because i don't want to go for an event where the entire point is to socialize and interact. what the what.

l4d2

Tuesday, June 02, 2009

6.02pm
pay another $60 for a new game that's not even a year after the first game? especially when all this new content was promised for the first game in the first place? hell, i'll do it.

i'm mad about the weapon changes though. where are the classy 1911s? now we're dualwielding a glock and a sig. and i'll never forgive the replacement of the beautiful, sleek benelli m4 with the ugliest shotgun on the planet, the spas 12.

those are my only legitimate bitching points. cosmetics matter.
i could bitch about the southern setting, too, but killing zombie rednecks and mexicans could be fun. i could also bitch about the characters. there's a gigolo, a redneck in a baseball cap, a black chick, and a fat black man in the AJC pe shirt.