6.19pm thanks again, valve. first you delay my preorder early demo, now you patch it to disable sv_cheats. now i can't spawn weapons and noclip my way around to explore the map.
but anyway. the demo was too short for me to get excited over. i would have preferred to see some of the major gameplay changes, like weather and scavenge mode. melee is fun but extremely situational, i would not choose it on a serious expert playthrough. bile bombs are overpowered, they provide more horde distraction than a pipe bomb, and make the tank a joke. he just stands ther while common infected huddle around him. definitely need to change that. swat them aside, you idiot, what happened to the action from l4d1's intro?
the weapons are interesting. shotgun reserve capacity has been reduced, a nerf i wholeheartedly accept. now it doesn't feel like i'm gimping myself and my team by choosing something else. ugly design differences aside, the spread and damage difference of the two autoshotguns are negligible, imo. the pump shotguns, however, are much nicer, i like the new chrome pump shotgun much more thanks to a much tighter spread compared to the old one. actually seems like it's shooting shot instead of flinging pebbles out in huge arcs. the smg's are strange. the mac 10 seems to both shoot faster and do more damage than the uzi. and it's even got a suppressor. zombie apocalypse aside, that makes no sense. the rifles are nice. the ak is everything it's supposed to be, next to the m16. less accurate, more powerful shots, smaller mag. the teir system for weapons seems to be gone, but the scar is definitely tier 3. 60 round mag, more damage than the m16. 3-round burst is sometimes annoying, through, and i'm not sure about penetration. the sniper rifles are now fun to play. aiming is sensible, now you won't miss something standing 5 steps away. huge change. the desert eagle is stupid. the grenade launcher is a team killer.
now here's a list of point-blank shots it takes to bring down a tank on expert that i made because i don't want to write my history of architecture essay pistol - 490 desert eagle - 110 mac 10 - 350 uzi - 400+, seems to vary, and i can't test anymore thanks to no cheats m1014 - 41 spas12 - 40 m16 - 250 scar - 189 ak47 - 161 hkg3, ruger mini - 89 grenade launcher - 8 meelee - 10, it would fun to face down a wounded tank and swipe it to death. or one be a throw target and the others smack him to death while he's pulling his rock out of the ground. gamebreaking.
molotovs do damage over time like in versus, the tank doesn't die in 45 seconds outright. now takes 84 seconds with fire alone. incendiary ammo lights the tank up for 4 seconds. and is still stupid. tracers can set a hill on fire on a hot day, but making lumps of flesh burst into flame... no.
there wasn't versus in the demo, but in campaign the new infected bosses were pretty effective. corner camping should be much harder as a viable strategy. chargers and jockeys are both much more effective than hunters, you can't meelee off a charger and jockeys are just plain annoying. unless they up hunter pounce damage by a bit, there's no competition. spitters are like giving the infected molotovs.
also, most importantly: lore! seems like the survivors might be carriers. cool stuff.
kay i'll go start that essay. 1500 words. should be cake.
game on
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
6.24pm so here i was eagerly anticipating my early demo access to l4d2 because i preordered it. instead it gets pushed back twice, first by 6 hours and then by another 18. so one more day to go. good job valve, screwed up distro or something, make me download the entire thing all over again.
in the mean time i will go play torchlight. it's no d3 but it'll have to do for now.
eh, what? oh yeah. work. i remember something like that.
tomorrow, tomorrow
Monday, October 26, 2009
10.25pm this blog entry is really about potato chips.
i'm eating a bag of Tyrrell's Sweet Chili and Red Pepper Potato Chips. As you can see from their proudly British site, http://www.tyrrellspotatochips.co.uk/, they specialise in the great tradition of hand-growing potatoes in "Tyrrells Court farm, in the heart of the unspoilt Herefordshire countryside" where potatoes get picked in the morning and fried by the afternoon.
I won't pick on their excellently modern and well-crafted website, or the really random black and white photos pillaged from old newpapers or what not. if you're a company started in 2002 and you want to look rustic, it's not going to go smoothly. what i really cannot understand is why this company that puts the Great back into Great Britain!!!! calls its product chips instead of crisps.
but these chips are good. seriously. best kettle-style chips i've eaten so far. loaded with outstanding msg flavour. makes drinking a chilled bottle of water even better.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
last day to preorder! and my family's all out of town. i need a credit card.
life lessons
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
10.30pm there is such a thing as good grief.
kilang makanan mamee
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
8.42pm this blog entry is about potato chips. i'm eating a can of mister potato potato chips. one of those pringles knock-off cans. sad thing about pringles, they used to be a "hyperbolic paraboloid saddle shape" (thanks wikipedia), but now they're simple little bent-in-half things. sigh. how did the fine craftsmanship of potato based snack foods deteriorate so far.
so, mister potato. i used to look out for the brand whenever the family drove down to malaysia, because they were the only brand i knew of as a kid that had tomato flavoured chips. to this day, it still rocks my mind. TOMATO flavoured POTATO product! why don't more people do that? like, french fries go with ketchup, huge link here, can't miss it. anyway, best flavour ever.
and this tube can of chips i'm eating. sour cream and onion, sadly. but i'm looking at the packaging, and i see that mexican dude wearing as close an approximation of a sombrero that malaysian packaging artists have been able to do, and i see the 'mister potato' logo, and i see: a japanese tagline.
oh boy. i can understand random chinese or taiwanese snack companies tweaking their packaging to mislead customers because japanese snacks are 'hip' and 'cool' and 'rad' and other cliched western old-people-joke adjectives, but this is a malaysian brand that's been around for years. it's sad. i guess they'll manage to con the random primary school kid or something.
.... ... and i've just come to the realisation that this blog entry is about being old. fuck, i'm 21.
edit: i'm 21, and i still can't even recognise katakana and hiragana. i had to rely on google to tell me that the can said 'misuta potato'. should i be said about that? or sad that i'm sad about that.
wake up your eye dear
Sunday, October 18, 2009
12.29am holy shit somehow i watched four seasons of How I Met Your Mother and did not notice that it was more or less How To Hide Two Pregnancies am i absolutely completely retarded? because dayum i sure feel retarded!
i guess leaving shows running on my laptop while i'm working(i.e. artz n craftzing) beside it doesn't count as watching.
on the bright side, now there's a whole bucketload of rewatchability for season 4 of a show that i am super annoyed with because of zero plot progression whatsoever!
it's all so obvious now! frilly blouses! holding big coats! laptops! eating contest! that guitar! that rack of basketballs! fuck!
blarghhaghrhghgh
Friday, October 09, 2009
9.55pm hi i'm back. i think the moon is still in the sky.
oktoberfest was okay. the food was meh, except for the apple strudel with rum raisin ice cream, that was outstading. the beer was outstanding. halfway through my second pint i had to go do my vomit-burp thing. sigh. after the remaining half pint, i went to burp again, and i threw up a little. what fun! so i stood there feeling a little disgusted and dissappointed with myself, then realised what the heck and i went to fill up again with dessert. and had a second helping of strudel and rum and raisin.
there was a band playing, it was super noisy. they were german, so of course there was the obligatory foreigner-sings-chinese-song segment. they sang a song which was titled, in english, mice love rice. okay, german dude. thanks for that.
now i gotta go draw some shit.
wtf is a porphyry circle
5.52pm porphyry was a greek philosopher, and since the term 'porphyry circle' arises in an article on a chapel designed brunelleschi, meaning, there are fucking lots of geometric relationships in the design, i spent 15 minutes trying to find out if this porphyry guy thought up some sort of circle. eventually i found out that porphyry is also the name of a type of rock.
project 02 is a lot more fun than the first one. there doesn't seem to be a need to spend hundreds of dollars buying clay and acrylic and cardboard and styrofoam and shit. so far it's just: drawing paper model
ha! ha ha ha! AHAHHAHAH! moist delicious cake on a fucking silver platter.
later i think i have to turn it into a stick and string structure that can hold up a brick. hm.
going to raffles bar and billiard for OKTOBERFEST BUFFET. somehow when i get to school my appetite dissappears, so for three days a week eat one meal a day, dinner at 9+pm after i get home. i'm still gaining weight like a motherfucker though.
pheonix wright and eba? two of the best ds games smushed together... awesome.
that was some matrix shit right there
Monday, October 05, 2009
9.28pm oh, man, hippogyphs have a walk animation now. i might have to restart my account just to see mr antlerson do his thing.
in other news, my new studio group has been, as one body, ignoring the problem of how we haven't chosen a new studio rep yet. one guy's being saboed but he keeps insisting we do a ballot. someone faked a ballot where all the slips had SR written on them, so the first person to open thier slip would suck thumb. the scheme was exposed. one person opened theirs, thought she was the studio rep. then the saboed guy opened his slip and asked why his slip had SR on it too. retard! keep your mouth shut! idiot. so now there's a real ballot, with real risks involved. a sudden wave of psychic premonition hit me. i ripped a slip of paper off a piece that was sitting on my desk. i draw my ballot. open it halfway and glimpse SR. hide that slip in the book i was reading, and take out the slip i tore myself. BULLET. FUCKING. DODGED. integrity, honestly, trust. hallmarks of a rafflesian.
oh come on
Sunday, October 04, 2009
2.03am yeahhhhh how i met your mother is starting to get annoying. ten million hot girls throwing themselves at ted. all of them cool and liking cool stuff. totally not bitchy moneyleeches. going to bars and stuff. now there's this girl who claims to know all the lyrics to we didn't start the fire. suspension of disbelief only goes so far, man.
Saturday, October 03, 2009
woah
Friday, October 02, 2009
7.08pm i'm reading the latest chapter of bakuman and there's this thing with clones that's exactly how i've played it out in my mind before:
if i got split in two i'd start speaking at the exact same time and the exact same words as my clone. and i'd think stuff like, he's the clone! or am i the clone! and i bet he's thinking the same things and i'd be like, "hey,.." and he'd start saying "hey,..." and we'd like, not kill each other because i'm not that kinda guy, both of us. and we'd play scissors paper stone to see who got to be edmond and who got to be edmund, and we'd keep getting ties because we'd keep doing the same thing. so we'd go off and do different stuff, and come back and finish the scissors paper stone fight.
i should finish reading that chapter.
7.17pm original story? you just described the plot of no more heroes.
GOT IT
7.01pm i got it it was a flake of the peeling metallic paint from my room's doorknob
so i spent the day watching how i met your mother and not doing my essay. i can imagine all the actors trying not to corpse as neil patrick harris is sitting beside them being awesome.
hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian!
scorching
11.11am oh look at the time. wonder why this doesn't happen so much any more.
anyway, i just woke up. or rather, i woke up 20 minutes ago, with an excruciating pain in my right thumb that flared up whenever i put pressure on it. no, i hadn't burnt in on some flame shooting nipples. a few weeks back i'd stabbed it with my mechanical pencil as i was sweeping eraser dust off my desk. sweeping and sweeping and i swept my thumb right into the tip of the pencil. imagine waileong stabbing himself in the face with a pen while trying to eat a sweet. something like that, but less retarded.
so my thumb hurt for a few hours and i forgot about it. this morning, it started hurting again and i found a small black speck embedded in my finger. of course, i'd assume it was pencil lead. i broke out my knife, my rifle cleaning kit tweezers, a pair of pliers, but to no avail. that speck was really small. so how the fuck was i going to get a splinter of lead out my finger? probably thinner than the orignal 0.5mm piece that it came from? i couldn't even grab the tip and pull it out, it'd probably break.
but really, it hurt a lot. i couldn't even type. so i got my nail clippers and started chomping off bits of skin from my thumb. eventually i exposed enough of the tip of the speck, and found it was... shiny. shinier than lead. which isn't shiny. and i got a magnet. it didn't work. i got a pair of stainles steel scissors that had been magnetised, somehow, like they always are. and out popped a tiny sliver of metal. flat like tinfoil.
i'm wracking my brain trying to figure out when this might have happened. no clue. did i stab myself again? did that shard of metal fill up the hole i poked into my thumb?
whatever, i've got an essay to write so i'm not going to waste any more time chronicaling this. i've got to go and... test out l4d again. that new map was super bugged. every possible place to spawn gas cans/propane tanks/etc seemed to have those items. you'd be progressing through a level and suddenly see random explosions or fires, as stray bullets hit them. also, 10 million pipe bombs and molotovs everywhere. they just patched it, off to play.