twilight, but with cheeseburgers.

Vampires and Cheeseburgers. Seriously, what will they come up with next?

knight in the nightmare.

Seriously, I need to know which guy in the developing or creative team who comes up with the names for these games. Some of them are really WTF. In the sense that they make no sense at all.

Knight in the Nightmare.
Despite its rather dubiously cheesy/tacky name, it’s pretty interesting. This game is really heavy on the whole space-time continuum thing, that being the plot goes forwards and backwards. A number of flashbacks to explain what’s going on ‘now’ not that it’ll matter because after awhile you’ll skip the dialogue in between and jump straight into the action. An seriously, if you actually did try to pay attention to the plot (which I did and joyously failed), you’ll just get a major headache from all the confusion and the jump-backwards-forwards-in-time-or-not chemical equation that they’re hard up on.

The gameplay though, is the bit that quite suckered me in. Get this: You are a wisp. Like the things that mine for wood and various other raw materials in Warcraft. And as a wisp, you get to control, possess rather, knights and get them to fight the evil baddies. One thing to note though is that your knights aren’t exactly alive. My brain’s still a lil’ muddled but as a wisp, you recruit fallen knights to your cause as allies to battle against monsters.

Battles take place in real time on an isometric grid. The wisp, controlled via the touchscreen, moves around and is how the player gives orders to allied units. When the wisp comes into contact with a unit that can act, the attack must be aimed by moving around the wisp. However, the wisp will be under constant enemy fire. The player must guide the wisp to dodge the shots as well as order the allied units to attack. Normal attacks generate Gems which recharge the Magic Point meter; items can be used to generate Skill Attacks which can actually kill monsters or destroy objects.

Despite having a timer, time is only deducted for charging attacks and when the player’s wisp takes damage. Thus the player has “unlimited” time to plan strategies and in this manner resembles other strategy role-playing games.

Permadeath exists as characters have a vitality stat which decreases when they use skills and other special circumstances. Vitality is replenished through leveling up, the Transoul System, and other special circumstances.

Had to snag this off Wiki because I had no other way to explain how it is that you do go into battle. Full article (of sorts) can be found here.

I’m currently stuck at this stage where I have to kill this huge guy on a horse. Sorta reminds me of Odin from the Final Fantasy series. The suckiest bit is that when you’re charging up your characters for an attack, it catches his attention and he rushes to decimate them. It’s always game over, especially if you lose your Valkyrie. Ah well. Till I figure out how to kick his ass, I’m going to charge up my mahjong skills via the DS.

how i won a pair of tickets to catch the Singapore grand prix

No I didn’t decide to go on a sudden hiatus. The motivation to blog left me, completely. Or that it could be that two rather lovely friends introduced Battlestar Galactica to me and I basically spent the holiday and weekend finishing up on season 1. This was in between trying to spring clean my room multiple times and getting a new vacuum cleaner with the mother. Of which, somewhere along the way, I find myself with a HTC Touch Cruise.

I’m still trying to figure out how to use it proper. So much for being a tech-geek. I is fail.

Ignore the bit where I wanted to talk about otherwise really boring stuff like weddings and my very boring and bland personal life. So instead I shall talk about how I won myself a pair of walk-about tickets to this year’s Formula 1 (happening in what, September?).

Thanks to @nanyate (Ivy), I got me invited to a Blogger event organized by Singtel. Basically, we all had a chance to test out the simulator cars. Three screens and a map that was pretty much a simulation of the route that the cars were gonna take for this year’s grand prix. Everyone had a trial go with the PC version. It seemed straightforward enough, the gears were initially awkward since the left tab meant to downshift your gear and the right to increase. I’ve grown too accustomed to the battered Honda’s manual gears and found myself crashing quite a fair bit as I tried to get used to it.

Next came the simulator round. No one told me that the time taken here would be the qualifying time for the finals. My first try, I basically crashed into the Sheares bridge and effectively ‘broke’ the simulator. I know, I’m such a vicious person and most things electronic tend to break down on me. The name of the car I had been driving in was… Tim. I think it was Tim. Very male. Didn’t like me. The steering was pretty tight and stiff too, which reminded me of power-steering. Afterwhich, I was ushered to sit in Nova and try again.

Oh yeah. True enough that Formula 1 drivers are pretty small and stocky. But how they really fit all snug and proper inside their car is something I can’t quite fathom. Perhaps I really am a lot smaller than they are but I basically had to sit up in the seat (which was really low) and had the pedals shifted almost to the max before I could even feel it. If you saw the pictures everyone took, you’d see that I was sitting like some kukunarded idiot in the car/pit.

Anyway. My first timing was about 3 minutes. Or slightly less. I was in third place with Diana (@molemole) in second, DK in first and MHisham in fourth place. Then the ‘nice’ people at Singtel decided to do this to us – 1st place vs 3rd place, 2nd place vs 4th place. This meant that I’ll be ‘challenging’ DK, who’s timing drained my face of blood. How sia? The guy was good and all the while as we were waiting for the finals to commence, he was training up on the PC simulator. And what was I doing?

Being a freeloader and eating food and drinking lemon tea. That and talking a lot of rubbish and dressing up in the Formula 1 suit and complaining how hot it was and thinking now that I should have just worn the darn helmet to see how the whole thing felt and looked.

Cut story short (since I’m getting tired and my BSG has loaded), the girls won. Diana came in second and I came in, surprisingly, first! I’d post up a picture of my timing but I didn’t manage to get a shot and I was starving, again, and craving for some zombie hunting so as everyone left for their next engagement, went to find the homeboys for dinner and l4d.

It’s a rather ooo-gleh shot but hey. I must pay respects to Project Gotham, Initial D, Burnout: Dominator and Ridge Racer for my virtual driving experience. If only my passes allowed me to take a picture with the Ferrari team then that would have sealed the deal.

But well, thanks Ivy and Singtel for the opportunity!

roach vs (wo)man.

I’d been meaning to do this for awhile. Such grandiose ideas I had – animated stickmen, stop motion images of me and maybe even a video. Till reality smacked me on the head real good with the fact that I can’t draw. Not even stickmen. They’re pretty pathetic. I have virtually no patience for stop-motion images and video and finally, I hate myself on camera. My voice is bad enough but combine that with my fat face? Oh. Am. Gee. No way.

So instead I did this and I tried to get it working in iMovie to sync both the audio with the presentation. But I’m no magical genius with iMovie and to be honest, I’m still exploring the wonders of what my Mac can (or cannot, even with me pleading and begging and making cutesy faces) do.

This is purely for humorous purposes. We all have different ways of killing roaches. And no roach was killed (yet) in the making of this vid. I hate them. I really do and someday, if I ever will, I might tell you the story why. Till then, enjoy this random bit and yes, make fun of my voice and how I ramble on and on and on and-

Roach Vs Woman Download and listen to the audio here.

Unfortunately, I can’t seem to get the slides to appear. Bahhhhhhhumbug.

Sorry la. I don’t have the kachingching to get the upgrade for WordPress. But if and when I do, I’ll try to make everyone’s lives a bit more easy if you’re forced to (usually because I’m holding a banana hostage and we all know we can do pretty serious collateral damage with a banana) listen to my nasal voice and watch my make-no-sense-but-cowsense slides.

zombie vs shark. who wins?

Something Mudz showed us whilst we were chilling at Nasrin @ Arab Street. I’d always thought that zombies couldn’t really swim. And yes, I know this is fake. But still… If we managed to herd the zombies to the open sea, they’ll be pulled by the currents and then just clump up together in the middle of the sea somewhere. With no brains in the immediate vicinity to munch upon, we’d force them into starvation ala 28 Days!

BRILLIANT!

Now I’ll need a zombie expert to tell me if this is feasible.

shiny shiny namecards.

Giggity go.

Guess who got her spankin’ new namecards?

If you want one, come down this Saturday, 28 March, 2009 to Tangs Orchard for the Social Media Breakfast (night really) 6!

The list of panelists are as follows: Krisandro, Daniel Tsou, Nicole Then, Don Tan and… me. Yes, it’s surprising really. I’m there.

Anyway, there’s gonna be loads of food and we’ll be celebrating Earth Hour together! I think I’ve mentioned this in my first virgin entry somewhere below. But head on down to the FaceBook group page and c-c-chekkit out!

Plus, can’t wait for this Friday’s True Blood Asian premiere!

Have you got your stakes ready?

In Case of Vampire...

better check your passport expiry date.

This, is a lesson to me.

On Saturday, Trex and a couple of friends planned to head down to Pengerang for some seafood and sight-seeing. I, with all the chaos from work and post-event administration, totally forgot to check when my passport expired. I knew it was in 2009, I just didn’t know when. Turns out it flew off to passport heaven on January 9. Big booboo on my part. We vaguely recalled that you could apply for a one-day emergency pass and thus rushed down to the Immigrations and Checkpoints Authority (ICA). By then, like all government complexes, it was packed with people.

Had to wait for an interview, which took me close to an hour. Following which after the interview, I had to wait another two hours for my pass to be processed. Total, three hours gone just like that. By the time everything was settled, we finally reached Changi Ferry Terminal at 1ish and had to wait (AGAIN!) for more people to go on the boat (needed at least 12 people). Lunch was really record time. Arriving at the restaurant at 2:30pm and leaving at 3:30pm for the last ferry which was at 4:00pm. No time to sight-see, no time to go trigger happy. My fault for not checking my passport earlier.

Turns out I could have renewed my passport online via this APPLES thing, can’t remember the what it meant and it would have taken three days. YES. Three days and I could have picked it up Saturday morning and not have to go through the silly hassle of waiting almost four hours just for a stupid piece of paper (and oh, waste $15 too). I’m not saying that ICA was inefficient, could understand that they were really trying their best to serve the hundreds others like me who could have possibly even waited longer than I have to get their passports processed or their identification cards done up etc.

Lesson learnt. Always ALWAYS check your passport WAY before you’re heading off to anywhere. Least then you won’t have to go through the rubbish I did for my silly blunder.

I thank Trex for being so patient, accompanying me and waiting with me whilst we got the documents processed. Thanks love, you really are the best!