Vertigo

We are not alone.

Alright, so I don't really have it that bad in most games per se. I was only slightly queasy in Descent - one of the most notorious motion-sick inducers - and I habituated rather quickly once I got better control over my keys and resulting rotation.

But I did just spend half an hour this morning feeling green with carsickness because I was stuck in a stopping and starting cramped car with too little air for far too long. So I kinda sympathize.

And then there was Half Life 2: the dune buggy level. Still chronically unable to finish it. Goodness knows why. I had a small amount of queasiness with the way they rendered reality in the first few levels of HL2, but the dune buggy induced dry heaves.

Something about the inertia, the jerky starting/stopping and poor acceleration, coupled with poor control as one had to leap ramps and often failed...tumbling over and over in a gigantic metal crash onto the beach floor, while vainly trying to rotate the gun to shoot giant ant monsters and not die, and re-rev the engine to begin one more violent swerving heave at the uncaring ramp...

..it all came together in a very sucky, puke-inducing, brain-twistingly bad way.

Resurrecting (a)New Old Games

I have been bitten quite thoroughly by the nostalgia bug.

I'm awake at 3am, listening to my DVD drive hum as it installs Planescape: Torment. Baldur's Gates I and II are up next.

I've no clue if I can get the things running again, without downloading a possibly Trojan-infested No-CD crack - I have the vague idea of burning the CD ISO and mounting them into a virtual drive as I'm reluctant to test how sturdy my ancient CDs are by letting them spin endlessly just for the sake of a CD check.

I'm not even sure if I can tolerate the pixelation that is bound to be there when you try and stretch a 800x600 resolution game onto a 1680x1050 widescreen monitor. (Wonder if there is a windowed mode?)

But I can't get the NPCs out of my mind. I blame Minsc and Boo. For no reason at all, the thought of him and his hamster popped into my mind, then I was surfing websites reading Baldur's Gates quotes, and then I was thinking of the old NPC romances (Jaheira and Viconia *sighs dreamily*) and realizing I never did experience anything of the Aerie, Anomen and Edwin NPC interactions, nor play an evil bastard in BGII, or for that matter, finish BGI properly.

MMOs just don't do NPC interaction like the old-style RPGs did. If I weren't already paid up until September, I'd probably put a stop to my CoX subscription right about now. But sighs, what's the point? I may as well earn a few more vet months while thinking about it.

By then, I suppose I will have cooled off in time for a couple months of Aion. Eye candy still looks good, and the collector's edition Asmodai figurine interests me a lot. I'm not sure how long a WoW-clone will last me. A decent leveling game will keep my interest for a while, FedEx quests and all, but I realize I have problems with MMO endgames, be they raid or pvp.

For now, I shall content myself with going oldschool and/or casual singleplayer. Sims 3 is on my birthday wishlist, and I caved in this weekend to pick up the PopCap games collection on a separate Steam account so that the casual games are more easily moved around on a laptop or shared with family members. I think I have a year's worth of 10-20 hour casual games now.

It's rather mindblowing how appealing arcade games are, and how suddenly they can ramp up in difficulty. Take fer instance Fishing Frenzy 2, whose earlier levels I breezed through, and suddenly started dying every other level or two around map 40.

Typer Shark deluxe was hilariously fun. As the name implies, you have to type words at a fast WPM in order to stop sharks from swimming over and biting you. The first time I started the game, it gave me a typing test of a paragraph or two to record my WPM. Being a competitive maniac, I gave it my best, got a score of 90WPM (lowered 1 word for an accidental typo or two) and received a recommended difficulty of Xtreme! Wow. So I took its suggestion and promptly got mauled as I had to type 6-7 letter words per shark. Going down to Expert was a tide better. Turns out I can manage about 60WPM in the actual game as typing gibberish and spaced out words in a stressful ("omg, that piranha is almost next to me!") environment is much tougher than a complete English paragraph where context helps you out.

The casual games are good for an hour or two of amusement, similar to how I'm getting an hour or two of Guitar Hero practice every other day or so. The good news is that my manual finger dexterity should be increasing. I need to develop more grip power in my last little finger, not to mention faster reflexes and sense of timing. It should help for my martial arts classes.

Story-wise, I do miss the old style RPGs and maybe even the adventure games. The CD of Grim Fandango gave me a forlorn look as I was flipping through them in the search for my Black Isle games. My Fallout 2 CD sleeve is perplexingly empty. Where the heck did that game go?

I should focus. I really want to play Baldur's Gate. I'm really installing Torment only because I'm scared the CD will get corrupted and leave me with zero copies of the greatest game ever.

Pylon Soloing, Take II

After my initial failure at soloing Rikti Pylons, I decided to really focus on a ranged-defense build. The result? A controller with 42% ranged defense. Not quite at the 45% cap, but good enough. I could ditch the epic armour for the leadership pool to get to the cap next respec. Surprisingly, it wasn't very hard to get to the defense cap. The main workhorse was the thunderstrike set. Slot a bunch of them and one could achieve a respectable ranged defense level. Add in a bunch of other sets for other powers, steamy mist, combat jumping and a 3% defense IO. Viola, ranged defense in the 40% range.

Then I took him to the pylon. To my surprise, he lasted indefinitely there, until a streak-breaker killed him.
What he lacked, was the DPS. The pylon took a few dips from full health, but I never got the healthbar to move down in a steady trend that would imply that I was actually killing it. Perhaps formulating some kind of best-possible attack chain would help. I know it *is* possible to solo AVs with that powerset. People have posted proof of that.

Perhaps the builds are tweaked to have more recharge, letting more tornadoes and thunder storms to be out. The problem is, I'm not sure how to up the recharge since all my slots are dedicated to milking as much ranged defense as I can get. Perhaps dumping the epic armour and hurricane for manuevers and assault. Since one has capped ranged defense, why take these?

AV or Pylon soloing builds really are gimmick builds. It is the case of the specialist vs the generalist. The generalist takes a bunch of powers, and slots them so that he is ready for multiple situations -- solo, small team, big team. The specialist has one goal in mind, and he bends his toon completely towards that one goal. But I want to solo a pylon. And I want to solo a pylon with my petless controller. It's just the competitive streak coming out, but what else is there to do in an ultimately pretty easy game?

Guitar Wannabe

It starts with Heavy Rain. Whose very prospect set plans into motion to obtain a PS3.

A colleague mentioned that Starhub was giving away free PS3s for some funky 2-year subscription plan or other, and since my family is pretty much married to Starhub for broadband access and cable television, and my dad is a HD disc/Blu-Ray junkie who made the wrong choice of buying a HD player just before HD got discontinued...

...a couple wranglings and telephone calls later, my dad was the proud owner of a slightly cheapo (no PS2 combatibility, small hard disc size) but fully usable PS3.

A year later, Heavy Rain has been pushed back to 2010 (durn, but it's ok, get it right this time! not half done like Indigo Prophecy!) and my dad has been getting full mileage out of the PS3 as a glorified Blu-Ray player.

Feeling a little left out of the equation, I start casting around to see if I can locate some cheapo PS3 games since there has now been sufficient time lapse to spark non-$80-90 games.

Listening to one too many video game music concerts have put the Metal Gear Solid series in my head. I spot a Metal Gear Solid 4 going for $60. Nice and cheap, comparatively speaking.

Turns out, I am fairly incompetent at sneaking games. I appear to lack patience. I tend to dash out of cover when someone is looking in my direction and the alarm call sends packs of soldiers with AK-47s to flush me out, often quite successfully.

The other game that I've always wanted is a Guitar Hero variant. I had always been minus a console to plug any peripherals into, and waiting for a PC version with little hope of finding one. On second thought, trying to fit a bunch of faux band instruments into my tiny cramped room to stick into my PC seemed ill-fitting, pun intended.

It then occured to me that I did have a console lying around after all, and a Guitar Hero game is much better suited as a living room / party entertainment sort of deal.

Enter Mission: Choose Best PS3 Variant of Guitar Hero. (Or Rock Band.)

Scanning the song list nailed it as GH: World Tour or Rock Band 2 as containing the most enjoyable songs in my playbook. Both instruments were also compatible with each other, unlike their earlier series. And Rock Band 2 had not made it to Singapore yet, apparently, so that narrowed down the choices quite well.

A call to Tec-Drome put the entire band set of GH: World Tour at $288. *gulps* Then they tell me that they have no PS3 version. Oh well.

Random idle hunting around yielded a number of places who maintained that the band kit was out of stock for PS3 (Wonder what Sony is planning...) and one or two Comics Connections that had a very old battered carton selling for $289 and $290.

In the course of my search, however, I did find Best Denki @ IMM having a 1 for 1 software sale. It looked like they were getting rid of their PS3 game stock. (Whatever -is- Sony up to?) Despite not having the band kit, they had tons of the Guitar Hero: World Tour game ($84) in their glass cupboard, and there were slightly bruised cartons of Guitar Hero: Aerosmith with a wireless guitar set at $155.

Then it struck me. Hmmm... I didn't exactly need all the band instruments at that moment. I had actually wanted the Rock Band 2 band kit because some people have had technical problems with the first batch of Guitar Hero: World Tour instruments. While I wasn't exactly an Aerosmith fan, a guitar controller and two GH games for $155 seemed like a steal.

And so begins my jaunty journey into the world of clicking red, green, yellow, blue buttons on time while hitting another strum button with the other hand.

I've been harboring an admiration for casual games because of the simple, clear, focused goals of the game. There's just usually one style of minigame to win at, rather than a multiple of badly done task lists as in an MMO (in an attempt to represent a virtual world.)

Guitar Hero is anything but casual though. The pace of 'easy' difficulty is quite a steep climb. It's ideal enough for my level of coordination and zero sense of rhythm as I score an average of 86-95% and get encouraged to improve and master the songs. But I can see people falling off the ladder and getting discouraged if they aren't within the ideal range of difficulty.

'Beginner' mode is a bit of a condescending challenge that is in some respects HARDER than easy. You just have to hit the strum bar in time without pressing colored buttons. This truly sucks if you have no sense of rhythm (like me) and cannot hit the strum bar fast enough for certain songs.

Fortunately, my left hand coordination is a little better, thanks to lots of WASD and 1231 controls. I find that I can shift notes on the colored buttons fast enough, and that feeds back into my right hand and speeds up its pace a little more.

Casual Musings

Huh. It's been five years since I created my first blog, according to the listing of dead blogs attached to this blogger account. Come to think of it, it's been ten years since the Internet started getting into full swing (1997-1998 aka the BBS/MUD years and 1999 when we begun to get decent unlimited connections.)

Time surely flies.

Ditto a month has passed since I started trying out FFXI. It has promise, but it's a little too big and open and time-consuming for me at the moment. I need to cancel the subscription. The problem is that they have cunningly made the account so hard to log into that the prospect of it is making me put it off. Still, I must persist.

Casual games have taken over my mindshare for now. It's hopelessly ironic, but I can't get PopCap Games out of my brain. The power of their narratives are stronger than any MMO quest. Perhaps it's because they don't make any excuses for their gameplay. Each game is what it is, and they can just focus on one story that leads you through the multiple levels.

I still desperately need to play through Bookworm: Adventures. Part of the appeal is that these games are visibly completable. Once I finish the 50 or so levels, that's it, end-of-game, feather in one's cap, chalkmark on the clipboard, done. Each minigame is also fun in their own right, and PopCaps' sponsored games have a knack of making the gameplay novel and slightly more complex by adding in new twists every couple of levels.

I tried out Feeding Frenzy 2 finally. It was again remarkably refreshing in its simplicity. You control a fish, that starts out small and only able to eat the teensiest of fish (aka tier 1 fish). Evade everything else. Eat enough of those, and your fish blows up in size and can take on tier 2 fish as well. One more time and now you can eat tier 3, 2, 1 fish (but still have to evade the odd shark and barracuda and mine that galumps across your screen.)

Basically it evokes a king of the hill sort of feeling once you hit the top tier. Twists include fancy out of the water jumping to eat insects (shades of Dolphin Olympics) and taking on the barracuda tail-biting gamble (which has gotten me killed more often than not. If you bite the barracuda's tail 4 times, you get this fabulous score/bragging rights bonus, but the barracuda is likely to flip 180 degrees in half a second and the collison detection is highly unforgiving, gulp, your fish is chow. No take backs, no save games.)

Afraid that I was getting a skewed picture due to picking and choosing the best of PopCap, I downloaded some weird demo for a PI Mystery in New York affair. On initial Steam browsing it looked fairly lame, some sort of hunt the object in the picture game. On actually trying out, it wasn't horribly shabby. It's no Indigo Prophecy in terms of mood evoked or relevant story-based clues, but the narrative served as a good linear excuse to present a bunch of object-hunting minigames.

The minigame itself was slightly more fun than I first imagined. Each picture they present you with is cunningly drawn to have a GAZILLION objects hidden in the background, in buildings, against the walls, floor textures, part of objects, etc. Then they give you a fairly obscure list "5 tools, makes a joyous sound, 2 birds, 2 cats." Using your mouse, you then have to click on stuff that might suit the criteria. The tools might be a hammer, a wrench, a saw, etc. The birds might be an ordinary crow plus a penguin. One cat drove me nuts until I finally found a lion's head buried in wallpaper texture.

I could see quite a bit of replay value in each picture as there are so many objects, they would only have to vary the lists randomly. It's also quite a good family/party/multiple people game as everyone can participate in finding the stuff. I might not be thrilled paying a full $15 sgd for the game (and I see that each PopCap Game is actually being sold in Popular, published by a Cylon company, for $29.90 or thereabouts. Phew.) but $5 sgd is pretty fair for a couple hours casual fun.

The Wizard's Pen seemed like another slightly lame Harry Potter lookalike. Again, it turned out surprisingly fun. Each click of the mouse rubs away a rectangular portion of a blank page to reveal part of a picture. When you can guess the object, you type its name in. The less reveals, the more points you score. This game's synonym dictionary is spectacular, which is ultra-cool as games of this sort can easily degenerate into a guess-the-noun hair-pulling screen-breaking rage-inducing exercise.

I can only give kudos to its testers and programmers for getting this game to play fair. Every single object that I got correct, it recognized the (possibly British) word I had used. It was only when I had patently misidentified the object that it said nope, I was wrong. True enough.

Peggle is something I didn't really expect to enjoy, despite worldwide acclaim. Since the Peggle Extreme version was given free to all owners of some Half-Life variant or other, I decided to play through it since it was there. Turns out it is a short 10 bonus levels with Half-Life, Portal, Team Fortress 2 pictures as backdrop that serves as a demo to sell their actual game.

This game has an element of chance that I'm not super-keen on. Only A Game calls it the element of Alea. My intrinsic dislike of this factor is a little odd, considering that nearly every RPG in existence uses dice or some other random event generator as a conflict backbone, but there are heavy modifiers that can be attached to a dice roll and often strategy wins out over the small amounts of alea.

In Peggle, the objective is to shoot balls from a cannon whose angle you can adjust with the mouse and try and strike all the orange pegs before using up the balls. A moving basket dashes up and down the bottom continuously - if your ball happens to fall into it, you get a free ball. It's like a unique twist on Pinball.

Since your control is limited to the first few bounces of the ball, unless you can magically predict the angles the balls will strike and how long it'll take to ricochet around the pegs before falling to the bottom, it's pretty hard to get balls into the free ball basket or indeed control them beyond the first few seconds. The orange pegs will also reset if you don't manage it in your first ten-ball go, and rotate to some other random arrangement.

Not really my first choice of game, but I did manage to complete the ten levels. Wasn't too bad either. Not my cup of tea, but I don't think I will be devastated if I get some Peggle games along with a collection - who knows, I might get into an aleatory seeking mood one day.

I'm hanging on by the skin of my teeth until this weekend. I'm nearly there at putting down some sum of money for these games. One thing that is turning me off is the prospect of only one person being able to play them if they get locked into my Steam account.

I might make another Steam account just for these casual games so that I can share the password and let my mum at 'em.

Meh, then I'll have to deal with the prospect of logging in and out of two accounts whenever I want to play a certain game. :/

Mundane vs Gamer

Intersections and Boundaries

A casual invitation to dinner with relatives at the NUSS Graduate Club/Kent Ridge Guild Hall served to highlight some startling similarities and key differences between the two breeds of people.

See, my mother was basically ooh'ing and aah'ing over every advertised dish of food from the club's varied restaurants, making a load of noise over how cheap it was, and that I should apply for the club membership because some years ago, when I had just graduated, they sent me an invitation to join.

At the time, I took one look at the letter, and raised my eyebrows at yet another cheap trick to pry money out of alumni (it's not as if I even owed ANY of my higher education to NUS, they took one look at my Chinese exam paper marks and offered me a condescending PROVISIONAL entrance, *snorts*, bureaucracy.)

The letter promptly went into the bin because they wanted me to pay a low LOW sum of $3000 for LIFETIME membership! And look, we'd even give you a thousand dollars worth of food vouchers!

(Yeah, right, pay you two thousand dollars, and then feel obliged to have to keep visiting you, regardless of quality, because I need to get my "money's worth." There are a gazillion high-class gourmet restaurants I could swap around and visit for the price.)

An actual visit to the club in question didn't change my mind. Oooh, $1 chicken dish offer! (Minimum spending $38, mind you.) Pick your three course western dinner for $19.90! (The appearance was that of a family restaurant/catering outlet - my guess is Swensen's quality, which you could get at any outside franchise without having to pay several thousand bucks first.)

The Chinese restaurant had pretty decent food, I'll give them that. The cook's quality was somewhere in between an outside seafood restaurant (like Jumbo seafood) and a presentable high-class restaurant (one of the more posh Crystal Jade franchises) but certainly nowhere near uber hotel standard (Golden Peony@Mandarin Hotel, Shangri-La Hotel, etc.)

The problem was the price, the decor and the waitstaff. The price they charged was more akin to uber hotel standard. We're talking hundreds of dollars for their dinner set meals, averaging about $50-60 a head. I could pay $60-70 a head and eat at an uber hotel. Or I could pay $20-30 a head and go to Crystal Jade or Dian Xiao Er and get a greater-quality meal.

Decor was pathetic. Very low class seafood restaurant type of furniture. So why aren't you charging low class seafood prices?

Waitstaff... sigh. I got the distinct impression that nearly all the waitstaff were NUS students working part-time, maybe as part of a 'required' Hospitality course syllabus, and a bunch were Chinese nationals who could barely understand a word of English. A couple -were- trying, I'd give them that. But I'm not surprised that a young gal, barely in her twenties, would slop tea on my dish while attempting to reach around and pour into my cup.

Again, price charged != what you get.

There was a pretty heartland kind of crowd wandering about the place too. My first thought was friends and family of NUS professors and such. Lots of casually dressed kids and parents with some grannies, and old men hanging about, belting their hearts to a Karaoke tune. It all sort of struck me as "Oh look, an affordable Club membership for those aspiring for the 5 C's of Singapore. So many cheap food deals and family-friendly activities! Also, our students get on-the-job training in preparation for working life, maybe in our future IRs! Aren't we such a great gahmen-sponsored educational institute?" That kinda vibe.

Still, it served to highlight that a gamer lifestyle is quite a budget one in comparison. A club membership costs thousands of dollars just to apply for, and then there is a monthly subscription fee of $50-100 or so. In comparison, an MMO game is about $80-120 for the box, and the monthly subscription is $30 or less.

Of course, it depends on if you make full use of the facilities. I'm sure the people hanging around every night for social entertainment are getting lots of bang for their buck. (That's if you don't end up paying the club even more money for drinks priced akin to any gourmet bar hangout - Personally, I'd rather go to Brewerkz or the Queen and Mangosteen for a more hoppin' time.)

The best part of the evening was visiting the club's jackpot room. This was literally a small room crammed to the brim with jackpot machines lining the walls. Being about a metre's distance from the players, who were harmless Singaporean crackpots (heartland crowd, remember?), afforded more ease of study than in a Las Vegas casino which is filled with a haze of bad-smelling old smoke and sweat and where you're scared someone might take violent offense at extended eye contact or close proximity.

The kicker was a little old hardcore grannie who had developed a habit of fondling the machine's screen as she pressed the buttons. Amusing thing was, the white-haired top-knotted lady was getting more coin payout than anyone else in the room.

Being a skeptic who understands mathematical probability, playing the jackpot machines myself holds absolutely no attraction. What interaction is there? There's no 'game', no challenge that one can control the outcome of, or apply a strategy to increase one's winnings. One is basically paying a dollar coin every time to press a button and watch a computer roll dice for you, albeit in pretty picture form.

And this computer is programmed not to be fair, but to tilt the odds slightly towards the house, say a 53% house 47% player chance. You might win now and then in the short term, but long term, it's not worth the payout unless you get mightily amused by moving pictures arranging themselves in rows. It all just capitalizes on people's greed and poor grasp of mathematical probability.

Still, the great contrast is in comparative value. My relatives, giggling in social fun, messed about a little bit with the machines. In the space of 20 mins, at least $13 went down the tubes, just like that. *snaps fingers*

For that amount of money, I could have bought a PopCap game from Steam and gotten more than 2-3 hours gameplay out of it. More rewarding too, since it actually provides a controllable challenge and values skill over random luck.

That disregards the cost of club membership in the first place. For $2000, wow, I can get a lot more stuff I'd value out of it. My computer and assorted peripherals are within that price range (and I love the oodles out of my sexy black high-tech gadgets more than I would a club membership).

For $2000, I could buy a Nintendo Wii AND an Xbox 360 that I've always lusted after, with cash to spare for some games. Maybe even a guitar hero band set which would offer lots of family fun for less cost.

Amusingly, I've always sat on spending anything more than $200-300 at a go, which makes all those game consoles slightly out of casual buying reach and turns them into a long considered process of "I would like 'em, but how much value would I get out of 'em."

Then I turn around, and I see these ordinary people paying tens of thousands for a plasma screen TV, a couple thousands for a club membership, pledging thirty years of their life for a car and housing loan (not that loans are bad per se, one does need a place to stay and public transport may not be for everyone, but I'm thinking those that put themselves in debt for a prestigious car brand and to live in oooh, landed property)...

...and I do wonder how many of them are living beyond their means. And even if they can afford them, how much joy and value they're getting out of these mundane material goods.

Perhaps their mindsets are different, and they really do get as orgasmic a thrill out of their country club membership as I would carting out $70 worth of paperbacks out of a secondhand bookshop.

I mean, I can understand a sports car freak who loves racing/car maintenance to spend tons of cash and time on a prestigious brand of vroom-vroom. Or ditto a motocycle maniac. Or a boat guy who spends all his time doing sports, or fishing and stuff by the waterfront and so would benefit a ton from a yacht club membership. Or an aquarium hobbyist who lavishes thousands on their thousand-gallon tanks and pumps and electricity bills to keep their worth-weight-in-gold fishies alive.

It's clear these guys know what they like, so all power to them.

But I really do wonder about those who just buy the standard luxury goods that everyone is supposed to desire, do they really like them, or is it just a whole 'image' / 'face' thing that they're trying to maintain? Sorta sad if it's the latter, spending an entire life trying to look good to other people, rather than feeling good internally.

Alice and Kev

Despite the better graphics, I didn't think I was that into Sims 3 and mundanity.

I've changed my mind.

I'm sure author skill at reinterpretation and storytelling help a bunch at setting up such interesting conflicted scenarios/shorts. But pretty amazing all the same.

And so another game finds its way onto my watch list. Here's hoping it will depreciate in value quickly and get to a price range I find comfy by Christmas.

Internet Orgy

(And no, get thy mind out of the gutter.)

Have been pretty much exhausted to the brink of mental collapse by the second week of an intensive course, a full-day bioinformatics workshop that I had to conduct -alone- the next day, the prospect of working the day after that (ie, tomorrow) and impending plans for setting up the lab (we have no technician at the moment) to accomodate yet another workshop I have to conduct -alone- for teachers, unsoweiter.

Long story short, the stress has been keeping me off the interweb, let alone get much gaming in.

Only two more impending things though, so I've had some time tonight to fool around and do crazy internet stuff.

Like watch a dancing cocktatoo. Or two.

It's all quite fascinating, especially since this has become a very recent "scientific discovery" due to a viral youtube video.

Of course, natural skeptic that I am, we do need to be clear on what's happening here. From combing through all the evidence I was able to search up, from wikipedia to the scientific paper, claims that the birds "developed the dance moves all on their own" might be a tide overblown. My guess is that the birds are indeed cueing off from their owners in terms of beginning the dances, getting motivation to continue, and perhaps ideas for dance moves. Some imitation / mirror neuron behavior is probably going on, as the owners are getting into the dances with the birds on a fairly regular basis, and the encouraging them to do it with positive attention and praise is setting up feedback loops which make the cockatoos more thrilled to dance.

Random thought: It's kinda funny that both owners of the really good dancing cockatoos are female, and the birds are probably male. Wonder if some social mating behavior cues are encouraging the interaction - the birds seem happier to dance when their owners are about, preferably dancing too?

What is cool is two things. One is related to something commented on in my course. That the introduction of females to scientific research is prompting different (possibly more subjective, emotional) questions being raised now, as contrasted to the "ye olde days" of nerdy engineers in their objective, very male, circle of compatriots.

And the other is the one thing that does seem clear on the face of the evidence. Cockatoos, and probably other parrots, can indeed listen to music with a strong beat and follow a rhythm by themselves (aka beat induction.) Alex, the african grey, did spontaneous head-bobbing when music was played to him, following its tempo. A couple other bird videos on youtube (there's a preponderence of altered, worthless ones though) do show head-bobbing in time to actual music played in the background. Pretty darned cool. And fascinating in that it took serendipity to notice this and have stuff all come together. I bet random parrot owners for centuries have seen their pet spontaneously dance and taken it for granted.

There's definitely encouragement by the pet owners going on, certainly. The dance behavior wouldn't have been so elaborate otherwise. That the parrots are capable of it is pretty amazing by itself. It's also interesting to note that the parrots seem to dance better when their owner is facing them and dancing too, I strongly suspect they are using their eyes as well to augment their rhythm with visual cues. And it's neat that they aren't getting any extrinsic motivation in the form of food rewards, it seems naturally enjoyable to them to boogie. (Comfy surroundings and human adulation help, of course.) To our music, nonetheless. And develop 'tastes' for certain songs. Weird but very cool. Raises lots of follow-up questions, like what exactly is it they like in the songs...

---

On non-related Steam news, the only game I played last week was some stolen hours of Defence Grid: The Awakening. Fun tower defence game. Well made, with an extra oomph of 3D graphic polish you don't get from Flash games. Bought on the cheap during one of those ubiquitious weekend deals. Only played now, but it's nice to have some waiting in the wings, so to speak.

I passed on last week's deal, after all. Never got around to installing any of the clients. The savings just didn't seem like a huge amount, and there just isn't any more time I can spare to invest in playing long elaborate MMOs. I'm going to guilt-trip maybe a month more with Final Fantasy XI and give it up then, after I've actually ventured out to a few more areas and maybe hit a level I can change classes at. LOTRO is a staple standby, and I guess CoX goes on the back burner again.

This week's deal is rather tempting. I've never tried the Total War series. The newness of the game mechanics is making me drool. The first Rome: Total War is a great bargain, $9.99 for the original game and their Alexandria expansion. Old and cheap, I'm picking it up for sure. The second game, Medieval: Total War, is in a genre I like, but the price point ain't right - it can stew around waiting for a weekend deal. I may pick up the polished third game with the deal since it's on anyway.

The one problem with getting so used to Steam digital downloads is that I find I'm now being tempted to pick up games that AREN'T on a weekend deal simply because it's so convenient and I feel like playing them. NOW. This very instant. It's insidious, this online shopping mall and micropayment thing.

This is all very well as a couple of cheap impulse purchases, akin to window shopping, but I am now facing a big dilemma with regards to PopCap Games.

Yes. The casual game company that churns out heaps of teeny casual games by the dozens. So sue me, I'm an adult, and a girl, and I get to play funky cartoony Flash-like casual games made for older casual gamers if I like them - even if I am a hardcore nerdy gamer who can chant "Go for the eyes, Boo!" with the best of 'em too.

They have a very cunning sales system. Apparently they produce free Flash versions of a game first. Then they do the "deluxe" PC version with more stuff and sell that. For very affordable casual game prices. Their Steam variant offers a free hour of a demo of any game, then asks you to buy the game at $9.99 if you want more. More than fair enough, sort of oldstyle shareware-like.

Thing is, there are number of their games that I am quite interested in. Plants Vs Zombies was their latest offering and people all over the internet are oohing and aahing about it. I'm not as thrilled by the abstract Bejewelled and Peggle, but apparently enough people were that PopCap got a name for themselves. Feeding Frenzy is something I want to try the mechanics of, as it spawned a whole genre of "big things eating small things" gameplay, even if the cartoony graphics are a bit off-putting.

The kicker is when I tried out the demo of the funkily named Bookworm Adventures Deluxe. It's a bloody stupid name, you know. So crazy that I had to open the link and see what the heck the game was about. Turns out it is the illegitimate love child of Scrabble and a turn-based RPG-style combat game. It's classic, appeals to adults and children, lets you romp through a cartoony Greek-based adventure setting fighting fantasy monsters as a green bookworm whose hitting power comes from spelling out looooong words in Scrabble fashion.

I have a weakness for word games. While you can get away with spelling three and four letter words, at the cost of poorer performance, I'm a perfectionistic adult proud of my vocabulary. It's a matter of ego to at least make five letter words, preferably with rare letters, and watch the monsters die in a few hits from one's verbosity. I stood no chance, I was hooked the moment I managed to spell "Lapidary" in the first act and did some whopper damage to the boss monster.

I gotta have this game.

At some point, anyway. All too soon, my free demo came to a close. While ten bucks is fiddlesticks, I'm now caught in the dilemma of wondering if the Complete Popcap Collection is worth it. It's a hefty $99.99 - but for 30 games.

As I mentioned, I'm heartily interested in three of the Popcap games and I want them at some point. I could wait for them to individually go on offer, some unknown time in the future, or I could just pay $30 for them.

Then again, Popcap has a very good reputation for casual games, and there could be some real gems in the other 27 that I'm passing up, why not get the whole lot and have games to spare?

But I have already have so many games I can probably never complete them all!

Pfft, you know your real thrill is in trying out all the different game mechanics!

If you say so, then I should just be able to settle for the trial versions and demos that are free, right?!

Or perhaps we can all wait until the PopCap collection goes on a weekend deal. If they even take 25% of the price off, it would be fantastic.

But but... I wanted to play Bookworm Adventures real soon. Like now now. :(

It isn't worth it if you start buying the games separately for full price, silly!

As you can tell, the voices in my head are having a little party over this. For now I'm going to wait in the hope that a discount involving PopCap games of interest come up soon. It's likely that my resolve will steadily weaken as I randomly play demos of their various games since they are free for an hour anyway.

To distract myself, I'm installing the free trial of The Hunter, and going back to work on games that already are in my collection.

---

Video Games Live concert yesterday was freaking neat, btw. More on it some other time.

Dabble Dabble Toil and Trouble

I might end off my Final Fantasy XI journey soon. Yeah, without even really stepping out of the starter town. Lol.

I'd like to come back to it at some point, but time is proving a critical issue, and interest in hardcore MMO progress is waning. I'll give it slightly longer, I think my free month expires only in end June, but not much beyond that.

LOTRO has become my poison of choice. I've made it into Moria. The solo quests are fun and meditative in a 'jog here, kill 12 thingies, jog back' kind of way. And I can see myself holding this pattern until Aion.

(Aion worries me. I like the graphics and the customization, but not the group-requiredness nor the PvP endgame. If I can find 2 more regular Singaporeans who play at our normal nighttimes, I would be set. If not, I might let it crash and burn after a few months.)

To make matters worse, Steam's weekend offer is giving my dabbling Explorer self spasms of "OMGOMGOMGbuybuy."

What's the offer? Welp, practically all their MMOs are going for 20-75% off.

I'm slightly miffed that I couldn't wait long enough to pick up Architect Edition at a cheaper rate, I knew a weekend deal would turn up one of these days, but nevermind, I am at a holding pattern with CoX and still trying to decide if I like the developers any longer by the time Aion comes around.

The attraction of the weekend deal comes in 3 MMOs that I've always wanted to try, but was never willing to hunt the box down for. Everquest II @ $9.99. Vanguard @ $15.99. And Eve Online @ $7.49.

That's only fifty bucks in SGD. Three (aging) MMOs for the price of a PC game box. They all come with 'free' months so we're essentially paying for a month's playtime/trial (with no trial account limitations whatsoever) and getting a free game download.

It's bloody tempting. That's what it is.

It's true that I don't really plan on playing any of them after the free month. It'll be a little inconvenient to find their websites and cancel the account, but it can be done. After that, what I have is a ton of potential to pick up and play on demand should I feel like going back to the particular MMO.

I might not ever go back, in which case, I don't pay for any month's subscription at all, but I get to say that I've played -that- MMO (yay for prestige and self-importance?) and more importantly for my own personal goal, I get to have experienced a new learning curve and the starter newbie areas of each MMO. I have this little obsession with mudhopping and game mechanics study, y'know?

EQ2 is cheap as heck. I don't think I can find even an expansion selling for 15 bucks sgd, let alone the entire game compilation. I'd like to see their elaborate quest chains and weird dialog bubbles. I doubt I'm even getting to the point where grouping is required, and I hear they've made solo play more viable too.

Eve Online is cheaper than heck. I'm probably going nowhere fast in that game, nor do I want to give CCP a lot of money given their past track record... I dunno. Maybe I should just download the 21 day free trial and be done with it. It's just that dropping $12 seems like a very small sum for the game entirely. Then again, if I ever had the interest, Steam sells it for $15 sgd (aka $9.99) on a regular basis, so what's three more bucks? A couple of fries?

Vanguard is considerably costlier. It's $16 usd, which makes it $24 sgd. Still cheap on absolute terms though. This is the one game that I really wanted to play and didn't want to be limited by a free trial that stuck you on the Isle of Dawn period.

On the other hand, nothing stops me from trying out the free trial FIRST, and then making a decision on whether I want to put down $24 sgd for the actual game. Again, the sale difference is about six bucks, so it's only a bonus discount if I have decided that I like the game and want it, rather than paying for it now and finding out it's a lemon. (I wonder where that turn of phrase came from originally.)

Ditto for EQII come to think of it. All the three MMOs I wanted to try offer conversion. That means basically paying $15usd for a month's subscription and the game. The Steam offer's better, but the absolute sums we're talking about here are really small, in the MacDonald's meals dollars and cents kind of small.

The Steam offer lasts for about two days, but if I miss it, it is not the end of the world. For a couple dollars more, I can do the same thing at any point in the future.

I'd say the really bright aspect is realizing that these games are available on Steam. So they won't die until the servers do. If there's one thing I hate, it's trying to find an old game in brick and mortar shops.

It'll be nice to dedicate tomorrow to free MMO trial day, I suppose. I could download and try them all out and decide if any of them are worth purchasing via the Steam offer by Monday (hooray for being 12 hours ahead.)

A little crimp in these plans is my recurrent obsession with Fallout 3. Replaying it again and it is still fun as ever. I wish I had the DLCs, but after some epic failures downloading Games for Windows Live client only to find out that certain DLCs are not offered in my region at all, and may not ever work for the Asian version of Fallout 3 (that's Microsoft's excuse, that the DLC is not available cos Bethesda has not sent a working copy of the DLC for the Asian region)...

... I have to say that I prefer to sit on it. I'm perfectly aware that all the Fallout DLCs plus US edition are drifting around on bittorents, but I've heard some virus/trojan scares regarding them, and even the comments say it's a doozy and a pain to get working for some.

Sometime in October, apparently all five DLCs will be bundled together with a Game of the Year edition of Fallout 3. As stupid as it sounds to pay for Fallout 3 again, each DLC costs $9.99 usd, so technically, it's five DLCs in a box with the game added for free, for those poor souls who don't own the thing.

Presumably by around Christmas, the Asian version should hit the stores. That'll give me time to actually hit level 20 on a couple characters and benefit from the expanded level cap too. Haha.

Eureka - Burger Sweet Spot

We have been spoiled by tasting burgers in Western countries.

A year or two ago, I'd made it my personal quest to find a decent representation of an American burger in Singapore - persistently if irregularly over the months trying out various restaurants' selections for fear of busting my heart open.

Fast food restaurants were right out. Despite the steadily rising price of a burger from $3.50 to a eye-raising $4-5 in MacDonald's and a princely $8-9 in places like Carl Jr's, the supreme mark of failure of these poor imitations is the lack of a properly buttered and grilled bun.

Please. Even Ya Kun Kaya Toast can butter and toast their $1-2 bread.

We will only offer a few sentences more vitriol regarding the overall size of the bun, which tends to be smaller than a closed fist (MOS burger is especially guilty, must be its Japanese influence) and the flatness and dry cardboardiness of the "beef" patty. I could eat tastier versions of offal in a nice plump sausage.

It wasn't as if it was utterly impossible finding a decent burger. For the sum of a $30-sized hole in your wallet, certain gourmet restaurants and hotels could assemble skyscrapers of bread, beef and other pickings which bore a passing resemblance to the humble Bongo Burger of my California days (a little hole in the wall, fast-food-like restaurant which would lovingly flame-grill bun and patty before serving you 15 mins later).

Sometimes they even got creative. Dempsey Hill's House has some interesting sliders (mini-burgers) with blue cheese on top, and truffle oil fries. The fries are phenomenal, the burgers fairly decent, though I'm not sure if I'm recalling correctly about the blue cheese. It leaves a $32-38 bill if I'm not mistaken too.

A couple months ago, I was gratified to find New York, New York, a themed restaurant by the same folks who gave us the ubiquitious Thai Express, right by a shopping mall very close to home.

It has the cheapest, passably decent, American-style burger yet. For about $11.95, one gets a burger that replicates the size, as well as the standard taste fixings like mayo, ketchup, pickles, lettuce. And a grilled bun.

The only flaws are a tendency for the bun to be more cake-like in texture and soft, rather than bread-like, and the patty to loosen up and resemble grainy beef bolognese.

Another Dempsey Hill hideout, the Olio Cafe, serves a burger that resembles the $24-$32 standard American burger of various hotels, for about $15-18. Decent quality, nothing to write home about, but presentable and cheap-er.

But TODAY, ah, TODAY I have found the BEST BURGER YET.

In, ironically, a British gastropub at Vivocity.

The Queen and Mangosteen

Strictly speaking, it's 3 Mini-Hamburgers and Fries for $18. ($21-ish after the tax damage.)

Each miniburger is about 2/3 the size of a standard MacDonald's bun in diameter, but easily double its thickness.

The bread is grilled to perfection to form a fluffy round morsel that screams "eat me."

The beef patty is a good two centimeters thick, very tightly formed and grilled to succulency. It looks wonderful on the exterior, and on biting into it, hot salty meaty juice gushes out into your mouth. I've never had a burger that did that before. Oil yes, juice no.

A grilled tomato and the perfect amount of mayo to taste finishes off the construct.

Phenomenal does not begin to describe it. I wolfed down two of these before going through the fries like a buzzsaw. The only reason I spared the last burger is that someone told me to save one for them. *hem*

Despite the lack of cheddar cheese and lettuce and other crap, it truly does not need any of it. It is colossal in taste, if a little petite in size. There's three of 'em though.

I'd happily pay $6 for each teensy burger over any crap from Carl Jrs or Burger King any day. Figure another three bucks for nice crispy thick fries. What do you know, $21, the exact cost. Very worthwhile. Quite sharable if you're a smaller eater, or want room for beer and stuff.

As an aside, the flavors of beer here are rather gourmet funky. I generally don't drink any beer (or much of any other alcohol for liver-sparing reasons), because I hate the thick bitter hops taste. I did take a sip to try and found it clear and light, not very bitter, and with fun fruity aftertastes. The one I tried was lychee-ish.

While I was there, they also played Sting's "Russians" on their playlist. That's an automatic couple points up on my marking scale right there.

The Mystery Anger Bubble

I pondered long and hard for a title to this post. "Sublimated anger" wasn't quite it. It's not a rage either. Nor a stew. It's more a low-level anger / simmering irritation in the pit of my stomach.

It has no root cause. It boggles me.

My best guess is that maybe it has a hormonal basis. I don't exactly keep track of what time of the month it is, and I may not feel 'moody' every single cycle, but it does occur now and then.

The perplexing thing is that it can be anywhere from 2-20 days after this period of moodiness, that my menstruation starts, so is it really hormonal after all? *boggle*

On the other hand, there are many other logical sources of anger.

One way I like to understand anger is the concept that one feels some level of anger when one's expectations are found not to coincide with reality.

So did anything like that happen today? Well, nothing major.

I am having a course that I looked forward to initially, but has been proving mentally very draining and tiresome for the past few days.

I had to face the slightly unpleasant fact that my explanations of certain scientific phenomena were not as satisfactory as they could have been, but then, there was a great deal of purposeful nitpicking going on to create a frustration/realization that everything was quite complex, after all. Of course, there are no easy answers either as to how to resolve this problem, so it's an open-ended question still.

I haven't had the time to play any computer games in the past 3-4 days, and while I don't have an addiction per se (As an aside, it seems to me that a lot of 'addiction' is really social obligations to people on the other side of the computer screen, especially when raiding or in a guild network, which my inveterate soloist self doesn't have to contend with anymore) I rather miss being able to relax and play games because that's how I'd like my life to be, with enough time to play an hour or two of games.

I had a Shinkendo class that I didn't really want to go for and waste my suddenly precious time, except for the vague guilt that I really should be exercising, so I went.

I wanted to attend a workshop with a subject matter that interested me, except after I spent all the hard work convincing my boss that it might be good, they have changed the workshop to another day and another price that is too costly for even me to consider, so I am now unable to attend it after all.

My mom's concerned but exceedingly loud yelling voice pumps this low level of irritation up further from time to time as she pokes her nose into my business and privacy. (So I like quiet, over loud obnoxious noises in my environment. Sue me.)

I suppose it is possible that each occurence above, completely minor and un-noteworthy by themselves, have stacked up enough minute anger to now feel noticable.

Or perhaps my hormones are at a critical imbalance that makes me more susceptible to feeling angry at stuff that just doesn't 'go my way' aka meet my expectations and is somehow just a tide annoying.

Maybe it's the lack of any semblance of balanced healthy food after eating three days of catered oily course food for breakfast, lunch and tea. Some geocities website suggested that low blood sugar could cause irritability (how far it's true, I dunno, I'm not exactly up for a PubMED search at the moment), maybe it's some other vitamin/mineral/nutrient imbalance fubaring things up.

All I know is that there's this niggling ball of moody anger in my gut that has no one definite cause to understand and work through, and it kinda irritates me further, in a laughably ironic sort of manner.

Bloop bloop.

Ah well. This too shall pass. Sleeping on it works for me.

28 Days Later Six Years Later

If it weren't for the fact that I was watching this movie on the spare monitor while I fought half-orcs and farmed scholar crafting materials, I'd want the past two hours of my life back.

How the heck did this movie get great reviews again? My guess is that a) a lot of those who loved the movie don't play enough video games, b) it was capitalizing off fear from the SARS period and c) it's chic to love grainy, artsy-fartsy "foreign" (okay, British) films.

I don't have a problem with British style production, mind you. I was getting through The Prisoner okay. I had a great time with a Fish Called Wanda. (John Cleese is super.) Anything Monty Python is fabulous. Hell, I was getting through Youtube video's of the cheesy Sandman TV episodes.

The only horror induced by this movie is the thought that some people managed to enjoy it, shoddy plot and all.

Spoilers (not that you'll really miss anything by not watching it) ensue:

1) Prologue: Grainy artsy fartsy film shot of chimpanzees in cages in an "ooh, evil Cambridge science lab." Heroic activists crash the lab in ski masks! They're gonna free the chimpanzees cos of the Euro sentiment of "ooh, poor animals!" A scientist in white lab coat tells them, nooooo, the chimps are INFECTED! They don't listen. Freed chimps promptly jumps out and bites 'em.

... Hrm. I swear I saw this coming. Honest. Dumb farts. Nevermind, I'll excuse it. You gotta setup for a zombie flick SOMEHOW, right?

Nevermind that movies like Outbreak, 12 Monkeys and god knows what other flicks love this West Nile virus scare/TV trope blown up to extremes. I'll forgive ya, it's only the first five minutes.

2) Completely unrelated male who turns out the protagonist of our story (with a truly ugly face that says the producers filmed this on a budget and probably with some friends doing them acting favors) wakes up in a hospital. Everything is quiet. There is a chaos of items strewn around, but oh noes...no one is there! "Hello, hello?" he calls.

... I'm getting flashbacks of every vaguely zombie/post-apocalyptic movie I've ever seen. Granted, a number of them like all the Resident Evil sequels, I Am Legend and Serenity have not yet been filmed. But the main mood is mostly very 12 Monkeys (and a quick IMDB check shows it was filmed in 1995, definitely before 2003.)

And there's also JMS' TV series Jeremiah, which also played from 2002-2004, with a similar post-apoc feel, with more biblical overtones.

3) Eventually he comes to the realization that the world as he knew it is gone, it's filled with horrible infected zombies and he meets two comrades who rescue him from the prior lot.

... I'm thinking, aha, spare characters. I bet they will get killed at some point. Ten minutes later, I'm proven right. The extra male dies horribly, leaving the female conveniently available for male protagonist as future love interest.

*sigh*

4) They travel, flashing product placements (Pepsi vending machine! Eat Maltesers to keep your sugar levels up for zombie fighting! Choose your soda, Pepsi or Tango!) along the way, to meet two more spare characters - a father and a daughter. Awww, what a sappy relationship, how lucky of them to still be alive, yay, they all have a picnic, "just like family."

... I'm thinking, yeah, sure y'right. This is a depressing dystopian world filled with zombies, bet one of them bites it, leaving the happy relationship shattered awfully. Sure enough, patience is rewarded.

5) But I get ahead of myself. Because these are poor poor civilians of a British country, they have no access or any clue how to use guns (unlike American flicks where you can just bust open a gunstore and shooteth Aliens,) so they get to hold one knife (kitchens have more than one knife, don't they?), a baseball bat and use a small car to flee in terror.

Despite this stress on 'realism,' they also manage to plow their getaway car through a mountain of other dead rusty auto heaps without any whiplash, or serious driver injury besides some cracks in the windshield. Hello? Inertia? Where are you?

... I'm thinking that Left 4 Dead might be more fun. At least I get to interact and SHOOT waves of zombies. Perhaps fast-moving zombies were a revelation in 2003. Six years on, no civilized infected walks around with arms raised like a cartoony Frankenstein's monster anyway.

6) So anyway, past one redeeming shot of a flat's roof filled to the brim with every manner of container in the hope to collect rainwater, they are trying to get to the mysterious site of a radio message. We are soldiers! We have guns and can protect you! We have the answer to the infection! You have to come to us at this address!

... Har. Right. Let's see, if you really are organized enough to save people suffering from the effects of an apocalypse, why are you playing a radio message on loop?

Surely every post-apoc film we've seen by now from Mad Max, the Postman, unsoweiter tells us that a group/tribe with guns can be a very bad thing, especially to weaker counterparts that cannot put up a fight and have desirable things? Like food looted from a supermarket, and two women?

It's a trap, dumb farts! It's a trap! Fly, you fools!

7) Nope, they go anyway. Gotta cling onto hope, y'know. The father conveniently gets himself infected and gets killed by said soldiers, who then hold the one male protagonist and two females at gunpoint and bring them to their base camp.

... Methinks, oh, you guys are SO screwed. And probably for the two females, literally.

(Only logical, right? Post-apoc setting. All rules of human decency tend to go out the window in at least 50% of the population - survival of the fittest and all that. Not to mention, if nearly everyone is dead, you gotta have female breeders to have hope/a future, right? Sure, it's preferable if they found a boyfriend, paired up and contributed to the community, but desperate men do desperate things in order to answer the procreation urge and/or repopulate Earth - it's post-apoc, remember?!)

My only suspense at this point is: "I wonder how much of the attempted brutal RapeAsDrama will they dare to show?"

Alas, they mostly wussed out.

8) Some interminable amount of time was wasted on pleasantries with the soldier's leader - a major who likes to dress up as smartly as Hitler when having dinner, just in case you couldn't figure out that there could be something possibly wrong / egomaniacal about people who can gather a tribe to themselves in a post-apoc setting.

He's white too. And keeps a black zombie infected chained up in his yard in order to see how long it takes the infected to starve to death. (Just in case you need symbolism to beat you over the head with a shovel...)

Finally, the cracks in this potential paradise of relief show. A couple of soldiers start getting leery, and touchy-feely. The major can't really control them that well, and whispers "go slow" as an order. He tries to recruit male protagonist by sharing the logical post-apoc philosophy (see above) and male protagonist reacts in OMGZORs "We have to get out of here! NOW!" horror.

9) He's also in a house full of nine soldiers with guns as he tries to warn the two unwary females (personally, if there was an apocalypse, I'd be resigned to being a baby machine or kill myself before the logical thing happens, how do you not realize that nine testosterone-filled men have urges? And they have guns!)

Sure enough, male protagonist gets the shit kicked out of him. The two females get taken off to be raped.

In order not to have the story end on a pessimistic note though, they do not shoot the male protagonist right there and then, surrounded by nine hostile men with guns. They somehow find it necessary to take him to a mass grave site with only two people accompanying him.

... I've quite lost the thread of the plot by this time. Clicking on my 37th Ancient Vase and fighting off lots of -1 con half-orc aggro was more exciting.

When I next look up, apparently the soldiers were stupid enough to take male protagonist AND a soldier who was on the moral side of right to be shot, with only two people accompanying them. There is some kind of panicked disagreement, some squabbling over "you won't really shoot me, will you?", some potential threat of infected by the mass grave site, a couple of gunshots that kill two soldiers, and suddenly near naked male protagonist is running for his life (wrists tied in front of him - there is a reason why real police have stopped handcuffing criminals in front, y'know) with one last soldier chasing after him, puffing and panting, instead of shooting him.

Somehow, naked male protagonist manages to jump a fence (power of adrenaline, I guess) and escape.

Crud, we lost him, the incompetent stormtroopers report to their major. And of course, they split themselves up yet again to go chase him down.

10) Meanwhile, all this ruckus is making the two soldiers guarding the two females quite unable to perform. (I mean, we can't ever be so tasteless as to actually rape them, imagine what that would do to the ratings and the movie reviews!) The horror apparently is in the anticipation.

So instead they waste more time by making them put on red dresses at gunpoint, there is much screaming and shouting and reluctant female-ing, some slaps, a oh-so-heroic kiss/embrace by the older female to distract the horrible pigs from the teenage female, glum resignation of their terrible eventual fate, yadda yadda.

11) Somewhere and somewhen in all of this mess of a plot, the naked male protagonist turns up, armed with a soldier's rifle. He also looks up at the sky to see the DeuxExMachina trail of an airplane that means that they are not alone, yay! He doesn't shoot the remaining soldiers. No, that would be too crass. No poetic justice, y'know?

So he shoots off the chain of the black zombie, who promptly proceeds to tear up the soldiers, who have conveniently wet themselves in terror. (Previously before this, they fought off about fifteen infected storming their house, with landmines, floodlights, the works.)

Somehow, the two females don't get a single infected scratch in all this horrible slobbering chaos. Must be karma.

Not much else to say. Near naked male protagonist shows up, to get kissed by the older female (who has conveniently fallen in love with the chivalric hero - I suppose we shall get babies after all, in the end!), gets bonked on the head by teenage female for a brief comic laugh ("I thought he was infected and biting you!").

All the evil schwinehunds of soldiers get their comeuppance at the hands of the infected. The major villain (haha, pun) gets to shoot male protagonist in a "surprise, you forgot me" twist, before he gets dragged off by black zombie to meet a horrible end.

The heroic trio (damn, that male protagonist is going to get two grateful gals to surround him in post-movie heroic paradise, huh?) makes their escape in another getaway car.

"Oh, no, the gate, it's locked!"

They decide to go for it and crash right through, arms raised in horror! Screen turns to black.

... I'm wishing they would just die, because this is sickening.

No such luck. The screen fades up from black. The male protagonist wakes up again in a hospital, having been well tended by the two grateful females. Apparently the shot was just a flesh (stomach) wound. Don't ask me how they sewed up his guts, the movie didn't show it, just a bandage.

They are in some kind of country hospital, just the three of them, and they happily sew some kind of massive cloth beacon, to lay out to signal the DeusExMachina (remember the plane?) that hey, there's someone still alive down here, send a helicopter for us!

Movie mercifully ends on this cheery saccharine note.

... Excuse me while I puke my guts out.

I don't get it. How can someone love this drivel? I need someone to explain in slow simple words what's so redeeming about this movie, because I can think of a lot more dark, dystopian flicks that are a lot artier and stronger in plot, plus a lot more Hollywood zombie shooting/explosion sequences that are more gratuitious fun and gore.

I now have a strong need to replay Fallout 3 for a more dreary mood atmosphere, and Left 4 Dead for mood and zombie shootin'. Imagine that. Video games that are better than movies.

And Now For a Prettier Word

If there's one game that can tempt me into upgrading to Windows Vista for DirectX 10, it's Lord of the Rings Online.

But even DirectX 9 renders aren't so shabby these days with an up-to-date graphics card and some extra chunks of RAM.

Before


After


The later developed areas also seem to look better, art asset-wise. Like going from Atlas Park to Striga and CoV, I suppose.

If only I had been clever enough to find the turn-off-UI key sooner...


(What's that on his footsies? Part of the 'All Grey 2 Me' escapade.)



(Eregion is great. Wide open plains that make me itch for the Rohan expansion. So much more fun to gallop around and quest in, versus Angmar's depressing red salt lakes and dismal mountains, and Misty Mountains' white foggy snow.)

As you can tell, as contrasted with the landscapes, LOTRO's UI sucks badly. The pretty parts are actually a downloaded skin I found. Doesn't do anything for the actual buttons though. Five rows of ugly squares are blocking my view, but I can't bring myself to change the layout because everything seems so necessary, and I'd have to get used to a new arrangement.

People Suck

I've more or less stopped talking to people online, or trying to make connections with them. Not sure if it is good, bad or a disturbing turn of events. Nothing I try seems to replicate the closeness of experience of the MUD, and even then, it seems that people were talking only to achieve some sort of goal (like the attainment of uber gear).

Can't say very much about offline interactions either. Mostly they are work-related. I have been babysitting two newbies and their wide-eyed gaping ignorance can sometimes annoy me to high heaven. It's not their fault, but one of them is pretty freaky in their own little world, and the other one reminds me of someone I knew from JC - mindset is so hopelessly mundane that anything out of the limited realm of their experience is cause for bewildered wonder.

This does not for riveting conversation make.

No wonder I tend to bond with older, wiser, more mature in years women.

Except there's a dearth of them online, and not much to be found offline either. They must all be on Facebook or something.

My supervisor is up to her forgetful ways again, inspiring forehead meeting brick wall Simpson-esque DOH! behavior.

I got a call on my handphone at 1pm today from my boss. I went to bed at 8am because I was on this little thing called "an off day." It was a feat to even say "Hello?" coherently.

Turns out supervisor must have forgotten to tell boss that I was off today. This, after she arranged for someone else to cover my class two days ago.

Turns out that she sent urgent email yesterday (a day I was ALSO on leave) giving me a whole string of instructions for things I should be doing and emails I should be sending today, because she was going on leave for the next week.

This irritates me to high heaven. I am generally responsible and carry out all my functions in a dutiful, reliable manner. But I find it very offensive to delegate all this crap, assuming happily that "Oh, P is always around and will get it done" while FORGETTING things that happened a day ago that should indeed clue her in that I am not around. (After all, she GAVE me the permission to take an off day.)

This is not the first time.

My supervisor is a master of the absent-minded taichi. True managerial material, indeed.

At least my boss has enough of a clue to pick up the phone and call someone when she senses something is awry.

As usual, my OCD self cannot now relax until some of this stuff is carried out, because it is important, but how is it that I am now working on my off day while four other (admittedly, more newbie) staff are completely available at work?

I find it another proof that people are hopelessly self-centred in nature.

All anyone can think about is "what's affecting me," not what's happening to someone else. I myself am not immune, I'm probably displaying full selfish tendencies in my little rant too.

It's amazing the world runs as much as it does on enlightened self-interest.

It's also little wonder why I don't feel like talking to any other person. They are just a little ball of emotional "what's in it for me"-ness anyhow. What's there to connect with?

I miss the age of innocence where one actually was able to assume that people were a lot like you. (One was, of course, talking to projected images of what one assumed other people to be. May as well just imagine up people and talk to them. Imaginary friends are a lot more reliable mentally and emotionally, they just kinda epic fail in a physical emergency department.)

I need a pet. I can talk to animals fine. And they have this sort of unquestioning acceptance that you are the supplier of food, so they'll give you some attention.

Except my mom is freaked out about anything four-legged, furry, finned or crawly, so I don't get a pet except for imaginary ones either. (And a couple of work mascots - a fish and a turtle - that I have partially adopted.)

Anyhow, I have now practised the art of taichi as demonstrated by my supervisor, with a slightly more productive next action twist. I've shot back three tennis balls via email to different people to get stuff for me that I require to get my side of the task done.

If they get the stuff sent to me by the end of today, I can carry out my side of the deal by today or tomorrow when I head back to work.

If they don't, then well, it's not my fucking fault someone told me about this crap last minute via remote, is it?

All Grey 2 Me

I have to admit, there is ONE good thing about many MMOs copying the DikuMUD style formula slavishly and following the EQ/WoW rising level cap strategy as well.

Despite the trivialization of the achievement 'grind' and whatever happy loot one 'worked' to attain, the uselessness of entire areas and mobs which have become nonrelevant to those hoping to gain xp (aka 95% of the MMO populace), the happy accident of mobs and quests becoming "all grey to me" in LOTRO is a boon in disguise.

To a (solo) explorer of land area, zones and content anyhow.

Some peaceful grinding of local wildlife later (animal pelts, planting seeds, chopping down walking trees...okay, there were also some half-orc brigands in the mix), I was a happy level 49.

Except for a slight OCD irritation at seeing heaps of Scholar nodes that were one tier too high for me to harvest.

It seems the new region of Eregion was built to address certain shortcomings in crafts like cooks and scholars, because I couldn't walk five metres without stumbling over a blackberry, blueberry or strawberry bush, or honey - as contrasted with going 500 metres in other zones and not seeing a single harvestable resource.

That, and I think the majority of people being at the new level cap of 60 leaves a lot of the early zones free to respawn their nodes, rather than get farmed to death by scores of people hoping to level their crafting skills.

Whatever the case, this is a good thing. Except for the fact that I couldn't harvest the nodes because of my slackard crafting ways.

Deciding to turn over a new leaf, and take a break from slaughtering local wildlife, I backtracked to an older zone in the hope of finding scholar nodes from the tier I still needed to work on.

While galloping around lost, searching vainly for ruins, I noticed that the elite Troll mobs in the zone were all grey to me. Hey... didn't I have an epic book quest that I had been stuck forever at, where I had to go to the DEEPEST chamber of three troll caves? (Group quest, of course, but I had never found -anyone- in the same range as me when I needed to do it.)

Glee. Perky goth glee, when I noticed that the epic book quest was now a glorious GREY in color. I charged into the nearest troll cave I could find, and sure enough, all the nasty trash trolls inside were a happy grey and completely ignored me.

Carefully NOT clicking on them (as they could still kick my ass if aggroed,) I ran full tilt through the mini-dungeon towards the end, and right into the arms of a bigger troll that attacked.

EEP.

Turns out he was one level higher than the rest. I had been right on the level range edge. Fortunately, after some scrambling to get my combat hat on, the inherent diku dismissal of near-grey mobs in the combat mechanics allowed me to dodge/evade/block/parry most of the hits and I whittled the thing to death.

Seems I might finally be able to progress with this epic book at last.

Mishmash of Mindshtuff or WRUP

aka What R U Playing, or Doing.

Big list of things that I have been dabbling with follows:

This blog blows the mind. Lots of crunchy articles about game design, ethics, philosophy, temperament theory and much much more. To think I only found it because of this post about nine types of gamers Personally, I don't think he's got even a handful of them down, but I found the summaries of the other possible classifications of gameplay quite delicious, especially Caillois’ patterns of play.

Took leave on Friday too. What the hell, I needed to claim a day for working on Vesak Day, and the upcoming next two weeks are a go-to-work-holiday because I'm on a long extended course (culminating in a non-related but fun Video Games Live concert. Mwahaha.) Not much room for days off there. So I pretty much turned this week into a nonworking week except for today and Saturday. Whee!

LOTRO progress has steadied out. I methodically went through a bunch of Eregion quests, and got about halfway through to the next level. Another one or two hours and I should be level 48? Or was it 49? Har, I can't remember.

FFXI progress has been slow, but progressive and 'fun' in an oldschool exploration sense. I went through the first city area - Port Bastok - talking to all the NPCs there, collecting a bunch of quests in the log (none of which look doable until I gain a bunch more levels and/or randomly stumble onto some mysterious mob in a hidden area doing something completely nonintuitive that was vaguely hinted in the one-liner quest intro and probably requires me to download a strategy guide, dang it at some point.)

I did the same thing to the next city area, the Bastok Metalworks, and was about halfway through the Bastok Markets when I lost the will to continue. FFXI resembles its Japanese RPG roots a lot more than a typical Western MMO, so a lot of the NPC interaction is vague hints and story parceling in dribbles, rather than a complete "exclamation point/quest text/quest objective" sort of thing.

Having learned about 2.5 city areas to the point of relatively confident navigation, I decided to save the other parts (more Markets, Residential District, South Gate or whatnot) for another time.

I jauntily proceeded to the next lowbie area, the Zeruhn Mines, now armed with a map bought from one of the vendors in Port Bastok. It made navigation a LOT more doable. Two goals: kill a bunch of things to level a little and get a change of pace in combat, and work on Story Mission 1 for Bastok, aka go all the way into the mines to pick up a message from an NPC and go all the way back to the Metalworks to deliver it. This time, I finally found the NPC instead of wandering in circles, and in between killing of monsters, stumbled across the keypress that brought up in-game configuration options. (Oooh! *cue brief flash of learning accomplishment*)

All done with the gamepad too, so you could say that I am learning a new control scheme as I go along. Gave up retracing my steps during the same session, so I logged. I am starting to feel encouraged about taking on (or trying out) games like these in small parcels. Segments of time that would probably be too long for anyone keen on achieving endgame progress, but good enough for me to blog about.

Call of Duty: World at War is significantly more playable on the second level of difficulty. There are less grenades being slung at me every second, and I seem to have the space of a few more breaths before they explode, allowing me to flee more effectively. Either that, or I am getting overparanoid about the grenade indicator. Survival rate has gone up to 75% less deaths than before. Was about four level maps (and two bonus maps) away from finishing the game.

The main narrative across maps is not very good. It is exceedingly disjointed, veering between the two POVs (a Russian fighting Germans, and an American fighting Japanese) with little connection. There's probably only a tenuous chronological reason for arranging the maps in the way they are.

Scenario-wise, each map is quite a self-contained, if short, immersive experience and fairly enjoyable in the Call of Duty vein. Quite a number of people have complaints about how this CoD game treats morality issues. There are a number of scenes of casual executions and so on, possibly needless ones, some argue.

Me, I'm okay with it. It's like any other cinematic experience, it's aiming for some kind of effect, even if they caricature some things in the process. I certainly don't think that the world of Grand Theft Auto or Saints Row exists in reality, it is over the top in some aspects while allowing you to experience being a 'gangsta.' In the same way, I certainly would not think that every Japanese in real life is an evil booby-trapping tricksome 'Tojo' just because a scenario in a game portrays them that way.

In fact, if you want to be anally politically correct about authenicity and fair portrayal of war, I'd suspect that most FPSes are lying terribly about how many bullets and how many enemies come at a single soldier. Most of war is lots of interminable waiting, moving from here to there lugging heavy objects, utterly cold, wet and miserable and now and then, a screaming firefight you can't avoid, doing your utmost not to get killed and certainly not racking up a killcount in the hundreds, headshotting the enemy. It would make a terrible game though.

So for what it's worth, I enjoyed the scenarios which portrayed war brutality (on both sides, imo, if you're not looking through rose-colored white-skinned glasses).

The first chapter began by putting my character in the eyewitness position of watching Japanese soldiers burn my fellow comrade with a cigar and slit his throat. Five seconds later, the tables are turned as my rescuing American marines jump on my almost-murderer and cut -his- throat out. I then grab a rifle and spend the rest of that time shooting scores of Japanese - who also lay vicious booby traps and trick ambushes for 'our side' to even out the NPC bodycount.

As far as I remember from my Singaporean and Asia-centred WWII history lessons, the Japanese in WWII were, as a whole, -notorious- for cunning strategies and basically 'fighting dirty' to the point of severely damaging Westerner morale. So facing the whole gamut of tricks in a bunch of maps as one character is just cinematic compressed time, y'know? Not very probable in real life, but it's the immersive experience and storytelling effect we're going for here.

Faced with all this morale-sapping occurences, plus a brutally tough trench warfare scenario where suicidal kamikaze Banzai-screaming soldiers are hurling themselves at you in order to take you with them, it's interesting when you, the player, have a chance to turn the tables. What will your reaction be? Do you take the moral high ground...in a war?

Me, I took the easy way out. Not sure what that says about me, if it's that my min-maxing efficiency mentality at work, or if I was just roleplaying/immersing into the role of a soldier hardened by trauma, but once I got a flamethrower in my hands, I was merrily flame-broiling the opposition as they screamed and flailed around, their kamikaze charge defeated by being on fire.

Not that it was EASY doing it. Japanese dug into bunkers would shoot you merrily from a distance as you were lugging a heavy flamethrower with insufficient reach. Woe betide them if I actually got near enough to spew fuel into their hideout though. Snipers in coconut trees would drill me full of holes, necessitating me exchanging the flamethrower for a long-range rifle to snipe them in return. But boy, was it great when one coconut tree was actually within reach of the flamethrower - it went up in a boiling napalm-like whoosh.

Ditto the Russian story. The character I was playing was actually left for dead (twice) and pretty much hunted down like a rat through a burning building after successfully sniping an enemy German general. When the tables turned, there was a story conflict between a hardbitten sergeant who wanted to execute captive Germans and a newbie private still hanging on to his morals. Your choice as to who you wanted to support. Me, I chose to play the "war is hell" story theme (too much Warhammer 40K perhaps) and headshot them.

Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core is one of the games I have been clocking up significant progress on. I picked it up for the PSP at $40 and it's renewed my interest in portables as a good way to get my game on while in transit.

Final Fantasy III for the DS has proved its oldschool lethality. I hadn't found a proper save point yet, only quicksaving when I had to turn the portable off. One bad unexpected fight later, my two PCs were slaughtered without a chance to even run away and I found the quicksave had erased itself. Damn, should have found out how to save my freaking game sooner.

Culpa Innata is a weird adventure game I picked up during a Steam sale. It reminds me a bit of Longest Journey (with a more personally intriguing setting.) I narrowly ran into a bit of dejavu aggravation when my avatar got stuck on a pixel and refused to move, but fortunately, a quicktravel option got me out of that buggy scenario. Someday I might play TLJ again, but I have to say, the inadverdent 'forgot-an-item-yer-screwed' bug left a bad taste in my mouth.

Anyhow, Culpa Innata is set in the future, in a society that has taken 'science' and the 'selfish gene' to its logical extremes. Greed and selfishness is a virtue, non-defective genes to be strived for, and it's a weird parallel inversion of a simultaneous dystopia/utopia. And then, there's a murder in the Rogue States, and you, a fine upstanding member of the New World Union have to find out more, because this was a murder of a NWU citizen.

Workin' on it. I dislike nearly no captioning of regular examination text (all voiced), but the major cutscene discussions with NPCs are all thankfully captioned. The PDA mechanic is interesting, as it brings up an always-available-on-right-click representation of a wearable computer that all NWU citizens have, you manage inventory, quicktravel and other things with it.

Games I want to start sampling in the near future: Sam and Max season 1 chapter 6, the original Splinter Cell stealth FPS, more Guild Wars, and I have these insane urges to go try out Vanguard (what, another group-required MMO while I'm still learning FFXI?), mebbe EQII (sure y'right), Neo Steam (already downloaded the F2P trial, may as well get off my ass and putz for a while), the Hunter (some F2P hunting game that looks really really gorgeous, even if the stalking mechanic reminds me a bit of a Tale in the Desert frog hunting) and dunno what else.

Call of Duty 5: Watch out for that grenade!

Call of Duty 4 was a masterpiece. Cinematic, modern-world setting, fabulous singleplayer, fun multiplayer, if you missed it, go play it.

Call of Duty 5, done by the other CoD development studio, has always had a reputation for not being as good as the first studio's offerings. Sort of like Guild Wars: Factions vs Nightfall.

Still, the graphics looked good and it was a chance to play WWII stuff from slightly different perspectives - no more D Day shooting Germans from an American/British POV, now it's D Day shooting Germans from an Russian POV plus D Day shooting Japanese from an American/British POV. *hem*

(At least it ain't shooting Koreans as in Crysis or was that Far Cry, who remembers...)

Honestly, I can't tell. I shoot anything that moves because they ALL look the same in their green fatigues and camouflage. It's not like I'm getting up close enough to verify the slant of their eyes before I shoot them, especially since I have a peashooter of a M1 Garand or worse sort of 'period-authentic' single shot rifle, instead of the M4A1 automatics that can riddle people full of bullets in a hurry. At least I'll still be alive to go oops later if they were my NPC troop allies.

I paused at the difficulty level setting for a while. There were four levels of difficulty.

There was no way I was playing level 1 difficulty of Recruit - "meant for novices to FPSes" because I don't want pushover fights.

There was no way I was playing level 4 difficulty of Veteran either - "you will not survive" is not exactly an encouraging sort of statement. I had enough nightmares about Nightmare level in Doom and their ilk.

But between level 2 and 3 difficulty was a little harder to pick.

For odd numbers of difficulty, my choice is easy. I go straight for the middle of the road. But even numbers of difficulty meant, "Eh, do I want it slightly easier or slightly harder?"

Being all hardcore hyped up and stuff, I went for the third level of difficulty. This proved to be a strategic error past the first few stages, I think.

I was okay with the enemy toughness, actually. They take about 2-4 bullets to go down, or 1-2 headshots. Challenging enough. It forces me to use cover and aim properly. Their lethality is fair - if I stand in the open, they will pick me off after 4-5 hits, but there's enough time for me to get into cover and recover.

But the 'nades. Oh the grenades. For the love of Holy Antioch, the grenades!

This is the stupidest mechanic they brought over from CoD4 without thinking about it. When a grenade lands near you, a grenade indicator lights up on your screen with a directional arrow. You've got about 1-3 seconds to either run the hell away, or hit the middle mouse button to throw it back.

This was fine in CoD4 because there weren't THAT many grenades being flung about, and you were a mobile modern soldier in lightweight combat armor and an automatic rifle.

This is CoD5, and it's the heart of World War II. Your cloth-armored regular grunt has a single-shot peashooter that misses 50% of the time if you fire from the hip, let alone if you're running, so you end up crouching or prone if you want to have a chance of hitting the enemy...

...Whose AI seems programmed to throw grenades at you to flush you out of cover. A LOT of grenades.

But you're crouching or prone, so it can take you a precious few seconds to try and sprint away. (And how many seconds did grenades take to explode again?)

And this is the heart of World War II, so you've got about twenty comrades near you, ready to bump into you should you try to turn about and flee.

So what the heck, let's be a hero, pick up the grenade and fling it back really quick, right?

Except you're also carrying 3 grenades, and the key for picking up grenades and flinging them back is the SAME key for pulling out your own grenades and throwing them.

So if you weren't near enough to the grenade to pick it up, you waste a couple precious seconds flinging your own pineapple at the enemy... but you're near enough to the thrown grenade to get turned into mincemeat by the explosion.

And yes, if the grenade explodes, you die. Period. No escape. No "only a flesh wound" limb blown off. Yer dead. Restart from the checkpoint. Try again. Get 'naded again. Rinse. Repeat.

It's dark, a grenade is a grey cylindrical object on the ground, I'm not going to turn and look for it, but I also have no time to turn and run away from it, and sometimes the goddamn grenade indicator doesn't even have time to appear before it explodes.

I think I'm restarting the game on difficulty level 2 to see if it improves any.

And I'm so not the only one having serious issues with grenades.

LOTRO Leveling

I've one bad game practice left over from City of Heroes being my first MMO, so to speak. I can never figure out when it's time to leave one zone and look for the next zone for my level range.

Couple that with my completionist tendency to want to get every single exclamation mark quest done, and this has been making me quite miserable in LOTRO where half of the quest chains are for small group fellowships, complete teams or even raids (the sad part of being 45+ and near the old level cap.)

After completing most of the doable quests in the Misty Mountains, I had been down to a bunch of ferry message quests leading towards raid quest pointers, and a instance meant for small groups but kinda vaguely soloable aka Goblin-Town.

I had a fairly okay time attempting to do quests in Goblin-Town, but soloing in an instance meant for small groups to complete and supposedly a big boss at the end for a full fellowship meant very often getting in over my head. Dying is exceedingly irritating in LOTRO since you spawn far far away from where you were, with a hefty repair bill to boot.

With the help of a third-party website map, I got far enough to complete one or two quests, but certainly not all of them at one go.

For some reason, this mechanic makes me a little grumpy. It reminds me a lot of the raid mechanic. Walk into an instance, fight the best you can to go far as possible, wipe miserably due to one reason or other, respawn, rinse and repeat. Like an oddly linear dungeon crawl.

Meh. I'm used to instances being completable at one go. City of Heroes, Guild Wars, singleplayer games like Fallout 3, etc. The dungeon oughta be doable. Having bits and pieces of a dungeon be accessible mildly irritates me. I can see the game design reason - you want the same map to provide content for soloists, small group parties and full teams, fair enough, but it's a little directly rubbed in the face that a soloist is never going to see all of this one dungeon.

I would much rather a group dungeon that I would never bother setting foot into, and a solo dungeon that I could handle myself. Or perhaps the same map, but with different spawn sizes and different rewards.

It's the plight of the soloist in LOTRO. Yes, we have content for you. It's the first half of anything. Keep doing all those first halves of stuff, and you'll level. Promise!

Grrr.

So eventually I gave up and decided to make the long ride past Rivendell, the Trollshaws and into Eregion - the first buffer zone before the Mines of Moria, apparently meant for 45+ to boost up to 50 before entering into the mines proper.

One long ride later, I was in a better place. Instead of zones that reflected the old level cap and quests that tried to funnel people into group content, Eregion's first town has a bunch of quests that resemble the lowbie leveling zones. You know the sort...

Small town quest hub. Bunch of Kill X numbers of Y mobs. Pick up Z numbers of items from the ground or from the Y mobs you're already killing. Methodical. Sorta boring. But eminently doable and rewarding. You get to fight stuff. (And count 'em.) You get an xp reward and some usable items at the end. The stuff that you killed provides vendor trash to sell for $$$. Grindy, but the sense of progression/achievement is a lot more obvious and mollifying than my aimless galloping and carting of messages across white snow.

Not perfect, of course. Some of the kill quest numbers are quite high, given how little xp they award. But more tolerable than achieving nothing at all between running to and fro timesinks.

I saw a LOT more people in this one part of the zone than in the old 45+ zones. Which, I suppose, tells you how nasty those old zones were. Me being a nooby idiot, I had no clue, while the veterans leveling alts have made beelines towards the more easily achievable quests.

Blah.

Someday, I need to make myself more soloable alts. But the Guardian is so high, it seems a waste to not keep playing her. :/