Well.

*blows off the dust* whooo wee it’s been a long while since I’ve been here. More than a year, in fact, judging from the date of my last post.

So much has happened in the past year, I’m tempted to break it up into multiple posts rather than write some ginormous thing that will wallow in the depths of the internet like a beached whale.

First of all, I’m a student again. I was successful in my PhD applications last year, and in August made the move all the way over to the USA with my wife and our son. That was an adventure all by itself, the trip taking 3 days in total with a stopover in Japan to enjoy some yummy ramen before being left with the horror known as American instant ramen. To be fair I did consume a fair amount of that during my college days but I don’t think anyone wants to go back to eating what they ate during college. The human body was not meant to survive on chips and soda, despite what college meal plans tell you.

Judging from my last post here, I was still enjoying WoW. However, I think not too long after that I stopped playing again. I had done a lot of the heroic dungeons, leveled up a couple of alts… but it wasn’t the same without my wife playing. I think WoW has really evolved past me at this point, and is clearly targeted at a different audience. Of course I’ve said that before (I think) and I still came back and had fun for a while.

I’ve been having a busy schedule trying to adjust to being a student again, and in an unfamiliar place. The USA has really changed a lot in the past 10 years. I like a quote that I heard during a graduate student orientation here, which was that the biggest effect that 9/11 had was to make the entire country insane for 10 years. In any case, despite all that I still try to have some time for some games (probably more than I should…)

World of Tanks

This was the main game I’ve been playing since May 2011 I believe. World of Tanks is a fun simulator/arcade tank game that is Free-to-Play, although there are admittedly some pay-to-win elements in it like gold ammo. But frankly I wouldn’t be too concerned about that since there are so many other factors that go into a match that having a higher shell penetration chance isn’t a big deal. It’s not like gold ammo lets you 1-shot opponents, and if you bother aiming for weak spots you mostly penetrate anyway.

The biggest appeal to me was 1) no subscription and 2) I could jump on for quick matches instantly when I had some free time. Each 15 vs 15 match lasts 15 minutes at most, and often under 10 minutes, which meant I was less likely to be interrupted by our son. It still happened, but it didn’t have as much as an effect as say, being the healer in a 5-man heroic in the middle of a boss fight and having to go baby-afk.

I did alright despite being historically pathetic at shooters like Counter-Strike. I think I ended up with a 51% win rate, which is above average, and I have a tier 9 IS-4 tank which is due to become tier 10 in the next patch. In fact I actually let my EVE subscription lapse so I could have more time with WoT. I hadn’t been doing much but skill-flip and update market orders for a few months already in any case.

Eventually, however, I guess my attention wandered away, as it seems wont to do nowadays. Most matches were pretty similar, and once you get to high tiers there isn’t much incentive to grind another tree. I mean, I chose to get the IS-4 due to how I read it plays (i.e. heavy armor, slow, decent gun) which suits my playstyle since I seem to suck at fast tanks and end up playing peek-a-boo anyway. So since I can only play one tank at a time, there’s no point grinding up another tier 9 just to have it sit in the garage. The other, very big, downside is the free-to-play community. The Internet in general is the cesspool of humanity, and looking into it shows you a reflection of just how shitty most people are. Free-to-play games, however, are like that kink in the plumbing where the scum of scum congregate and gather. The absolute stupidity of some of these players is mind-boggling, as is the aggressive manner in which they believe they are the greatest ever.

One of these days I might chronicle my journey in WoT, and very likely I’ll hop on after the next patch to give my new tier 10 a spin, but for now I’ll move on…

Random games

So as I mentioned my attention wanders… in addition to WoT, during the past year I also tried out a bunch of other games, none of which held my attention for that long. I played a bit of XCOM: UFO Defense, which was a game that I played way back in secondary school. Great fun, tried it on a harder difficulty setting this time and still did pretty well. I didn’t finish it though, once I realised that I would have no trouble killing anything it became a bit repetitive since I already knew the ending and how it was going to go. Other games I tried were Dungeon Defenders (since it was on sale from Steam), Neverwinter Nights : Diamond edition, and Kingdoms of Amalur:Reckoning.

Round and round we go…

And so, where do things stand now? I think one of the reasons my attention kept wandering was that none of the games I was playing were real MMOs. World of Tanks technically is, but you can really play it like a single player shooter with really retarded NPC teammates. Dungeon Defenders has multiplayer, but I never got into that and mostly played solo. So it seemed like I’ve been a bit spoilt by MMOs, which tend to have more new content. But I didn’t want to play anything with a sub fee since money is tight now that I’m a poor student with a family to support, and I have extremely limited play time.

I always follow TAGN’s posts with great interest as his situation resonates with me (being ancient, a gamer and quite often a noob). So I read with a fair bit of interest about him joining Goonswarm and taking part in null-sec fleet battles. And after a while, I heard the siren song of EVE pulling me back again… EVE has always been a game where there is so much to do, its almost impossible to do it all. I had yet to explore low-sec, null-sec, PVP, industry, invention, wormholes, Incursions…

Plus, the good thing about skill-flipping for a while is you come back able to fly lots of new shinies!

And finally my Ph.D applications are over with. My god, such a completely soul-draining experience. Applied to 7 schools this round, which will be my last. If I am unable to get into a decent program with financial aid, then I’ll have to start looking for a job again. In a sense it’s actually quite a relief too because then I’ll be able to put this idea of getting a Ph.D out of my mind forever and get on with my life.

Pwned by Application Turtle

At least I can now relax over the holidays (going on week long trip tomorrow) without having to worry about this crap.

Kinda silly but fun. Speed typing test that I found from Kirith Kodachi’s blog.

89 words

I got 93 on a previous try but had 2 errors so wasn’t very satisfied with that. Guess I type fairly fast but that’s not too surprising for someone growing up in the computer age and who did a lot of coding in university.

So after a whirlwind tour of the games available out there, I might as well give a little mini-review for each of them for anyone interested.

Command and Conquer Red Alert 3

I’ve always loved C&C. In secondary school I remember going to a friend’s house to watch him play the first ever C&C and being wowed by the graphics and rushing off to buy a box for myself. Played through all the campaigns and they were a blast, with a huge variety of units with individual strengths and weaknesses that made it such that you couldn’t really just build a huge army of a single type and expect to steamroll everything. Unfortunately, I really really SUCK at RTS games so I don’t play multiplayer and thus after finishing the campaign I was pretty much done. There’s an optional challenge mode that I tried which was pretty fun, but did I mention I really really SUCK? Yeah. So I gave up after repeatedly getting bum rushed by the AI before I even have 3 units out.

Dragonica

I actually tried Dragonica back before I stopped posting, but might as well include it here. Played it with my wife for a while during the beta and slightly after launch, but it got old eventually. It’s basically a F2P side-scrolling beat-em-up + MMO, with quests and levelling and talent points etc (almost exactly like WoW) and instances. But like most Asian F2Ps it gets really grindy past about level 20, and it has a weird fighting system that just ends up disincentivising players.

Much of the fighting mechanics revolves around comboing, specifically air combos. Most classes have a launching move and can combo large groups of opponents in the air. There is also a running combo counter if you manage to chain hits together decently well (there’s a couple of seconds buffer in between combos where you can run to the next mob and hit it). There are repeatable missions (think instances) that are meant for groups which give loot after beating the final boss, depending on your score during the mission. For the longest time we thought the score was some time-based thing, but this proved to be way off the mark. The score is actually based on a combination of combo points (earned for doing large combos) – times you get hit by the enemies. E.g. doing a 150 hit combo gives you x combo points, and you got hit y times throughout the mission. If x-y is large enough, you get S rank and maximum rewards. So…. it is REALLY in your interest to get large combos. And the best way to do that is… use a lousy weapon. Using good weapons means killing the monsters so fast you only get a couple of hits in. There’s also no incentive to upgrade skills and use new skills other than the basic launcher + air combo, since those break up the combo count and kill monsters too fast.

Once we realised this, the game became a bit pointless for the amount of grind involved. There’s no point in levelling up if it makes your character perform worse than before…

Florensia

Another F2P MMO, Florensia combines a traditional WoW-like system with an interesting sea-based combat system. Plus it involves pirates, YAAAAR. We actually played this for a while and it’s pretty decent for a F2P. But again, Asian F2P MMO = super grindy at high levels. The sea combat portion, while great fun initially, grows stale fairly quickly since you basically use the exact same strategy all the time. Get torpedo ship, fire torpedoes, 1 shot enemy ships. If enemy ships start surviving, upgrade your ship’s torpedo, repeat. There also aren’t enough quests for many of the levels, so we ended up having to grind quite a bit. It gets a bit repetitive to run circles AoE grinding the same packs of mobs for hours, so we dropped that eventually.

Runes of Magic

I tried this one by myself since my wife was getting a bit sick of these fantasy F2P type MMOs. Essentially, the stories of it being a WoW-clone are 100% correct. It plays exactly like WoW, with less polish. Although it has a nice feature in being able to click on the area map and your character will auto-run there, despite occasionally taking really weird paths and aggroing tons of crap. Every character is able to dual-class and use some secondary abilities from the secondary class together with all the abilities of the primary class. There’s also player housing, where you can decorate your house and even grow plants which give ores and herbs. Actually a pretty decent game, but eventually I just got tired of levelling/kill ten foozles/collect 20 parts. My taking part in the planting mini-game also probably contributed to my burnout as I had to keep watering/feeding them at odd hours or they’d die. Also it wasn’t the same playing without my wife

Fallout 3

Fantastic game. This actually kept me occupied for a long time. Great story, great combat system, and of course there’s lots of loot to collect for a pack-rat like me. I eventually had probably more than a thousand guns stashed in my little locker in the toilet in Megaton city. No clue how it all fits there. I finished the main storyline and a few of the DLCs, though I stopped short of finishing the Brotherhood of Steel arc. I was already level 20 and incredibly well equipped, so there didn’t seem to be a point in continuing and I eventually got distracted. But still a great game, which requires some thinking and strategising while fighting tough opponents, especially at the beginning.

Sins of a Solar Empire

I’ve always been a fan of space-based turn-based games such as the Master of Orion series, so I had high hopes for Sins of a Solar Empire. And it turned out to be fairly good. It’s not turn-based, instead more like a space RTS. You build ships, colonise planets, research improvements, annihilate enemy fleets and nuke their planets. Most fleet battles revolve heavily around capital ships, which are kind of like heroes in that they level up (max level 6) and get special abilities which are extremely powerful. 6 capital ships can pretty much easily mow through more than a hundred regular ships. So in the end-game, military strategy involves trying to catch and kill their capitals while preserving your own by warping out if getting focused etc. However, there’s no single player campaign so once I got the hang of each of the sides available every mission was pretty similar despite having unique maps. Plus, since it was intended to be primarily a multiplayer game, map balance was essential. Thus you can be certain that the solar system is exactly mirrored on each side. Once you know what your half of the map looks like, you know what’s in the other half as well.

Dungeons and Dragons Online

Since it went F2P, DDO has been doing much better. I must say that the DDO cash shop is one of the best, with Turbine points being used mostly to buy permanent enhancements such as new areas and new races. I’ve never been a fan of using real money to buy temporary buffs such as potions etc, seems wasteful to me. I played a paladin to level 4 and it was decently fun. Great graphics and a nice spooky GM voice provides good atmosphere while dungeon crawling. The combat mostly involves madly clicking though, since each click swings your weapon. There’s no targeting, the swing just hits whatever is in front, so fighting is just running in circles around mobs swinging frantically. Overall gameplay reminds me a lot of Neverwinter Nights. However, I’m pretty much a D&D noobasaur so I’m pretty sure I screwed up my character’s stats/skills/feats. It can be a little overwhelming and unless you really do a lot of research on character builds, and I always felt worried that I was doing something wrong. But that’s probably just me.

Overall a good game that I wouldn’t mind going back to at some point, after all its F2P. Probably better with a group of friends though.

Dragon Age: Origins

A fantastic single player RPG by Bioware again. I haven’t finished it yet, but the story is great and gameplay mechanics work nicely. Very similar in spirit to Baldur’s Gate, though obviously with better graphics and features. I’m playing a mage, since I like casters and ranged DPS. In DA:O mages are hugely overpowered though. I mean, you could probably blow past anything with a party consisting of 4 mages if it weren’t for the fact that a rogue is handing for disarming traps and picking locks. Basically any fight consists of my mages starting off with Blizzard (which does cold damage and freezes things), or Mass Paralyze (which freezes things), or Sleep (which freezes things), followed by Cone of Cold (which does massive cold damage and freezes things). Alternating Cone of Colds basically stops anything from moving, even bosses. As you can see, CC is pretty much omnipotent here. Which is a nice change from WoW

I think I’m about halfway through the game storywise, though in terms of power I’m already level 16 and have most of the powerful spells and abilities. In my typical packrat fashion I’m toting around a ton of crap because “I might use this armor sometime”. I even bought backpacks to extend the inventory limit by 10, only to find myself carrying 11 additional things “since I now have space”.

However, I got distracted by what I think may be my main game for some time to come, although I will probably come back to Dragon Age to finish it off. As to what that game is… did I mention that I like space-based games?

So… I ninja-stopped blogging way way back in July 09, for many reasons. First and foremost was of course the fact that I stopped playing WoW, which was previously the biggest focus of this blog. Of course, I never claimed it to be the sole focus (a good lesson I learned from Tobold in one of his old posts about not tying his blog to any particular game). A bunch of other personal reasons were also the fact that I quit my old job to pursue something different, as well as the imminent arrival of a special package… which actually surprised us with an early delivery in November…

But while I’ve quit WoW, I haven’t quit gaming. In fact, I take inspiration from The Ancient Gaming Noob who still manages to have a lot of fun in multiple games while raising a kid. So I sort of took the opportunity to take a look at other games which I’ve missed out on. I especially felt a bit weary of subscription games, since I wasn’t likely to have that much time to play anymore and it feels like a waste to me to pay a monthly fee for a game and not play it. Also, my wife who had previously played WoW with me for many years seemed to be feeling a bit down on games in general and wasn’t likely to be playing that much either, so it would probably have to be something I could play solo.

So, having been released from the sticky embrace of WoW I took the time to explore a whole bunch of new games, ranging from free-to-play mmos to single player games on the PC. But after a long tour of games which always felt like something was lacking, I may have finally found a new gaming home. I’ll probably elaborate more on this in a next post to avoid a humongous wall of text for my first return post…

Paladin Schmaladin has a post about a documentary which sounds interesting. It echoes almost perfectly my own feelings about religion. I’m so anti-religion that it’s practically my religion All the so-called benefits of religion can be provided by a chess club. In the end, religion is nothing but an outdated form of social education that was useful when peasant farmers couldn’t send their children to schools. It served it’s purpose, but it’s time for intelligent humans to move on.

Closing remarks from the documentary reproduced here for posterity:

“The irony of religion is that because of its power to divert man to destructive courses, the world actually could come to an end.

“Plain fact is, religion must die for mankind to live. The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge and have key decisions made by religious people, by irrationalists; By those who would steer the ship of state not by a compass, but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken. George Bush prayed a lot about Iraq, but he didn’t learn a lot about it. Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It’s nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith and enable and elevate it, are our intellectual slaveholders – keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.

“Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don’t have all the answers to think that they do. Most people would think that it is wonderful when someone says, “I am willing Lord, I will do what ever you want me to do!” Except that since there are no Gods actually talking to us, that void is filled in by people, with their own corruptions, and limitations, and agendas. And anyone who tells you that they know what happens when you die, I promise you, you don’t. How can I be so sure? Because I don’t know, and you do not possess mental powers that I do not.

“The only appropriate attitude for man to have about the big questions is not the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of religion, but doubt. Doubt is humble, and that is what man needs to be considering that human history is just a litany of getting shit dead wrong.

“This is why rational people – anti-religionists – must end their timidity and come out of the closet and assert themselves, and those who consider themselves only moderately religious really need to look in the mirror and realize that the solace and comfort that religion brings you actually comes at a terrible price. If you belong to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, violence, and sheer ignorance as religion is, you’d resign in protest. To do otherwise is to be an enabler – a mafia wife, with the true devils of extremism that draw their legitimacy from the billions of their fellow travellers.

“If the world does come to an end here, or wherever, or if it limps into the future decimated by the effects of a religion-inspired nuclear terrorism, lets remember what the real problem was: that we learned how to precipitate mass death, before we got pass the neurological disorder of wishing for it.

“That’s it. Grow up, or die.”

I think I’m very lucky to be married to a very wonderful panda. We get along so well and have so much fun together that it often totally boggles me when I hear of the kind of problems other people have with their spouses.

They’ll say how amazing it is that we still hold hands together when we walk. And I’m like… are you angry with each other all the time? Does she have open sores on her palms or something? Why wouldn’t you want to hold each other’s hands?

However, the one that takes the cake has got to be the question of “Toilet seat up or down?” Apparently, some women will fall into the toilet bowl if the guy doesn’t put the toilet seat down after peeing. Then the guy complains that he always has to raise the seat otherwise he’ll dribble all over (unfortunately, there’s a guy in my office who apparently has been conditioned so well by his wife that he really doesn’t raise the seat, hence explaining why he DRIBBLES ALL OVER).

To me, it doesn’t really take an extreme amount of effort on either part to either lift up the seat or put it down. Worst case is if somehow both parties alternate perfectly, meaning everytime they go to the toilet they have to put up/down the seat cover, so it’s perfectly fair. If not, there will be some times when you go and “hey presto!” the seat is already in your preferred position, all is well.

But the underlying reason is probably just arguing for the sake of it, and it probably shows that most people get married for the wrong reasons I think. Some of my friends know married couples that are already experiencing marriage woes after 2 years of marriage, which is amazingly sad.

Despite what some old fogeys probably think, I strongly recommend living together before getting married. For at least a couple of years. We lived together in the US for 4 years before coming back to Singapore, which pretty much allows you to get past all the silly stuff like who takes out garbage or does laundry or the dishes. Being together with your spouse comes down to spending the rest of your life together, not how cool he looks on his bike or how sexy she looks in the dark at 2 am in a pub. He may be able to tell interesting stories now and seem to live a life of adventure with all his tattoos, but is he going to keep that up for the rest of your life?

Probably not, which likely gives rise to a multitude of problems when couples realise they only like certain parts of their partners (omg that sexy rebonded hair!!!!) and loathe the rest (which they don’t see since they don’t spend 24 hours a day with them). Later on, they start to whine and try to “improve” their partners. “It’s just for his own good, I don’t see why he’s being so selfish and stubborn”.

Maybe these people get married because they want some nookie with a hot chick. Or maybe they’ve always dreamed about a wedding with 100 tables, and they’ll look so preeeetty in their dress and all their friends will be there gushing about how beautiful she is and how handsome the groom is.

People can be so dumb.