Risen?

Anybody heard of that game? Risen, i mean. I believe it was reviewed on Digital Life on 28 October. I went to check it out on IGN. It seems like a mix of Elder Scrolls and...i dunno...something really old school? Like the first ever Monkey's Island?

Damn...Dragon Age: Origins is already coming out soon though, and the browser game Dragon Age Journeys is already out. I've got so little holiday time, and i don't want to be spending my entire holiday playing computer RPGs...but still, these kinds of awesome escapism are terribly hard to find...

Okay, time to go for CLT class! I wonder if Mr Szetoh is ponning it, that slacker...lol then again, maybe i should relax instead of taking notes like crazy too. That's one thing i hate about Dowdle's classes; he talks interesting stuff but quite a few of us never get to enjoy, listen and digest what he's saying because we're all overwhelmed with note-taking.

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Life is boring.

Gaaaahhh i'm really really damn bored...

Amagad it's horrible...i'm supposed to be studying my Company Law over the weekend, but because it's so damn boring - unless i chance upon an interesting case - i end up finding entertainment to pass my time after every paragraph i read.

Except...there's nothing to do! I've deleted Warcraft III, Puzzle Fighter, and Street Fighter Alpha 3 from my laptop (for the sake of removing distractions, although evidently i end up looking for other sources since law readings are just SOOO boring), so now i find myself playing games like Country Story and Naruto Shippuuden on Facebook and Chess Titans...stuff that i probably wouldn't touch during the holidays.

I end up reading random stuff on Facebook, reading articles (and even the dumbass comments) on Soccernet, and going to the Dragon Age home page in the hopes of seeing an update...all for the sake of escaping from the grim reality of that enormous mass of law readings and homework. Heck, i even just wrote a blog entry on Dragon Age!

Dragon Age Character Creator was supposed to occupy me for longer, but i'm done creating characters already! There's only so much time that i can spend fiddling around with chin heights and depths and nose tip depths, etc...so much for a worthwhile distraction.

Sigh, on the whole, i have nothing much to look forward to, apart from readings and more boring readings. It's like...i dunno. The exams are on the horizon again, and when i get home...there really isn't anything fun or relaxing waiting for me there. Unlike most people, i don't really have that much of an attachment to my bed. I've got my laptop, my PS2, and i just fixed my computer, so there's a whole lot of fun waiting for me, but my conscience is preventing me from starting a new game or starting a new anime series, since i'm at the tail end of my school term. And every time i play anything, i just don't enjoy it (and every time i sit down to read my law stuff, i fall asleep. :|).

Anyway, i need a solution. Not to the problem of not having enough entertainment, but to the problem of needing that entertainment in the first place. Though i wish law was still - for me - something fun, like back when i was searching the internet for laws on intellectual property rights when i was in NS, or during my first lecture on Tort law and Contract law, when lectures weren't just all about note-taking ordeals.

Bleah.

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Dragon Age...Criticisms!!!

I've been fiddling around with the Dragon Age Character Creator for a few of hours over the weekend. Dragon Age is, well...you should just do a search and find out what it is lah. Go find out before coming back to read the rest of this post...and this only applies to people who like single player computer RPGs or have played games like Baldur's Gate 2 and Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and would know what i'm talking about.

Anyway, i've got a criticism of the Character Creator...why are there so few customisation options available??? The game creators kept boasting about how the Character Creator would be so great, but i'm sorely disappointed...in terms of customisation, Elders Scrolls 4: Oblivion was better, even though that game came out nearly 4 years ago, when the NVIDIA 7800GT graphic card just got released onto the Singapore market. Oblivion had so many more options...one example would be the option to alter the length of hair, which allowed gamers to obtain precisely the look they wanted for their characters.

On the other hand, Dragon Age gives male characters only about 10 FIXED hair styles...and all of them are ugly!!! They're either bald, G.I. Joe, tribal themed, or medieval English themed. I know the Dragon Age world is backwards, but why can't i have a character with a more modern hairstyle? Or is it simply because the people at Bioware have no sense of style??? I want a character with a long fringe, and i don't want the fringe tied back! Haven't the game creators ever heard of the new age Japanese hairstyles??? Haven't the game creators played Final Fantasy or ANY Japanese RPGs???

Sigh, i should have expected this disappointment though...Bioware kept talking about how Neverwinter Nights 2 and Mass Effect would have great customisation options, but both options sucked big time DESPITE being released after Oblivion. In Oblivion, i could easily create a character (without using any presets) who looked very much like Squall from FFVIII, while in Dragon Age, i can't even make my character's FACE (nevermind the hair) look like Zack from FFVII when i'm referring to his pictures on my laptop while creating the character on my desktop.

Heck, i can't even make a character who doesn't look like some medieval peasant/barbarian/noble or some US Army jock or some Australian Aborigine or some Native American. Sigh, doesn't Bioware understand that we want our main characters to look GOOD??? So many of the options give rise to characters with troll/ogre-like noses and chins and freaked out facial features in general...what's up with that?

On the contrary, female characters have a bit more options and they LOOK better too...for example, i can easily make an attractive female character who looks about 18-20 years old, while the potential male characters on Dragon Age all seem to have a minimum age of 30. Doesn't Bioware know that most of the players will probably be guys, and most of them AREN'T the type who would create female characters and have them make out with male NPCs???

In addition to the Character Creator part, i've got a few concerns as well...

One that i can remember, is the choice of NPCs.

First, there are too few NPCs. For most races, there is only one NPC to recruit, and there are much fewer races in Dragon Age as compared to Baldur's Gate 2. I also think it detracts from the open-endedness of the game a bit when the NPCs are already announced to us way beforehand. This, of course, stems from the problems of over-hyping any game and revealing too much. So now, i won't have a scenario where this person unexpectedly joins my team; i would have seen it coming a long time ago, and would have taken steps not to kill him off, etc.

Also, nearly all the NPCs are outstanding talents in their respective fields...why can't my teammates be normal dudes? Like i want the fifth best healer and just another of the witches to join my team, not the best healer ever known and the daughter of some legendary witch. I'd want my teammates to make a name for themselves under my influence; i'd rather have a group of adventurers starting out small and later joining the big league, instead of having some walking VIP circus troupe. What's the point of leveling up? To be able to start out small first and later become demigods both in skill AND in NAME. Right?

The NPC choices are also too varied, in a way. Given that there are so few NPCs to choose from, why spread them out and give every race a representation? I understand that Bioware might think that we want to try out every race, etc, but it also increases the feeling that this game isn't as open-ended as it seems - like the game's path was already all planned out for you. You have so few NPCs, and - just nice - each race has one! Except for the human race; humans are special, so we will give you one choice per class...one white mage, one black mage, one assassin, and one sword fighter! You don't get players with similar races and similar roles in the team (for eg. Imoen and Nalia, and Minsc, Keldorn, Anomen and Sarevok in BG2), where you could choose who you wanted based SOLELY on who looked better and whose personality you liked, etc.

I probably sound like i'm nitpicking here, BUT Dragon Age is supposed to be - for an open-ended single player fantasy RPG fan like me - the greatest game ever made. So i've got high hopes for it...and exacting standards come with those high hopes! I hope the game itself would alleviate some of my concerns...although my concerns of the Character Creator have certainly been realised. -.-

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Rodent attack!

The school is becoming more and more unhygienic. Jialat. Almost dangerously so. First, there was this huge rat lurking outside one of the classrooms on the first floor; then there was that maggot in my lunch, and today, i saw a small rat in the gym. When i came into the gym at 7.45am today, it scampered underneath one of the treadmills. I could even bend my head below, look underneath the treadmill (from a distance of course) and say hi to it.

Back in the army, i had a lot of experience with rats. There was this rat which stole tissue paper from my bedside chair over a period of time and made a nest with it below my bed. And i only discovered the nest a few months later; guess that's punishment for not doing a thorough area cleaning. I always wondered why my mucus-filled tissue paper kept disappearing from my chair the next morning, nearly every day. The whole time, i thought the fan/wind was blowing my mucus-filled tissue out the window or something. ^_^" Back in signal school, we'd also get rats sneaking into our lockers (despite there being a lock!!!) and tearing up our milo 3-in-1 packets and biting into our toothpaste.

The point of my last statement is that these rats can sneak into really tight spaces VERY EASILY. It's like they're all meat and fat and organs and no bones, so they can flatten their bodies like crazy if they need to. Meaning they can sneak into our classrooms. They can sneak into the gym and hide in all those smelly shoes that people dump into the shelf cubicles.

AND they can sneak into the lounge. As every NUS law student should know, the lounge is a very fun place. It is ALSO a very dusty and messy (and i'd daresay dirty) place, and the carpeted floors and cushions and the flaps covering the space below the cloth/wool sofas make for good hiding places...for rats.

Gulp. I'm not even going to bother looking below the sofas. Unfortunately, as quite a few law students know, there's this year 2 called Gregory who likes to take power naps in the lounge when he's short on sleep...yikes. :|

But ahwell. To be honest, i'm quite used to sleeping among rats already. I had more than a year of that, after all. I'm just being a little dramatic because, otherwise, i really have nothing else to write. But i AM quite worried that those rats would sneak into my bags while i sleep and nibble into my tissue paper, my notes, my computer power cables, etc...just like those rats did with my iPod charger cable back in army.

...I'm still using that charger cable though. 0_o

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