SEGD Gathering

Last night, on April First, we had our annual SEGD meeting. As usual, we had it in the Cyberia multipurpose hall.
This time, thanks to our organizer, K3yz.


Our group photo

It was nice to see some of my seniors again as well as lots of new juniors.
We had plenty of game discussions, ranging from game design, programming to just what kind of games played recently.
Some of the topics diverge from games to stuff like books (yes, we gamers read those paper thingies with lots of letters on them as well) to martial arts. Such as capoera (Hilmy) or tai chi(Li Hern).

Eventually at 10pm, some of them left to One Utama for some Star Wars toys convention or something. Hilmy said it started at 10pm - 2am. Eventually around 11pm, the rest of us dispersed... well, most. <_<

Real Life Quake

As Ajax and Queen Amanra of Egypt gazes over the destruction of another Norse ally town, Kastor grips his sword tighter. He is eager to redeem himself of his past action. Beside him, his Ulfsark squad is busy building another tower for the impending battle. King Folstag and his frost giants stood by the pool to heal.

Over the hill, they can still hear the destruction as the Titan of the north and it's Norse allies destroy another building. Already some of the Norse troops are taking over the abandoned Town Center. Like wolves to the kill, they frantically build up...

A housemate behind me gave me a nudge as I sat in front of my pc, shaking my leg, awaiting the next assault on my base in Age of Mythology: The Titans Expansion.

"Hey Kian, can feel the house shaking ka?"

I stopped shaking my leg only to find, HOLY CRAP! The house is moving!
I then hear a loud sloshing noise coming from outside. With dread, another housemate and I peeked at the pool just outside our balcony.
There was no one in the pool, yet the water is sloshing left and right into the drain. It's like someone carried a huge basin of water, which is the pool, and swing it around.
Then, from the staircase, I can hear the sounds of many many slippers and sandals rushing downstairs.
The time was 12.30 am, Tuesday on the 29th of March 2005(Malaysia time).

Quickly, I grabbed my wallet and house key and roused my housemates and got them to get their butts downstairs. I never knew there were that many people in Cyberia before. :|


Picture courtesy of some guy in Block A1 who took the picture from his balcony facing the carpark instead of running out of the building when the tremor was felt like any sane person.

A few minutes later, a fire truck and a police car dropped by. The police ordered everyone to move away from the buildings and to the road outside the guard house. A few people managed to get their cars out of the building and parked outside... just in case. Then, the firemen donned their helmets (they look like those guys in Armageddon walking to the space shuttle singing "I'm Leaving On A Jetplane") and went into the Cyberia aparment blocks to check for any danger.

Meanwhile, I tried to call my family but the air waves were busy. My other housemate and I, who are working people, took short naps on the road side. Rumors flew about an earthquake in Sumatra and of tsunamis. The police loudspeaker blared a warning that all residents are to move away from the buildings and not enter it as they have a report of a possible second quake.

I only managed to call my family around 2am. Apparently my sister in Melaka didn't feel the tremor, either that or they were sleeping so soundly that they didn't noticed. In my opinion, a quake that's strong enough for us to feel it's effects that far inland, on high grounds is not something to be trifled with. Anyway, I'm glad that my family's ok and the house still intact.

After 3 hours and the gound not moving even a nanometer, the police allowed us back in with a warning to rush out if any more tremors were felt.

At 3am, still weary about the incident, I continued my AoM:T session that I paused before leaving the house. At 4 am and no untoward incident, I finally went to bed.


My 2cents on Age of Mythology: Titans
The story wasn't as good as the first AoM, but the introduction of new units such as the Atlantean race as well as new God Powers are kind of cool. The voice acting for some events that occured in the campaign, such as receiving a new God Power, is not very good. This time, the story revolves around Kastor, Arkantos' son who was the hero in the first game. He's become a man much like his father.

While his dad's watching the world from good ol' Mount Olympus, Kastor is tricked into fighting the Atlantean's old allies, namely the Greeks, Egyptians and the Norse.

Role Play

Arrrghh!!
My first post in March. AND it's almost at the end of March!!
It's not like anybody cares. ;p

For the past 5 weeks, I've been attending a Role Playing(RP) session. Most people who's familiar with it calls it Pen and Paper RPG. This is what all those RPGs that you've seen in games are based on.

The RP that we played was based on Dungeons and Dragons. There are plenty of other RPs that we could've played (Robotech, Vampire: The Masquerade, Demon: The Fallen etc) but our Dungon Master(DM), Ronnie, started off with something simple and one that noobs like us are familiar with.

You'd most probably say, nah, I don't do role playing. But as our DM said, most of us has role played at some point in their lives. Remember those times when you're young and you played Police Tangkap Pencuri(It) or Make Believe or having a tea party? These are games played by children where they take up the role as someone, be it a police catching a thief, superman, the host of the party etc.
RPs are like that except that you have rules to follow. This is to avoid situations like this:

Boy A: BANG!
Boy B: You missed!
Boy A: No, I didn't! I shot you at the head.
Boy B: Nuh-uh, I dodged it.
Boy A: You can't do that.
Boy B: Oh, yes I can.
(argument ensued)

I Am The LAW
The DM's word is law.
The DM is basically the story teller and refferee. And determines how the story will progress and if he should make your life easier or harder. In this modern day, some DMs have gone to great lengths to provide a more visualable content for their players, like this guy.

There are several die types ranging from a four sided die(d4) to a twenty sided one(d20). Each die is rolled for a different purpose. Though I'm not sure what yet (I need to read more about D&D rules). Suffice to say, we used the 8 sided die(d8) most of the time to determine the success or failure of a particular action.
(e.g. Valchrist did a spot check on the corridor, rolled a 1, didn't find anything, walked in and got attacked by a monster hiding in a corner).

I Made That Up
You can't start the game without a character to role play.
We are all given character sheets to create our character.
Then, we started with picking a race, class, skills, allignment(Good/Netral/Evil or Lawful/Neutral/Chaos) and rolled the dice to determine our stats (STR, CON, INT, DEX, WIS, CHA - I think you guys know what these means).

As we are noobs, we started off as Humans to ease calculations as you don't need to add the racial benefits when rolling the dice.
My character's a Neutral Good Human Cleric named Valchrist. Neutral Good means that I will do anything I can to help people in need whether I know them or not and would do anything to accomplish them. ANYTHING.

And then, we are off!
Here's the log of our first adventure. But since then, our scribe haven't added the logs of our other adventures. <_<