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. <_<

2nd Kyu in Aikido

I had my Aikido grading.

For the uninitiated, Aikido is a Japanese martial arts that uses and redirects the opponent's attacking energy back onto themselves. Aikido's techniques are very practical in real life situations and are used for disabling and/or disarming an attacker and can be quite lethal if you really intend to hurt the attacker. Aikido means "The Way of Harmony".

The grading system goes like this:
6th Kyu (n00bs)
5th Kyu (university/college n00bs start here)
4th Kyu
3rd Kyu (where I was before)
2nd Kyu (where I am now)
1st Kyu
Shodan/1st Dan
2nd Dan
3rd Dan
4th Dan (the highest rank you can get from grading, the other ranks are given as honors - current highest rank in Malaysia is my instructor, Low Sensei)
7th Dan (Steven Segal sensei)
8th Dan (Seiichi Sugano Shihan* who is the Shihan* for us)
*Shihan - a master's master


Our grading involves doing techniques as the instructors grading us tells us to do.
All this is done non-stop for both the uke(attacker) and nage(defender).
In the 5th Kyu's case, they have to do 6 techniques before they can pass. In their case, it takes roughly 15 minutes per person to finish his/her technique which means for 5th Kyu graders, they are doing techniques for 1/2 hrs non-stop.

In my case, 2nd Kyu grading has about 40++ techniques...
Lets just say, it's like running a marathon carrying 30 Kg backpacks with no water for 10km. Aikido really trains your stamina during grading. O_O
We did the techniques roughly 30-40 minutes per person. Which is about 1 hr non-stop.

I'm glad I managed to pass. Now, I'll have to prepare for 1st Kyu. :p

My Life (Or Lack Of One) - New Year

LayZee virus alert!!!
Yeah, I've been infected... for a long, long time already.
No updates for... how long? And I think I stopped half-way through my view of Online Games.

Went home to Melaka for the Chinese New Year.
My family always gather around my Grandma's house for any family gatherings.
We had the usual yee sang and the reunion dinner.
(No photos for now, not until I get my hands on my own camera phone... :D )

Too bad one of my cousin's studying in UK and can't make it back home.
Didn't know that Chinese New Year is not a holiday in UK.
He still had to go for classes.
We did use a webcam and chat with him through yahoo, though.
Looks bright and sunny over there... go figure.

I got reminded of how hot Melaka is normally is.
The only nice thing to do in the afternoon is to lie down in bed with the windows wide open and let the breeze lull you to sleep (FYI - this always happens to me when I was lying down and studying in my high school years, I always end up sleeping... hehe >:) )
Every night, I'd go to sleep and wake up with sweat on my back if I don't put the fan speed to 3 at least. It's really hot, and I wonder if it's gotten a tad hotter.

Online Gaming

Ok, here's my second post.
I havent been posting because I'm busy with work.
And of course I'm a bit new to this blogging thing (which is another excuse for being lazy).

I'm really into online games. Design-wise, that is. (I play any kinds of games).
For one thing, it's all the socializing. Offline games lack this, even with multiplayer options available it still pales in comparison with what online games can offer.

Socializing
And contrary to what people believe, online games help PROMOTE socializing compared to socializing in RL. Gamers are NOT the social recluse that most people think.
Hey, how often do you see a guy in real life going up to a stranger and says, "Hey, wanna hang out together?". More often than not, they'll think you're some kind of nut.
Fact is, in real life, when talking to total strangers, people might shun you because of the way you look (you're fat, skinny, too ugly, race, skin color, clothes, I don't like the way his ears look etc).

But in online games, all of these visual cues are eliminted.
You can go up to a person and say"Hey, Priest, lets party and go levelling" and he'll just think, "(hmm... a Knight), Sure, why not?" And this is the norm. Whatever differences you have in the real world is put aside.

And you will always have a topic of discussion, "Hey, have you seen that huge monster in the new patch?" Having a common interest also helps in socializing. I mean you don't go up to a football fan and talk about basketball. The other guy'll lose interest and you'll find that your conversation is hanging or one sided.

Game Types
There are many terms used when mentioning online games. Some call it Online Games (duh), Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) or Persistent State Worlds (PSWs). All these acronyms can be confusing so, I'm going to explain a bit about them.

Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) are just a subset of MMOGs.
These kinds of games normally have players selecting a character, selecting a class/race/faction, he usual levelling up your character by level grinidng, quests, item/weapon/armor/mobile crafting etc. (E.g.: Ragnarok Online, World of Warcraft, ROSE Online, Maple Story, Ultima Online, Everquest, City of Heroes etc). These are the most abundant and what most people think when you say MMOG.

But there are other types of MMOGs around. They don't require you to level grind or adjust your stats etc. These kinds include A Tale In The Desert, There and Sims Online.

We also have another kind of Online Games where many people may be online at the same time but only a few play the actual game together. These types are normally casual online games. Meaning, people come, play awhile when they are free and leave. Not much commitment needed. Such games include Gunbound, O2 Jam and Survival Project.

In my opinion, all these games are also known as PSWs because no matter what happens, they still exist. People will still play them for a long long time, until the developers decided to pull the plug on the game, that is.

The there's the lesser known web-based online games. Most of these games are text and are strategy type yet many people still play them. Examples include Utopia, Earth 2025 and Archmage.




Ugh... I've rambled too long. :p
Gomen gomen.
I'll continue more on my thoughts on online games another time.