Orientation 2007 Notice

I was (finally,) notified of what I am suppose to bring for orientation by my Orientation Group Leader after others seemed to have recieved the messsage before me. The call took 1.58 minutes (as indicated by my phone). Highlights include:

1) Commanding me to bring a piece of paper and a pen to note down something: Date, place, what to wear, amount of money to bring, that I should bring a bag, bas pass, stationary, my OGL name, and sub-OGL name, and the OGL’s contact.

2) No mention of the helpful VJC website, which has more or less EVERYTHING in the above list included (least OGL-related stuff).

3) Identifying me as an IP3 and NOT a JC1.

I thought that something like “please go to the VJC website at http://www.vjc.moe.edu.sg to check out what you need to bring” will be more efficient. But then, in the VJC website, the note had a header of “Attention all JC1 2007 students” and had NO mention of “IP3″. Maybe thats the reason why they told me 1) instead of telling me to go to the VJC website…. ….?

First Age of Empires 3 (The War Chiefs) game in ES0

A few months back, even before The War Chiefs was available, I tried to play in ESO but for some obsure reason failed; the game just hung when I tried to get into ESO. Nevertheless, I bought The War Chiefs when it came up and today I tried ESO. Miraculously, it didnt hung up on me, however, there was an update/patch which I had to install. After installing it, the game HUNG again: alt-f4 didnt work, ctrl-alt-del didint work, neither did alt-tab, nor the mouse… virtually nothing BUt the cold reboot. After that, it worked smoothly.

In the first game, I “advertised” myself as a “noob” (which I think I might be considered as since this was the first time i played in ESO) and played a 1v1 against another player (level 8). I used the Ottoman, since it is one of the best (personal opinion) against computers. the other guy used the Iroquois. Being a noob, I lost. But this was the best “first-time-lost” ever. I think the worst was in Empire Earth (Art of Conquest), where I was building an economy in a mid dm game (jargon alert!); almost just as worst was when in Command and Conquer Generals where the enemy rushed us like free…

At least this time, I put up a worthy fight (I hope). I lost mainly because I never played with other human players for AOE TWC before. Against computers, you can just up your Ottoman to 45 civs and win… but not with humans! Apparently, after the game, I checked the statistics and realised that he practically had TWICE as much food as I had (80 000+ vs 160 000+). No wonder he could produced the Aenna (archer) as if it was free (it came in the hundreds every 5 minutes or so I think). Looks I need to increase my pop limit when playing Ottoman next time…

The second reason was that I took a risk that did NOT pay off. I tried to reach age 5 instead of building an army. In fact, just before he sent the army that killed me, I had 3000+ food and gold, and just a few minutes late and I would have advanced.

Now for the third reason, I think it might be because of my Empire Earth (AOC) onlline gaming background. I used to play dm (deathmatch), which means you start with tons of resources, enough to build at least an army right at the start of the game. However, in AOE ESO, I played the “supremacy” style, which virtually means you start with few resources and build all the way up. Moreover,in EE AOC, I usually play the medival age (which had no gunpowder units) only, which means I never need to deal with upgrades related to age advancement. This is unlike the game I played, where I set the starting age to be “1″ and the ending to be “5″, and hence the necesity of advancing.

Looking at the positives, I managed to reach level 5 after only one game. This allowed me to get some upgrade cards, of which I find the card which delivers the factory being the most important one.

So much for my first game in AOC TWC ESO, the experience was great, the game was fun and it looks like I would be going that once every so often!

Slime and the VJC website

If you play any “original” slime games (e.g. from http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bartle/), you might experience a weird lag that is not caused by double buffering. Apparently, if you experience, you can try opening the VJC website (http://www.vjc.moe.edu.sg/), and amazing, the lag stops. My guess is that your internet security blocks certain access to java (that causes the game to run faster) if you open a slime game. However, if you open the VJC website, access is granted to Internet Explorer, and hece the java loads faster. This a a random guess…. anyone has a better explanation?

Atomic Bomberman

Introduction:

Atomic Bomberman is a simple PC game developed by Interplay in 1996 that involves using a character (your bomberman) to set up bombs to kill your opponents (other bombermans). You can pitch yourself against the computer or another human 1v1 or play team matchs of up to 5v5. Alternatively, you can do free-for-all for all 10 players. The bombs explode into flames extending only in the X and Y directions, and there are powerups available to upgrade your character and bombs (expect for poison, see below).

Game Play:

Genre: Action

Number of players: One limitation is that while it supports up to 10 players, only a maximun of 3 can be humans, of which 2 share a single keyboard while the third needs a joystick controller. Most unfortunately, joysticks are quite rare and thus the game is usually limited to 2 human players only. Maybe they should support controls for keyboard up to 4 players (yes its a bit crowded but its better than nothing).

Level of difficulty: It is simple to play but not necessarily easy to win (especially against expert players and computers): It is simple to play in the sense that your only keys you need are up-down-left-right (arrow keys), one for placing your bombers and a last one acting as an “action” key (explained below; it is difficult in the sense that if you really want to be an expert, you need to be able to combine different powerups, which might be difficult to control.

Winning: You decide the number of matches a player needs before the players wins the game. E.g. if i select 3 victories, then a player have to win 3 matches (not necessarily consecutive) before he/she/it wins the game. You win a match by blowing up all your opponenets.

Graphics:

Bomberman: Top of the pack for 1996, but not worth mentioning in 2006. At least the bomberman look 3D and the powerup symbols are rather colouful. For your bomberman, ther are 10 different colours for you to choose from (since there are 10 players). Alternatively, in team play, you can change all the colours of your team to either white or red (for easy identification), with the opposing team being the other colour left. This is a very useful feature in trying to differentiate your allies from your enemies especially if you like to play games with many players, e.g., 5v5.

Bombs/ Flames from bombs: They correspond to the colour of your bomberman

Background: The background are not too distracting while looking cool enough to allow you to play long hours without getting bored of it. There are 11 backgrounds to choose from, plus one option which will random choose a background each game (so you dont have to face the smae background again and again). Note that the random map option does not choose from all 11 maps but only from 9 maps. I am not sure whether this is done on purpose or it is a bug.

Version reviewed:1.0

Conclusion:
This simple but challenging game is worth a try, expecially if you are bored from high-tech games and super-realistic graphics of todays games (wonder how this sentence will look 10-20 years down the road….). While playing against the computer may prove to be difficult at first, you would soon get used to th computer’s style of playing and realise that actually, it is not really that hard to beat them if you exploit their weakness. I recommend trying 5v5 (with you being one player and the other 9, computers) to practice any new strategy you have. Playing against humans are much more rewarding and you can look forward to enjoying a whole afternoon playing with your friends bomberman.

About Atomic Bomberman/ References:
htp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Bomberman
http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/atomic-bomberman

Moving from wordpress.org to wordpress.com

My first post after I have finally suceeded in migrating from wordpress.org to wordpress.com! Things were very rocky right from the start:

1) I completely FORGOT that I had already registered at wordpress as “chewtianwei”. This was because I needed the API to activate my askimet for my wordpress.org blog. Thus, when I tried to register (remember that I forogt) as “chewtianwei”, wordpress states that the username was taken. I should have been more alert when they told me that my gmail (which I tried to use for registration) was already in their database.

2) I told my friend about it my username being taken up and after some miscommunication he thought that the blog address (chewtianwei.wordpress.com) that was taken up. So he tried to sign up for “chewtianwei.wordpress.com” and was therefore successful. He tried to delete but failed (fortunately, if not this is gone forever) and I am thankful to him for transfering the blog to me.

3) So he was willing to transfer the blog to me and I still needed a username. Not knowing where it was possible to transfer a blog or not, I signed up for a second username “chewtw” and “chewtw.wordpress.com”.

4) I was ready (so was my friend) to transfer my blog but then miscommunication happened again (all thanks to msn, or rather my expression:D). After I told him I was able to sign up for “chewtw” he thought that I couldnt sign up for “chewtw” because I had much problems with my email receiving the activation. So he told me to sign up for a THIRD username, “ctw1990″, which went successfully.

5) After making clarifications, he transfered “chewtianwei.wordpress.com” to my “chewtw” account.

6) I tried searching wordpress.com and wordpress.org forums and faq for help on how to transfer from wordpress.org to wordpress.com but I couldnt find any. So I posted a post in the forum entitled: “Moving from wordpress.org to wordpress.com” (got my inspiration from similar posts like “moving from wordpress.com to wordpress.org”). http://wordpress.com/forums/topic.php?id=5723&replies=8

7) After a successful migration over to “chewtianwei.wordpress.com” from my old blog, I was quite contented. but then I went to check my gmail again because by logical deduction:

a)
Premise 1: WordPress claims that my gmail account had already been registered with them
Premise 2: WordPress always sends an email to a user’s registered email account to confirm activation
Conclusion: WordPress has sent an email to my gmail account to confirm activation

b)
Premise 1: WordPress has sent an email to my gmail account to confirm activation
Premise 2: All wordpress activation-confirming emails have the username and password to the user
Conclusion: The email wordpress to my gmail account would contain (and hence tell me) my username and password

Of course, I vaguely remembered that I had registered for wordpress.com just to get the activation key for my old wordpress.org blog’s askimet.

8. My deduction was right, and so after transfering, “chewtianwei” has one blog and that is “chewtianwei.wordpress.com” and “chewtw” has one blog and that is “chewtw.wordpress.com”

Special thanks to all who have made this migration successful:

My friend Cleaven: http://icebubble.wordpress.com/
People in the forum (mark, boles, sunburntka): http://wordpress.com/forums/topic.php?id=5723&replies=8
Everyone else who indirectly helped