Sometimes, I feel like the male prototype in my relationships because I’m usually the practical, geeky one who prefers to stay home and play games rather than engage in romantic activities, indoors or outdoors.

But that’s not to say that I spurn romance. I have done a lot of romantic things for my partners but the truth is that gaming appeals to me a lot more than, say, a candlelight dinner under the stars.

I think this arrangement suits the guys I’ve gone out with. I have a soft spot for geeky gamer types so there’s usually no problem with my gaming obsession. But, surprisingly, the gamers I’ve gone out with have all displayed a capacity for romance which probably exceeds mine.

Continue reading…

Hey, did you know that today marks the start of the Dating Violence Awareness Week (DVAW)?

I didn’t. Until two days ago.

I received an invitation to attend the launch event by an NTU undergraduate named Carmen Lee, who seems to be the media rep for this campaign.

Unfortunately, I can’t go, but I want to support this worthy cause, so I’m shouting out about it.

Launch of Dating Violence Awareness Week
Date: Sat, Feb 7, 2009
Time: 1 pm to 6 pm
Venue: Tampiness Mall, Level 4 (Open Plaza)

Yeah, it’s happening right now.

There will be freebies, a jigsaw competition, Bodyshop makeovers, dance and band performances and other stuff. Check it out if you can drop by… at such short notice.

Dating violence happens when a partner uses force or pressure to abuse the other partner sexually, physically or psychologically in a dating relationship. The frequency and the severity of the abuse usually increase as the relationship continues.

Some startling facts in Singapore:

• From 1999 to 2004, 58 people were killed by their spouses, boyfriends or ex-lovers.
• A 2003 survey showed that 15 to 30 per cent of secondary and JC students polled have experienced family or dating violence.
• In 2004, it was reported that one in five university students had physically assaulted a dating partner over a year.

DVAW campaign video:

I hope DVAW will go a long way in helping address this social problem. Perhaps victims will not feel so alone and, hopefully, find the courage to leave their abusive partners because it’s just not right to allow another human being to physically abuse you for any reason.

There is a better person out there waiting for you!

If you believe that you might be a victim of dating violence but aren’t sure, read this to find out the warning signs.

Check out the official campaign website for more info.

Well, okay, let’s all support this cause and help make the world a better place!

February is a very exciting month (which translates to busy for me).

Apart from Valentine’s Day, which is totally irrelevant to today’s column but is being mentioned for the sheer fact that it just so happens to also fall in February, we’re looking forward to all the many games releasing this month.

Plus, and more excitingly, we’ll be experiencing big game launches for three big titles in Singapore, namely Halo Wars, Ninja Blade and Street Fighter IV.

There are so many activities planned for this month I’m getting dizzy sorting through all the info.

But I managed to sort through everything (huzzah) so read on to find out what’s what.

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Table of Contents

1. Halo Wars
2. Ninja Blade
3. Street Fighter IV
4. Funtown Mahjong
5. Lips – Grammy songs
6. Results of last week’s contest
7. Win a limited edition UNSC Spartan vest!!

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Halo Wars

The popular Halo franchise comes in RTS (real-time strategy) format for the first time!

To be launched on February 26 (Japan & Asia Pacific. Yes we get it before the Americans and Europeans do), Halo Wars is already getting ahead with a slew of pre-launch activities.

Here’s a summary. See if anything catches your fancy!

1. Play Halo Wars demo free at E2MAX Feb 14-22
2. Halo Wars tournament at E2MAX Feb 21-22
3. Singapore’s Biggest Halo Fan contest, now on till Feb 22
4. Halo Wars pre-order available till Feb 19
5. Halo Wars demo now available for download on Xbox LIVE marketplace

If you need more details on anything, they’re all here.

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Ninja Blade

Ninja Blade is flying your way on Feb 12! Have you tried it yet? If not, get your butt over to XXZ this weekend! (Feb 7 and 8, Best Denki VivoCity and Challenger Funan.)

There will be Ninja Blade demos and free play, as well as guest appearances by Xbox Xpert Merdeka and a special Ninja mascot!

Merdeka’s looking very cute deadly at the bottom of the poster.

More details here.

Ninja Blade pre-order is still availabe at XXZ until Feb 8. Get your Ninja Blade letter opener quick!

Also, take note that there will be launch activities at both XXZs on Feb 14 and 15.

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Street Fighter IV

Street Fighter IV is also launching on Feb 12! How lah! So many games!

If you’re a Street Fighter fan, you don’t want to miss a thing!

Free SF4 calendar

From Feb 12 to 28, show XXZ staff a copy of your SF4 game, or purchase a copy there on the spot, and receive this cool calendar!

SF4 Launch

Go to any XXZ on Feb 14 and 15 to enjoy launch activities!

XXZ is at Challenger Funan and Best Denki VivoCity.

Digital Life party

Digital Life and Microsoft Xbox Singapore are hosting a party on Feb 14 for fans. You’ll get to play the game with other fans and win prizes! This is an invite-only party! You need to send an e-mail to get an invite.

Win an Xbox 360 console and SF4 games

One Xbox 360 and five SF4 games will be given away to lucky winners in an SMS contest. Details here.

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Funtown Mahjong

I just downloaded this game from Xbox LIVE Marketplace. It’s so fun! I can’t wait till more people download it too so I can play multiplayer instead of playing with the cheating AI. (Well, they always win just before I’m about to win big!!)

The game is very Anglicized. When characters throw out cards, they will announce the cards in English names. For example, “Bamboo 4″. That takes a bit of getting used to.

Even the tiles are Anglicized, although you have the option to change them to traditional tiles.

The gameplay is a little bit different from the mahjong I’m used to. The rules are roughly the same, but this is 16-tile mahjong (whereas in Singapore, we usually play 13-tile mahjong).

That means your play strategy has to be slightly modified. For instance, there is less time to build very exciting big combinations. The game ends a lot faster since everyone gets three extra tiles in the beginning, meaning there are less facedown tiles to open up.

The above is a Chinese New Year special background which I downloaded for 200 MS Points. It’s pretty cool. The original background looks like this:

And you get to choose which cutesy AI opponents you want to play against.

I really dig this game, although the 16-tile gameplay annoys me because I like building big cards.

Still, it’s a very nice “break time” game to play for when I only have 10 or 20 minutes to spare.

And I think it’s a good game for beginner players because there’s a fully guided tutorial on the rules of mahjong, and the game seems to encourage a play strategy of “anyhow build your tiles just to win fast”, which is the strategy that most beginners adopt.

Drop me a note if you download this game. Let’s play together! =)

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Award-winning songs for Lips

Lips launched late last year with quite a sad selection of downloadable songs.

But over the months, the list has just been exploding, with three to six new releases every single week.

I think now would be a really good time to buy Lips if you haven’t already.

Available from today are three new Grammy Award winning songs:

Fallin’ – Alicia Keys
In My Place – Coldplay
Building a Mystery – Sarah McLachlan

And coming up next week:

Buttons – Pussycat Dolls
Magic – Olivia Newton-John
My Happy Ending – Avril Lavinge

Yowza!! Siiiiiing! Sing a sooooong! Sing out louuuuuud! Sing out strooooooong!

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Results of last week’s contest

Dominic wants an IAHGames iCash card to buy Expert scrolls and Enchantment boosters and +7 his weapon to make it bling.

VERY WORTHY GOALS, MY FRIEND!

So, Dominic wins a $10 IAHGames iCash card! Congratulations!

Please e-mail me to claim your prize, thanks!

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Win a limited edition UNSC Spartan vest!!

I suddenly have a lot of stuff to give away!! But one at a time, eh?

This week, I’m giving out a very special exclusive item which I have kept since 2007.

It’s a limited edition vest that was given out as part of the Halo 3 launch campaign in Singapore in 2007.

I thought this might be a timely thing to give out, while the search is on for the Biggest Halo Fan in Singapore.

It’s still brand new, never been worn before.

To win this, I need from you:

1. 3 reasons why you need the vest
2. 3 reasons why you deserve the vest

Please post your reasons here. I will pick the most convincing, sincere, heartfelt, touching entry. In case there are too many convincing, sincere, heartfelt and touching entries, I will get Mr Randomiser to help me decide.

Closing date is Thursday, Feb 12, 2009, 11:59 pm.

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Phew! Mission accomplished! A winner is you!

Four months ago, I saw a casting notice inviting actors to audition for a Mandarin gangster movie set in 1970s Singapore. I sent in my resume and photos and was shortlisted to audition for the role of the main female character.

That was good news, except that I was tasked to prepare a Mandarin monologue and dress up in 70s fashion.

I had never done a Mandarin monologue in my life. I had no idea where to look for a piece I could do. It should also be noted at this point that my Mandarin is as bad as my English is good.

(I can speak Mandarin very fluently and accurately if you give me the words to say. Otherwise, I’m a complete mess.)

It should also be noted that actors are supposed to spend months rehearsing monologue pieces to get good at them.

So, I had about two weeks to prepare for this scary audition and the butterflies in my stomach very obligingly kept me company throughout my ordeal.

I even contemplated calling it off, so stressed was I of not being able to live up to it. But I really wanted a chance at the role, so I rang up an actor friend for help.

I asked him where I could find Mandarin monologues. He said he’d lend me a book of short plays. At his earliest convenience, I went to pick up the book from him.

First challenge overcome. Next came the greater challenge.

I had to read the book in order to find a suitable monologue (or at least a dialogue I could modify into a monologue).

I figured that it would take me five minutes to read one page and 36 hours to read the entire book. It was written by some literary luminary in a level of language which I feel would be more suited to people studying advanced Chinese literature.

Well, I didn’t have 36 hours. At that time, I had just returned to Singapore after filming in Malaysia and was busy wrapping up filming in Singapore as well as preparing for X08, the biggest ever Xbox event.)

I had to quickly scan all the lines spoken by relevant characters to try to pick something out. Long story short, it took me about a week to find my monologue and try to read the whole play that the monologue came from to get an understanding of it.

After that, I only had a week left to rehearse. And to find a costume. All that during one of the busiest periods of my life.

I rehearsed it as much as I could (which wasn’t enough), did some Googling on 70′s fashion trends and managed to get my costume one day before, and finally arrived at the audition bright and early, as prepared as I could manage.

The dress cost me $65. I bought it the day before the audition. I wasn’t even sure if it was “correct” but it was the best I could find.

It’s now sitting in my wardrobe and I’m wondering what to do with it. I don’t think I will dare to wear it out on a normal day because it’s so loud.

The audition started off with a short chat (in Mandarin, no less) with director Kelvin Sng. He’s a very friendly and jovial guy, which made the process a lot easier to get through.

After the chat, I had to do my monologue. I think I did it really badly. I just can’t do monologues. They’re totally unnatural!

And then an improvisation session. I was put opposite actor Vincent Tee (who has appeared in several local movies) to act in a scene briefly described on the spot by the director.

I think I did that even worse because I had to improv in Mandarin and the words wouldn’t come out, so I basically came across in the scene as some half-mute person.

I knew what I wanted to say but I had no words for what I wanted to say. Haha. If only I could have done it in English. But that wasn’t the point of the session, I guess.

I think the audition was a total disaster, which was quite disappointing after all the effort I had put into it. But then this happens quite a lot to me so I’m used to it by now.

And, in fact, sometimes I get jobs out of disastrous auditions and sometimes I don’t get jobs out of auditions I think I did so well I would have hired myself on the spot.

So, you can never tell.

Three weeks after the audition, I received an e-mail informing me that I had been shortlisted again to attend a callback audition. (That’s like the second round of auditions.)

That was quite a shock, but a happy one, of course. I had a chance to redeem myself!

To be continued…

While going through my old photos for my latest Star Blog entry, I turned up quite many possible photos but some didn’t make the list because I could only choose 10 memories.

I’ll share some of them here!

The Indian Years

One year, my friends and I were quite into Indian culture and would visit Little India to buy Bollywood movies, eat, and shop for Indian traditional costumes.

One of those friends was also my colleague, and we decided to wear our Indian costumes to our company dinner and dance that year. The dress I’m wearing in the picture is a lahenga. I really liked those because they look like princess dresses!

We were both nominated for the Best Dressed Award that night but my friend was too shy and refused to go up on stage, so I went, and won the award! =) It was one of those win by applause thing. Lucky my department was rowdy enough to garner enough noise for me, haha.

The Grunge Years

This was during more tomboyish, grungy times. I was very into heavy metal and boots. Hmm, I still am now, lol, but not as much.

San Francisco

I was attached in Silicon Valley for a month for work, but also managed to be touristy. The photo above was taken in a disco.

We were driving around somewhere one night and decided to swing by a disco for fun. I can’t remember who brought us there but we found this disco which turned out to be a rip-off.

There were people sitting outside collecting entrance fees (US$5). When we went inside, we were taken through several rooms that were under construction and then finally ended up in a main dance hall. It was EMPTY. There were no customers. There was only a DJ spinning some stupid music and the staff.

We stayed for 10 minutes and then left. lol.

Some random sightseeing photo.

People playing chess in the street.

Osaka

I was in Osaka, Japan, to cover the opening of Universal Studios, but I can’t find those photos now. =( The only photos I can find are those taken at Nara Park, a tourist attraction featuring hundreds of free-roaming deer.

They’re so cute (but smelly) and were allowed to roam even into the carpark! The deer in the picture just happened to be posing beside the carpark sign. Heheh.

Melbourne

This is the famous “sinking library” sculpture outside the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne. Okay, it’s a really badly-taken photo. But it’s still a cool spot!

Younger Days

My younger days, wearing too much lipstick.

Even Younger Days

My even younger days, when lipstick wasn’t needed.

Aww, how I miss my entire life! =)