I was up until 5 am last night playing a new browser MMOG.

The Goonfather had recommended it to me early in the week but I didn’t have time to check it out until late last night. And then it wasn’t because I wanted to check it out. It was because I had no choice but to try the game in order to be able to talk about it in GGF.

Taking the alternative, that is, to make the Goonfather write a review for me, would have been disastrous. His review would have read like this: “Come play Civony and let me kick your ass. The end.”

Anyway, not too surprisingly, I got addicted to the game and was only able to forcefully drag myself to bed at 5 am by virtue of my game running out of lumber and rendering me without any moves left to make.

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Table of Contents

1. Civony — Another one of those time sinks
2. Time Wasters by Swordplay
3. Video Games Live comes to Singapore
4. Darkmoon Faire comes to Singapore, too!
5. Rag Doll Kung Fu: Fists of Plastic
6. Take part in XXZ League and win prizes
7. Results of last week’s contest
8. Win a Fifa Online 2 Kickoff Pack!!

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Civony — Another one of those time sinks

Even while writing about Civony, I’m playing it. It’s one of those irritating games like Travian, where you have to log in every so often to build stuff because your resources are produced in real time and they overflow and go to waste if you don’t use them.

Plus, if you’re not building and growing constantly, your enemies will surpass you and conquer your city easily.

When I was playing Travian, I had a browser tab open with it on my computer 24/7. Yes, literally.

Civony looks set to be the next permanent squatter on my browser.

The game is free to play, although rich perps have the option to buy perks in the game using real-life cash, a business model that web gamers have come to accept as the norm.

Players of Age of Empires and Civilization will be familiar with Civony. The game concept is similar, with the differences being that Civony is web-based, is massively multiplayer and doesn’t have timelines. You can form alliances and real-time text chat with alliance members to plot destruction against your neighbours.

And because the game continues while you sleep, you’ll form the habit of setting your alarm clock at three in the morning so you can wake up to build a farm.

For those unfamiliar with this genre of games, you’re basically building cities from the ground up, managing resources, villagers, buildings and armies, and then expanding your empire by building more cities or conquering other cities.

For a web game, Civony has a rather steep learning curve. There is some semblance of a tutorial system in place, but the “tutorial” throws you into the deep end within the first few minutes of gameplay.

In fact, I messed up my first city and couldn’t bear to look at it after a while, so I abandoned it and made another account to start from scratch.

It seems to be a popular game. There are already three live servers up, barely two weeks after official release. And there’s an active forum where you can ask for help or share information.

Of course, you have to be prepared to contend with the juvenile imbeciles who hog the real-time world chat. I normally just ignore them, but they can be quite entertaining sometimes.

Choice overheards:

“Press Ctrl-F4 to get instant 1500 lumber.”

“How do I save this game?”

“HOW CAN I GET A BOYFRIEND?!!”

“Is this all automated or are you all real people?”

And, just this morning, some retard spread the word that you can get free resources by typing in this particular cheat code. The entire chat got spammed.

Fives hours later, the chat was still full of people trying out the “cheat”.

Oh, and there’s one office-friendly feature some of you may be interested in. You can rename your browser header to anything you like!

Type in whatever you want…

Then, tadah!

LOL!

If you’re going to play the game, go to Server 3 since it’s the newest and players in there won’t have progressed too far yet.

The creation process is quick and painless. Just make sure to choose Server 3 and create your city in the state of Bohemia. That’s where the Goonfather and I are.

Send me an ingame mail once you’re in and I’ll invite you to our alliance!

Name: Sheyla (I had to ditch Sheylara to create a new account)
State: Bohemia
Server: 3
Alliance: Sheylara

Anyway we only started last night, so we won’t be too far ahead of you!

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Time Wasters by Swordplay

Swordplay is my pesky li’l bro who spends all his time playing time-wasting games. To make him a little bit more useful, I’m sitting on him and making him recommend one fun and simple web-based game each week.

Today’s Recommendation: Monsters’ Den: Book of Dread

What a great recommendation this is! But awful timing, considering that I’m currently hooked on Civony.

Monsters’ Den is a flash-based old-school RPG. I love these!

It’s one of those games in which you make a party of adventurers and crawl a dungeon. The battles are turn-based, which requires a bit of planning and strategy.

I love the way this game has been laid out because it feels like an interactive storybook.

You can name your characters. There’s even a way to customise your avatar so you can feel a bigger sense of ownership.

And then it’s lots and lots of exploration, killing mobs and finding treasure.

The map opens up as you click on rooms to walk to, which helps you keep track of where you’ve been and where you haven’t.

I like turn-based combat because it allows you to plan an entire battle ahead, kinda like playing chess, except that I hate chess because I hate planning ahead.

Okay, that doesn’t sound right.

Okay, well, chess is just boring.

Unlike RPGs, where you can make fireballs and such.

Anyway, in my first attempt of the game, my party wiped within 10 minutes because I think I took on the boss party prematurely.

Well, it was fun, anyway.

The game saves automatically, so you can go back to the page any time and it will pick up where you left off.

You can also have up to three saved games on each computer.

Great game, if you like old-school RPG.

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Video Games Live comes to Singapore

Who woulda thought?!

For the first time ever in Singapore, we’ll be able to catch Video Games Live, the largest and most successful video game concert in the world, with over 100 shows staged since 2005.

Together with the two-hour concert, there will be a festival of events, providing a total of five hours of spectacular gaming goodness.

Highlights of Concert

• Music from Mario, Halo, Final Fantasy, EverQuest II, Warcraft, Sonic, Metal Gear Solid, Space Invaders, Diablo III, Legend of Zelda, Kingdom Hearts and a lot more!
• Metal Gear Solid composer Norihiko Hibino.
• Award-winning, globally-acclaimed Video Game Pianist Martin Leung, who gained worldwide recognition by playing popular video game music blindfolded.
• Tommy Tallarico, video game composer who has worked on more than 275 video game titles and bagged over 48 industry awards.
• Jack Wall, who composed music for Myst III & IV, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, Jade Empire, Mass Effect and Rise of the Kasai.
• Audience interaction.

Check out this video of a VGL concert featuring classic 8-bit game tunes:

It makes me emotional to think about how far video games have come!

Makes me feel old, also.

Highlights of Festival

• Meet all the concert celebrities in person!
• Play old arcade classics such as Pac Man, Space Invaders and Donkey Kong.
• Game tournaments.
• Cosplay contest.

Tickets can be purchased at SISTIC with prices ranging from $55 to $115.

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Darkmoon Faire comes to Singapore, too!

If you’re a World of Warcraft player, you’d be well familiar with Darkmoon Faire, the monthly carnival held in Elwynn Forest, Mulgore and Terokkar Forest.

If you’re a World of Warcraft player, you’d be extremely excited to learn that the faire is coming to Suntec Convention Centre in May!

The Darkmoon Faire, apart from being an ingame festival, is also a real-live gaming event with tournaments and games for fans around the world.

It will be happening in Singapore from May 22 to 24 this year.

Expect to witness the first 3v3 WoW tournament in Asia, participate in WoW trading card and miniature games, mingle with cosplayers, buy WoW merchandise and play all kinds of fun carnival games.

Sounds like a great event to take the family!

Darkmoon Faire is part of Licence 2 Play, a massive gaming and electronics fair.

Some of the other highlights of L2P, besides Darkmoon Faire, are:

• The New Paper Cyber Challenge
• Asiasoft Game Festival
• Game’In School Competitions
• Cosplay Competitions
• Family Gaming
• Workshops for gamers and parents

Check the website for more details!

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Rag Doll Kung Fu: Fists of Plastic

How I wish I could play games all day. I’d spend more time mastering the moves in Rag Doll Kung Fu: Fists of Plastic because it is really fun and satisfying.

It’s a party fighting game which you can download on the PS3.

It’s also a very comical game. You’re a kung fu hero with wobbly joints, and you kinda look like a muppet baby as you jump around and whoop asses.

I love it!

But I must say that the tutorial is very overwhelming.

The different moves and combos use all of the buttons and triggers of the PS3 controller, including the sixth-axis.

For example, to execute a deadly blow that will reward you with cheesy canned applause, you need to press a button at the right moment, then shake the controller up and down very violently.

Here’s me playing the tutorial:

By the end of the tutorial, which has about 9,473 lessons, if I may exaggerate a slight bit, I could only remember the basic moves: punch, kick, block, heal, pick up something and throw it at someone.

And then I went right into the game proper.

The gameplay is fast-paced and humorous. If you’re a casual, non-fighter gamer, you would totally enjoy watching your boyfriend play it, because you can’t be bothered to memorise all the combos while at the same time manoeuvre yourself into positions to execute said combos.

But I actually played this myself, in the following clip. If I seem gimped, it’s because I am.

I think it’d be nice to have someone do all the hard work and I just enjoy watching the gameplay, but the Goonfather doesn’t want to play it. He’s into playing the Xbox 360 to unlock achievements recently.

Although I can’t speak for fighter gamers, I expect they would like RDKF: FUP. I would if I were one. I mean, I’m not one and I already love the game. Then again, that doesn’t quite follow.

Oh, well. Who cares.

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Take part in XXZ League and win prizes

Want to win Xbox premiums and gift vouchers?

Taking place every Sunday from April 26 till May 17, 2009, the XXZ League will feature “Pro” and “Fun” categories to suit your level of playing.

Held at both XXZs in Singapore (Challenger Funan and Best Denki VivoCity) concurrently, the games and timings will be roughly as follows (different dates will have slightly different times):

Halo Wars (1pm – 3pm)
Castle Crashers (3pm – 4:30pm)
Lips (5pm – 6:30pm)
Gears of War 2 (8pm – 9pm)

For more details or to register for the League, please e-mail xbox@in2.com.sg with the following details:

Name
NRIC number
Mobile number
Game: HW/CC/Lips/GOW2
Location: Funan/VivoCity

Good luck and have fun!

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Results of last week’s contest

The winners of four copies of the awesome Norton AntiVirus 2009 Gaming Edition are:

Dennis
CT
Aileen
Githias

Thank you for your participation! Please e-mail me to claim your prize!

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Win a FIFA Online 2 Kickoff Pack!!

This week, I’m waving around a box of FIFA Online 2 Kickoff Pack, full of goodies inside!

FIFA Online 2 is an online multiplayer football game serving the Asian region (Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia). Build your own dream team and experience authentic thrills of this favourite sport!

The Kickoff Pack includes:

• FIFA Online 2 installation DVD
• FIFA Online 2 Game Value Card ($10)
• 5 bonus stat-boosting items: Knee Tape, Wrist Tape, Bracelet, Goggles and Headband
• Entry form for Costa Sands “Share Your Passion” contest

Just post a comment here, indicating your wish to be included in the randomiser draw for the prize!

One winner only!!

Sorry, cos I only got one box.

May the luckiest reader win!

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I am not late! It is still Friday!!

Quite by chance one day, I was having a rare Plurk conversation with blog reader Stan and his friends when the discussion led to food.

It’s an interesting phenomenon you might have noticed. Internet conversations involving Singaporeans and/or Malaysians invariably lead to food. Or sex. Sometimes both at the same time.

In this case, it was food.

I was recommended this place called Ramen Santouka, located at Central.

This ramen outlet is supposedly the best in Japan. I was also pointed to a food review written by Mr Miyagi, who called it the best ramen in the world.

I think it’s been in Singapore for a year or so. How come I have never heard of it?!

Anyway, Mr Miyagi’s review was incredibly appetising, so I organised a ramen outing with my friends the following weekend.

It looks like a humble establishment, nestled in an obscure corner in Central, with a seating capacity of maybe 40 or 50.

Because they don’t take reservations, be prepared to wait in line if you go during peak hours.

The menu is rather limited. There’s something like four types of soup bases (salt, soya sauce, miso, spicy miso) and a few kinds of meat to go with the noodles. There are also a number of side dishes and rice dishes.

We all ordered a flavoured boiled egg each ($1) because it looked so good.

It is good! You must order this if you eat there!

Because the salt-based soup (shio) seems like the most highly-recommended, plus it is also award-winning, I ordered that, with the Tokusen Toroniku, a premium pork meat which sells out fast because it is that popular.

The meat comes separate from the noodles, I suppose because it’s special.

Minou and Kerrendor ordered the chashu pork and theirs came inside the noodles.

Maybe I had too high expectations from reading reviews. The soup didn’t impress me as much as I thought it would.

I said to my friends, “I prefer Ajisen Ramen’s soup.”

Immediately, protests came from Morte and the Goonfather, who had ordered the same thing.

According to them, Santouka’s soup is superior. Well, okay, it’s not that bad. But I wouldn’t die for it.

In terms of noodle texture, we all agreed that Ajisen’s is better, in that it’s more chewy and springy.

But the meat… OMG THE MEAT.

You cannot possibly imagine how meat can melt in your mouth until you’ve had a taste of this.

If I don’t remember wrongly, our set of noodles and meat costs about $15. And the chashu combo costs about $13.

The chashu is to-die-for, too, surprisingly. It’s as melt-in-the-mouth as the toroniku and has a taste reminiscent of very good kong ba (stewed fatty pork).

If I had to verbalise the comparison, the chashu has a more fatty taste while the toroniku has a more meaty taste. But both are equally tender and buttery.

While we all ordered just ramen, Wang Wang had to be special and ordered a combo set, which comes with a smaller bowl of ramen, rice and salad.

The combos are pricier, at over $20.

Wang Wang and Morte

Me and Minou

Honestly, I couldn’t personally say whether Ramen Santouka is the best in the world, seeing as I never even used to like ramen until I was introduced to Ajisen. So, obviously, Ajisen is my benchmark but I’m not even sure if it’s a credible benchmark.

Still, I would highly recommend Santouka for the pork slices and possibly the soup. While I wasn’t blown away by it, I enjoyed it enough. And the Goonfather liked it so much that he cleaned up my leftovers down to the last drop.

Definitely worth a try.

Ramen Santouka
6 Eu Tong Sen Street
#02-76 Central
Tel: 62240668

The websites that I favour are those that are funny in a clever way. That includes satire and comics and, generally, just stuff that are perversely humorous.

Not all the sites I’m going to mention are funny, but they all grab me in some way and stun me with their clever, perverse view of the universe.

Except the Lolita shop, which I included because I kinda ran out of favourite sites.

Continue reading…

Every so often, I get mighty sick of the way I look. It’s the same stupid hair, same stupid face, same stupid smile.

Even when I try to make faces so that it’s not the same stupid smile, it’s the same stupid face.

If I snap 100 photos of myself, I’ll delete 99 because they all bore me.

I think it’s mostly the damned hair.

I cut it barely two months ago and now it’s horribly overgrown again with that stupid boring heavy rebonded look!!

I think rebonding is going out of fashion. Which is a tragedy because I’m stuck with “rebonded” hair for life and people are going to think that I’m outdated!! Argh.

I feel like going for one of those hair show competitions as a hair model and see where fate takes my hair.

I remember my cousin, Monster, said to me before, “Whatever you do, don’t get a pixie hair cut!”

But that’s exactly what I’m very tempted to do now.

Once upon a time, I had this funky hairdo.

Well, it was only for a day. It was set and teased for hours at a hair salon for a photo shoot.

A couple of hours later, it went back to this shape:

Maybe a pixie cut would be better cos there’ll be less hair to weigh itself down, so styling might last longer.

Sigh! Decisions!

I will make one eventually, though. So… prepare to see a drastic change in me in the next couple of months. Heh.

It happened after lunch.

Lunch looked kinda cool but it was awful.

There’s a canteen in Bako National Park which serves a variety of rice, noodles and local dishes. For a few dollars, I think, you get a plate which you can heap with as much food as you want.

But the food was cold, hard and tasteless.

There’s like fish, and chicken and a few curry things, too, but I didn’t take any of them because they looked dodgy.

Or maybe I just wasn’t that hungry. I was hot and tired after a morning of climbing mountains and trudging through swamps, and sleepy after not having slept much for a few nights in a row.

But what happened after lunch woke me up.

Our two tour guides wanted to show us more creatures, such as cute monkeys.

Here’s a picture of Anastasia, our main guide:

I don’t have a picture of Alex, our secondary guide, which is just as well (and you will find out why, soon).

We were trekking around the chalet grounds. Yes, you can stay in Bako National Park. But I wouldn’t because it looks really creepy, the perfect setting for a horror movie.

The view from inside the chalet:

And you have scary neighbours, such as an exceptionally large sunbathing monitor lizard:

It trotted off after a while, probably realising that it had paparazzi on its tail:

I’m getting to the story.

Shortly after, we came upon a green tree pit viper. Alex found it first. I mean, it’s really amazing how our guides are able to spot camouflaged creatures a mile away.

We spent the next ten minutes furiously clicking our cameras at the viper, while Anastasia went off to look for monkeys.

We eventually got tired of gawking at the viper, which fortunately didn’t jump at us or anything like that. Alex said he’d take us to Anastasia, so we followed him down this walkway.

Suddenly, Alex let out a bloodcurdling shriek, jumped backwards very violently and started racing towards us, yelling all the time, like, “AaaaaH AAAAAHHH AAAAIIIEEEEEE!!”

Shocked, we all jumped back. I almost died of fright. I thought that maybe a hungry man-eating carnivore had strolled out of the forest in front of Alex or something like that.

He continued screaming and yelling and jumping as if a swarm of bees were attacking him.

Nothing was attacking him. We stood rooted to the spot in fright, waiting.

Anastasia appeared from the other end of the walkway.

“What happened?” she shouted.

To which Alex replied, very emotionally, “It’s a snake!! Arrghh! I hate snakes I hate snakes!!”

At this point of time, I burst out laughing. I was instantly reminded of that silly cult hit from years ago, Badgerbadgerbadger.

By the time I saw the snake, I didn’t have much time to take a good shot of it before it disappeared under the walkway. It was really quick!

Actually, what I managed to take was a photo of Javad and Lili taking photos of the snake.

To be honest, I didn’t dare to go too near.

After the snake disappeared and we all nervously sprinted past the spot where it was hiding under the walkway, we were able to have a leisurely laugh while Alex explained vehemently that he hated snakes and they gave him goosebumps and so on.

That was quite funny.

In the end, we didn’t get to see any monkeys. We heard them, though. But they kept running from us and we could never get near.

There are supposed to be silver leaf monkeys in that area. I found this photo in someone’s Flickr:

Cute, isn’t it?

Following this, just about five metres from the snake, we came across pretty red dragonflies.

Which was a nice finale to our Bako National Park outing.

No, wait.

Actually, the nice finale was finding out that high tide had ENTIRELY covered our dock, so there was NO DOCK from which we could take a boat back to the mainland.

That meant we had to walk through a beach and then wade out to a part of the sea deep enough for boats to moor.

The beach was very nice. We kinda hung out there to camwhore for a bit.

From left: Juraida, Lili, Sheylara, Nicholas, Wai Kit, Soh, Javad.

Nicholas wanted to do some jumping shots.

And then someone got the bright idea to do a group jumping shot!

We only did one take because we had to rush off to our next location.

Here’s the shot, taken by Javad!

The journey out to the boats was actually quite fun. We had to remove our shoes.

And everyone had to stop for a while because Nicholas and Lili wanted to camwhore in the water.

Deeper and deeper.

And deeper.

I tried to take a photo of my legs half submerged in the water, but it didn’t work very well.

Lili’s parting shot:

I have no idea what her expression meant. Maybe she was having a premonition of what was to come.

Because, a minute after this shot was taken, she fell into the water while trying to get into her boat.

LOL.

Well, she didn’t hurt herself, just got drenched. Hehe.

I didn’t actually witness her accident because I was at that time trying to get into my boat. I only found out when we arrived at the mainland and saw her dripping wet. Haha.

The journey back was quite uneventful. No crocodiles this time. Just a few playful dolphins too quick to photograph.

And that concludes my three-part Bako National Park report.

I wouldn’t have gone there on my own because parks are not normally my thing. But I was glad to have been made to go. It was truly an experience!

If you’re interested in paying a visit, more info can be found here.