My Mandarin has never been as bad as it is now. I mean, it has always been bad — I was a chronic F9 case in school — but it’s really bad now, if you can imagine anything worse than F9.

I can do very basic conversations like, say, discussing a shopping trip with the girls, if I’m allowed to pepper my speech with English words.

But ask me to be interviewed in Mandarin, on national TV no less, and I am suddenly struck dumb. I mean that quite literally.

That was actually what happened last week.

I received a call from my manager:

“Channel 8 news wants to do a segment on POCC (Power Over Cervical Cancer) and they’ve requested to interview you in your capacity as POCC ambassador.”

“Um… um… in Mandarin??”

“Yes.”

“My Mandarin is very bad. I can’t do it.”

In the end, I was talked into doing it. I would be given the questions and a list of key terms I would need to use in Manadrin.

On the night before the interview, I received a list of six questions. I typed my answers out in English and attempted to translate it.

It took me an hour to translate just the first two lines because I couldn’t figure out how to structure my sentences correctly. I had about 35 lines to translate.

First: “Cervical cancer kills one to two women every five days.”

The only way I knew how to say it was: “每五天,子宫颈癌杀死一到两个妇女。”

Well, at least my Mandarin is good enough for me to know that THIS IS VERY BAD MANDARIN.

For my non-Chinese readers: What I did was a literal translation almost word for word. But what results in Mandarin raises an imagery more like: “Cervical cancer picks up a chopper and hacks one to two women to death every five days.”

Simply put, very crude.

Here’s another example of my butchery of the Chinese language:

“The earlier people know about this, the more lives we can save.”

My translation: “如果大家越早知道这个消息，就会越少人死。”

If you can read that, you now understand why I rejected the interview right off the bat.

Actually, I wasn’t even aware that my Mandarin had degenerated to this degree. I had eventually agreed to do the interview because I believed if I could prepare my answers beforehand, I would be able to do it.

It was only when I was attempting to translate my answers that I realised my Mandarin is now effectively 87 keys short of a piano.

I finally sent out an SOS on Plurk, Twitter, Facebook. I received lots of good translations for the two sentences above. But no one offered to help me translate all 35 lines of my answers.

Thankfully, I managed to get a friend to help me. By the time I received the two pages of translated answers, it was midnight. The interview was the next day. And I’d only had two hours of sleep the night before so I was rather exhausted by then.

But I had two pages of Chinese to memorise. It wasn’t simply a matter of remembering the points. I had to memorise everything word for word because, if I were to answer in my own words, I would come out with something embarrassingly rubbish like: “POCC 希望会有两万个人去他们的网站支持他们和子宫颈癌打架。”

I didn’t have enough time to memorise everything so I had to wing it and hope I didn’t look too bad.

If you happen to watch Channel 8 news this Sunday, and you see me stuttering on TV and looking quite bimbotic, you know why.

To compound matters, my laryngitis had not totally recovered, so I was still sounding rather hoarse.

Maybe with clever editing, Channel 8 will manage to make me look halfway decent, but I’m not too hopeful about that.

Look, I think my Mandarin is even worse than Ris Low’s English. So that’s why I never laughed at or criticised her. We can’t all be good at everything!

In any case, I think I’d better not accept anymore interviews in Mandarin. Or I’d better go back to Chinese school.

Now I hope I won’t set POCC’s efforts to reach out and save lives back by a millennium because of my disastrous Mandarin.

I mean, I hope people won’t see me on TV and say, “She sucks,” and then not watch the rest of the segment. Lives could be lost because of that!

Seriously. I’d feel really bad!

Anyway, it’s this Sunday (July 11), 10 pm, on Channel 8. I don’t know what time the POCC bit will be aired but it’ll be a short segment. Around five to 10 minutes.

I don’t think I’ll dare to watch myself.

I just received the PDF for my Stuff interview spread, so here’s how I look uncreased.

I have to admit that that looks pretty nice.

The problem is that no one will know except you who are reading my blog now.

Because whoever picks up the magazine from the newsstand and flips it open to my page will see THIS:

Woe is me.

Click here to read the interview.

Am in the March issue of Stuff Magazine.

Showed my friends.

First comment: “Why they make you look so fat?!”

O_o

How how how… if people think I look fat, who will wanna read my interview?!

I guess I shall have to depend on my loyal readers here to read it. Will post up the interview if I can get the PDF. Cos my legs are cut by the binding so it will look odd if I scan the spread.

Alternatively, you can buy a copy of Stuff magazine. I will be writing a monthly column starting next issue. Really, I think it’s a good magazine with good reads even though I look fat in my interview pic.

Okay, back to work.

Busy week this week! Will try to tweet more so follow me on Twitter!

I’ll show you one today, starring… me.

I’d talk more about the shoot but I’m outside and don’t have all my photos.

In fact, I’ve been more or less out for the past three days, which the more astute of you might have discerned if you’ve been coming here faithfully every day expecting to see new entries but instead seeing that dodgy picture of some blackish soup.

A close friend’s mum just passed away and we’ve been over at the wake. I’m now blogging from there because, no matter what, life goes on.

I’ve always feared the day I would lose a loved one. I always wonder how people cope but I suppose we cope, eventually.

Have a good Sunday, all.

I could never stop being a gamer.

Now that I don’t have time to play serious games, I find myself compulsively playing stupid kiddy games, such as Facebook games, which I mentioned last week.

I almost feel ashamed of myself.

I also recently downloaded a bunch of free iPhone games just for days when I’m caught with nothing to do outside and I didn’t bring my DS.

Last night, in bed, I decided to play Lemonade Tycoon (!!!) on my phone for 15 minutes to make myself sleepy so I can fall asleep.

I ended up spending an hour on it but it didn’t feel like an hour at all. It felt like 15 minutes.

I had to lock my phone in the bathroom to force myself to sleep.

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Table of Contents

1. Heroes Over Europe
2. Time Wasters by Swordplay
3. Sheylara goes to GCA 09
4. Forza Motorsport 3 video
5. Results of last week’s contest
6. Win a limited Forza 3 2GB thumbdrive!

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Heroes over Europe

A review by the Goonfather

I have always wanted to get into a cockpit and get entangled in chaotic dogfights.

I have tried playing games such as Wing Commander, Strike Commander, F15 Strike Eagle III, Falcon 3.0 and F-22 Lightning II, but gave up after a couple of tries. You need to have attended flight school for a week just to make sense of the controls in these games.

So it was for that reason that I stopped buying flight combat games despite being sorely tempted with each release.

Then, one day, I found a copy of Heroes Over Europe sitting on my desk, courtesy of Sheylara. I hesitated a little. To be honest, I still have an unwrapped copy of Blazing Angels which I bought more than a year ago.

But thanks to the forceful persuasion Sheylara, I finally relented and played Heroes Over Europe over the weekend. My first impression of the game was: “Wow! Easy controls!” There are no gauges to bother with and the controls are as simple as those of FPS games.

The gameplay is less of a flight simulator and more of an arcade shooter, which will appeal to players looking for a fun game rather than a realistic flight sim. There’s the regular “chase, aim and fire” tactic to take down the enemy, or the ace kill mode.

When your meter charges up, you can go into Ace mode where time slows down and you can zoom in a great distance to see in magnified detail the enemy pilot, gunner, engine and ammo container. You will need to hit one of these vital spots to one-shot the plane. (Bigger planes may require two vital spots to be taken.)

There is also a nose dive tactic, in which you’re required to dive straight down at full throttle while firing at the enemy. Damage is maximised in this stunt.

The storyline seems messy and weak as the game takes you to different missions in different areas. The story revolves around three pilots, each out to become a hero of the skies during the WWII era. I just skip the stories and go straight for the action, which is addictive enough as it is.

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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.

This week: Vox Populi, Vox Dei (a werewolf thriller)

Description: An adventure game about heartbreak and werewolves! Sneak up on werewolves and tear them apart with your bare hands, leaving a trail of pixelated blood.

Gotta love the description!

Vox Populi, Vox Dei, by the way, is a Latin expression meaning “The voice of the people is the voice of God”.

I don’t know what that has to do with werewolves and heartbreak, but it’s a cute, simple side-scrolling game.

Here’s what the pixelated blood looks like.

Yes, I caused that bloodshed, evil me.

You get to pounce on werewolves then hit Space Space Space (see the signboard behind?) to liquefy them. You can actually see the blood spurting out and dripping.

How do they manage to make 8-bit games so gory?

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Sheylara goes to GCA 09

I went to GCA 09, as y’all know, shot some footage and did some interviews.

Here’s the video after much procrastination. (I really dread editing videos cos it’s such a tedious process!)

I mainly just went around the Xbox 360 booth, so you’ll be seeing mostly Forza Motorsport 3 and Halo 3 ODST.

Actually, you’ll be mostly seeing me suck at playing the two games.

I also had a chat with The Great Ian Livingstone (Life President of Eidos, founder of Games Workshop, author of Fighting Fantasy books).

He has a new Fighting Fantasy book out, called Stormslayer. A few other popular titles in the series have also been revamped and republished, with more colour and in B4 size.

I’m also hearing that some FF titles will soon be available on the iPhone and DS, like around Christmas! Gasp!

I digress.

Other interviews in the video: John Wendl (Content Director of Turn 10, for Forza 3), Erik Ford (Regional Senior Marketing Manager, Xbox 360) and the two Forza 3 booth babes!

Forza 3 is looking really great! The demo is out now on Xbox LIVE, so go check it out!

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Forza Motorsport 3

Oh, yeah, I think I haven’t shown the Forza videos here, yet. (I have too many channels for gaming news to take care of, these days. I get confused.)

Check this out. It will make you so want to play the game!

Forza Motorsport releases on Oct 23, 2009, exclusively for the Xbox 360.

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Results of last week’s contest

These exclusive GTA t-shirts are going to three lucky people!

Amazingly, Mr Randomiser picked NNNW, bryan and Piers!

Congratulations! You three are getting the awesome tees!

Please e-mail me to claim your prizes. (Prizes not claimed after two months will be returned to the giveaway pool.)

Thanks!

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Win a limited Forza 3 2GB thumbdrive!

I was going to keep this for myself because it’s beautiful and it’s 2GB!

But after some thought, I decided to be nice and share it. I’m sure some Forza fan out there would love to have this.

This thumbdrive is one of the goodies that come in the Forza Motorsport 3 Limited Edition game.

To win this, tell me how much of a Forza fan you are. The person I think is the biggest fan will win.

Terms & Conditions

1. Winners will not be notified. Please check the next issue of GGF for results and instructions.
2. Prizes not claimed after two months will be returned to the giveaway pool!
3. Closing date is Oct 8, 2009, 11:59pm.

It pays to be a fan!

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Back to the topic of iPhone games, Nanny Wen recently introduced me to this game called Tap Tap Revenge 2. It’s also free. It’s a music game where you tap on notes as they fall.

By the way, I only download free games on the iPhone. It’s like that. When you give someone something free from the start, they find it hard to pay for the same, subsequently.

That’s why I haven’t attempted to purchase the paid version of the game even though I really enjoy it, and it has only a few songs in the free version, and iPhone games are actually really cheap (value for money).

You gotta wonder what’s wrong with people.