Title from a conversation between James Vega and female Shepard, my new favourite pairing.

010412
21SA, Combat Medic
250 days to ORD

Today I finished Mass Effect 3. Should warn you that, just like my Gears of War 3 review, there will be

MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD. IT'S ALSO REALLY DAMN LONG. REALLY.

ME3 picks up quite a while after the second instalment in the series. Been a few years since Shepard destroyed the Collector base, and she and the crew of (as well as the ship itself) the Normandy have been grounded for killing a shitload of batarians and destroying a mass relay.

Or so I think. See, the problem is that you have to have played the ME2 downloadable mission called Arrival to understand it. But from what I gather, at some point (I don't know whether it was before or after the Collector base) Shepard discovered the Reapers were going to invade from dark space using the Alpha Relay. So he/she (henceforth "she" because I play a female Shepard) crashed an asteroid with a batarian colony on it into the Alpha Relay, destroying it and buying the galaxy some time, but at the cost of millions of batarian lives. So she's sent to stand trial, and after that, grounded. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.

So ME3 starts as the Reapers invade Earth, and Shepard goes around recruiting forces from all over the galaxy. Much smaller supporting cast than from ME2, because BioWare said they wanted to focus more on character development. Makes sense. Also makes the Normandy feel a lot less like a menagerie. And a lot of mainstays from ME return if they're still alive, such as our very own Tali'Zorah vas Normandy, Liara T'Soni, Garrus Vakarian, and Ashley Williams/Kaidan Alenko, depending on who you left to die on Virmire. Naturally I always rescued Ashley, because I found her far more interesting than Kaidan, and besides there was always so much homoerotic tension between her and my Shepard.

Before I go any further, I am obliged to add that if you don't have an import from ME2, you will miss out a LOT of bonus stuff in ME3. I lost the two Shepards I had from the first two games due to my idiotic hard drive crashing. It's extremely frustrating to know that you had a catalyst that would have changed the outcome of a scenario drastically, only it used to be yours because it was a different Shepard.

If you import a save and have a lot of people survive the suicide mission, especially if you've done their loyalty missions, you'll be assaulted by a bevy of familiar faces. Kasumi helps you spy on a fellow Spectre behaving suspiciously. Thane is your only safe inside man on a Cerberus-infested Citadel. Zaeed saves the volus ambassador in a tense Mexican standoff. Legion leads his "people" in the underground resistance against the Reapers. Wrex is busy uniting the krogan under the banner of Clan Urdnot. Grunt heads the most decorated krogan unit in history. You find Samara hunting down her last two daughters. Jack trains the best and brightest human biotics in the Grissom Academy.

You don't see any of this without an imported save. It kind of ticks me off, knowing that all my crew survived the suicide mission.

Anyway. There's a lot of good in Mass Effect 3, unsurprisingly. It's had two stellar games before it (pun not intended, and "stellar" also being highly subjective), and it's got the BioWare pedigree.

For one, the combat is slicker than ever. It feels more like Gears of War in the Mass Effect universe, which is a very good thing. Instead of your movement being confined to running around stiffly with weapon outstretched, you now have a whole slew of moves, most helpful of which are the combat rolls. You can perform SWAT turns across a doorway or roll from cover to an adjacent piece of cover. You can climb over low cover as you always have, but tapping A twice rapidly, interestingly, allows you to vault it swiftly. There's a whole separate animation for it, which I was very pleased by, probably more than is appropriate.

Also, storming no longer has a stamina meter, allowing you to sprint unhindered across the battlefield. Very useful when fighting enemies who like to close in for melee, i.e. Husks or Brutes.

But the best part of the whole thing is, they finally, finally, FINALLY got the weapon mechanics right. I practically cried with happiness when I found out the basics of the whole thing. In Mass Effect, you carried a pistol, shotgun, sniper rifle and assault rifle, but could only use a weapon effectively if you had "training" in it. You could play an Adept and use an assault rifle, but you wouldn't be able to zoom in with it, so you might as well be pissing at anything you were trying to hit. It was a dumb system that restricted most of the classes to using pistols.

Mass Effect 2 made that whole deal significantly better by, believe it or not, simplifying it. First, the sequel was responsible for the introduction of the personal defense weapon, the SMG. This gave the non-combat classes like the Adept, Engineer and Sentinel much more in terms of close-range automatic firepower. Furthermore, ME2 introduced heavy weapons, like grenade and missile launchers, and had to be replenished on ammunition picked up from crates. Heavy weapons replaced grenades, which were highly useless anyway. Bio-amps and omni-tools could no longer be modded or replaced.

Weapons themselves fired differently; instead of cooling down, they used disposable "heat sinks" as ammunition that had to be picked up from enemies. The weapon selection was far smaller, restricted to two or three weapons of each type, but the differences were tangible. Like between the Avenger, which was a fully-automatic, low-damage, low-accuracy bullet hose, and the Vindicator, which was a high-precision, hard-hitting three-round-burst battle rifle.

Armour, instead of being separate sets entirely, was separated into helmet, chestplate, greaves etc, with each component having options made by different manufacturers, that would give you different bonuses to health, or weapon damage, or shielding, etc. This allowed you to mix and match.

Also, classes were restricted to using only the weapons they were trained in. So only the Soldier would carry all six weapons, while Infiltrators and Vanguards would carry a heavy weapon with an SMG, heavy pistol, and sniper rifle or shotgun respectively.

It was good, but I was kind of peeved at the fact that I still couldn't use any weapon I wanted with maximum effectiveness.

Then Mass Effect 3 came along and kindly allowed you to pick any weapon you wanted -- with a great condition that the more powerful the weapon, the heavier it would be, thus increasing the time it took for your powers to recharge. This forced you to choose between pure damage output and versatility of your powers, and in my opinion, could not have been implemented any better.

Grenades were brought back, but in the form of a class-specific power, just like biotic or tech or combat powers. They'd have to be scavenged from ammo boxes to replenish their supply, but they were far more powerful than the grenades in the first game, and applicable.

Armour pieces and weapon mods remained the same, but this time each weapon was further upgradable to reduce its weight and increase its damage output. Furthermore, while upgrades were universal across weapon types (like how an assault rifle shredder mod would be usable on all assault rifles simultaneously), you were limited to two mods per weapon at a time, forcing even further consideration of tactical options.

Further deepening the melee combat, aside from a basic combo system, is the inclusion of heavy melee, which is, in other words, the much-loved omni-blade. Holding down the melee button allows Shepard to fabricate a blade from her omni-tool and slice whatever's in her way. It takes a while to charge up, but against frozen, stunned or burning enemies at close range, it's an amazingly effective tool. A particularly nice touch is how it differs from class to class; Soldiers flick it out and stab it directly into an enemy's face. Engineers summon a fist of fire and focus it into an explosive punch. Infiltrators have theirs wreathed with electricity, slashing it upwards vertically to slice an enemy in twain.

While not particularly useful, a very, very cool touch is that you can kill enemies with your voice. I don't mean that Shepard became the Dovahkiin and could send enemies flying with a fus ro dah!, but rather, the Kinect will recognise specific voice commands that you give, and carry them out.

Of course, simply bringing up the power menu and pausing the game is much easier, but there is a magic in screaming "Garrus, Overload!" as a Phantom swings her sword at you, and watching a burst of electricity stumble her. Then your omni-blade flares into existence, and it's all over for her. Or as you infiltrate a suspiciously dark corridor, you whisper "James, shotgun." And he replies with a "Got it", stowing his Revenant to draw his Eviscerator.

Mass Effect 3 has its combat down pat. I really believe BioWare got it to perfection in their final game, with the ultimate balance of gunplay and powers. Now that's how you do a RPG shooter.

One of my main complaints about the Gears of War series was that Cliff Bleszinski always promised "bigger, better, more badass" with each passing game. Yeah, it fulfilled it, and indeed more and more with each game, but the problem with that is that everything that used to be threatening became so underwhelming.

The first Gears of War really gave you the feeling that you were fighting a guerrilla war. All you had was the rifle in your hands and your buddy by your side. All you could do was run from the Brumak. Even the Corpser was killed via environmental means, as much of a pushover as it was, and the Berserker fights were either dependent on the environment too, or access to the Hammer of Dawn.

Gears of War 2 has you kill several Brumaks, the Riftworm, a Leviathan, three Corpsers in quick succession, and the Hydra, with another Corpser and a final Brumak at the end of the game. By the end you half expect Marcus Fenix to tear his skin off to reveal a set of green MJOLNIR armour underneath it.

Gears of War 3 alleviates it slightly, by genuinely making the bosses difficult as hell, such as the Lambent Berserker and the actual honest-to-God Brumak, kind of bringing back that guerrilla feel. But Gears of War 2 was the black sheep of the lot.

Mass Effect 3 ups the ante without feeling like it's trying too hard, which Gears of War 2 definitely did, the latter pandering far too much to fan request. The scale of ME3 is even larger, taking you to the homeworlds of the asari, the turians, the krogans, even Earth. These are places you know from the previous games but have only dreamed of going to. You've heard of the lush jungles of Sur'Kesh, and the elegant architecture of Thessia.

And then suddenly you're there, desperately trying to garner support from the races all across the galaxy, trying in vain to stop the immensely powerful Reaper fleet from razing worlds to the ground. The sheer gravity of it all hits you as you watch fire consume entire continents from orbit. These are the cradles of civilisation, the birthplaces of the races that now rule the galaxy, and for all their technology, an unspeakably powerful cosmic force has stepped in, crushing them with an unstoppable hand of fate, with nary so much as a thought.

This is the immensity of the scale of Mass Effect 3. By the end of the game you have the entire galaxy at your back, all unified against an ancient threat. The fleets of all intelligent races are awaiting your command, destroyers, frigates, dreadnoughts, carriers, as numerous as the stars around you. Asari next to salarian next to krogan next to turian. The gravity of what you've achieved, rallying an entire galaxy under you, is simply boggling.

And yet, at the same time, you're still made painfully aware that you're just one soldier in the ground war, with just a rifle across your back and a thin layer of kinetic shielding between life and death. You may be a Council Spectre, a Commander in the Alliance Navy, a graduate of the elite N7 program, Saviour of the Citadel, but you're still only human. And as you watch shell after shell slam into the smallest of the Reapers with earth-shattering impacts, only to leave it completely unscathed, the futility of your resistance threatens to sink into your bones; threatens to make you simply give up.

Almost at the very end of the game, this point of human frailty is driven home with a cold finality. The Reaper defending the Conduit is down, but it has taken a staggering number of casualties with it. With their forces depleted to the barest minimum, Hammer strike teams make their last, feeble push to the Conduit, determined to power up the Crucible and finish off the Reapers.

And then Harbinger, multiple eyes afire, swoops down, releasing an unearthly, mechanical screech that signals the crack of doom, throwing up a geyser of dirt with its landfall. You sprint towards the Conduit, a heavenly pillar of blazing azure light. You run for all you're worth, feet pounding across shattered ground, rifle in hand, praying for humanity, praying for all life in existence that you'll get there in time. All around you, vehicles roar into life, and other soldiers bark out frantic orders, running for their lives. It's a desperate race against time.

And then Harbinger's main weapon discharges.

Immediately a whole line of armour is reduced to flaming scrap metal. APCs' and rovers' plating might as well be rice paper. Screams fill the air as men are immolated, roasted, charred in another beam. Entire swathes of Hammer forces are incinerated in the blink of an eye. Yet you still run, breathing hard, arms and legs pumping, heart pounding in your ears.

The next beam Harbinger spews engulfs you in a sea of red.

You come to as the rain spatters your face, comms surprisingly silent save a single voice, quietly asking if there's anyone left, yet already knowing the answer. Slowly, painfully, stiffly, you stand, and the camera lets you see yourself in full glory. Your armour is scorched and warped. Blood leaks from your nose and ears, oozes from gashes on your face, pours down your body in crimson rivulets. The skin on one arm is flaking off in blackened chunks. The other arm is an unrecognisable mess of fused metal and burnt flesh.

It's immensely gruesome, but shocking. You're like an angel with butchered wings, forced to heavily limp the last few metres to the Conduit with only a Carnifex pistol left as your sole means of defence. You gun down a few husks attacking you, only to be surprised by a marauder, which catches you in the shoulder with a stray bullet. Shepard screams in pain, a wild, desperate cry, before raising the weapon and angrily loosing off a volley of rounds, tearing the marauder apart.

Admittedly, fighting off the husks and marauder made me die more than any part in the game, since you die with one hit and you move so damn slowly but the initial impact was intense. No other game (only Halo: Reach comes close) has captured that same feeling of desolation. Now THAT was truly epic.

And the gravity of the decisions you make really hits home; in particular, two of them. The first concerns the turians, salarians and the krogan. Bitter at the sterilisation of their entire species by the former two, the krogan agree to help the turians defend Palaven if they reverse the effects of the genophage. You can choose to, ending a feud that has raged for centuries, but potentially letting a second Krogan Rebellion happen. Or you can choose to lie and pretend that the genophage has been cured, but have to live with the knowledge/fear that one day the krogans will discover the truth. The latter also forces you to kill an enraged Wrex in self-defence when he finds out.

The second is even more nerve-wracking, regarding the war between the quarians and the geth. On Rannoch, you discover that the geth were only acting in self-defence, and that the quarians were the aggressors of the war. Upon the Reaper's death, Legion discovers a way to enhance the geth populace far beyond its capabilities, just as they were under Reaper control, but as the geth fleet is currently locked in combat with the quarian fleet with no way to disengage, you have to decide: do you stop Legion and let an entire species of innocent cybernetics be exterminated? Or do you let Legion go ahead, and watch the complete and utter extinction of the quarian race?

The stakes only get higher in Mass Effect 3, and the winner takes all.

The characters in ME3 are somewhat less detailed as their counterparts in the previous two games; most of them are recycled, true, but I found it slightly annoying that BioWare didn't quite put in the same amount of effort to animate interactions with your squadmates in the Normandy. True, there are times where you glean important snippets of information from them, or have a heart-to-heart conversation, but these can be easily overlooked because the game doesn't "lock" you into a conversation.

And since I got the Collector's Edition, I have the special content called From Ashes, which adds Javik, the last Prothean, to my team. Slightly disappointing, however. Javik is an interesting enough character, but his design is lazy at best. EDI mentions in ME2 that the Protheans underwent extensive genetic rewrites before they were turned into the Collectors, but Javik is really just a Collector with a different coat of paint. I was hoping for some kind of a more interesting look.

Where Javik really shines is his superb voice acting, and his interactions with Liara. For one, I was extremely impressed with how BioWare very subtly gave him an African accent. In the same way that Africa is the cradle of humanity, so were the Protheans the sowers of the seeds of life. Made a lot of sense to me.

His dialogue with Liara and the evolution of their relationship dynamics are highly interesting. Liara starts out as an excited student, but over time gets more and more dismayed with Javik's arrogance and fatalism. Post-Thessia, upon the realisation that the entire asari religion is a lie, Liara, close to tears, nearly tears him apart with her biotics, only for him to retort that the Protheans saw the asari as the species with the most potential, thus bestowing on them the greatest gifts, hoping they would realise their potential and rise up to be the race to overthrow the Reapers.

And speaking of Liara, it's quite startling to see how characters have changed over the course of three games. The scientist starts out as an innocently happy, if slightly shy individual, before evolving gradually into a cold, calculative soldier, unafraid to kill to get the job done. Ashley was a gung-ho soldier, a point-and-shoot kind of girl, who's suddenly tossed into the storm of politics, and struggling to stay afloat. Not often you get to see a level of characterisation like that in a game.

Of course, the game has its downsides. With the inevitable comparison to Gears of War 3 again, I felt that the game requires you to have done a wee bit too much reading to fully understand and appreciate the nuances of the story. There were a lot of references to the books I haven't read, like Kai Leng's involvement with Cerberus, and Paul Grayson as an experimental human-Reaper hybrid. I'd taken a spin through the Mass Effect wiki prior to playing the game so I was up-to-date on the fluff, but I was still a little irked at its exclusivity. Not as bad as Gears of War 3, but still bad enough.

Also -- and I'm not sure whether it's a good or bad point -- I didn't really feel the pressure of time whittling down. I had the freedom to run around and pick up artifacts from distant worlds, have a drink in Purgatory, visit people in hospital, take pictures for newspapers... And meanwhile, the Reapers are laying waste to systems across the galaxy. It was all a bit surreal, and slightly disappointing that they didn't manage to fully encapsulate the urgency of the situation. But I'm glad they didn't force a timer on you, like, say, Majora's Mask or Pikmin. That would have made it extremely annoying instead.

At the same time, since they were slightly lax about the time frame, I was annoyed with the new planet-scanning mechanic. Basically, it's the same as ME2, but in order to reveal hidden resources in a system you have to fire off a pulse, which has the added effect of attracting Reaper attention. This severely limits the number of times you can scan for resources before the Reapers notice your presence in the system, and you have to fly away from them as they begin to invade (the noise to announce their arrival will make you crap your pants in fear). A bit better of a risk-reward system, and far more realistic to boot, but I kind of wish I could explore systems with a bit more impunity.

As for the much-discussed ending, I... was surprisingly alright with it. I can't think of a way that it could really end any differently honestly. The most technologically enlightened race in the galaxy, the Protheans, were wiped out by the Reapers. The current cycle of civilisations wouldn't stand a chance. So it's either the galaxy goes down taking as many of them with them as they can, or the developers pull a deus ex machina out of their arse. So they went for the deus ex machina.

In the end, the Crucible docks with the Citadel, and after talking to the Catalyst (which is actually a Reaper AI), you have the choice of whether to control, destroy, or synthesise with the Reapers. If you control them, you send them away, and Shepard's physical body dissolves. If you destroy them, the mass relays explode, and Shepard is supposedly killed in the blast. If you synthesise with them, you get vapourised by a huge honkin' energy beam, but everybody is happy.

However, whatever ending you choose, there IS this hugely unnecessary scene in the end that shows Joker trying to escape from the pulse of the explosion, and failing. Then they crash-land on this planet teeming with verdant plant life. Everybody steps out into the sunshine, smiling and happy. And you, the player, are just going "What the hell?"

Aside from that it all seemed fairly ok, but recently Jeremy showed me this theory that suggested, very compellingly, that Shepard was indoctrinated all along, and the final events of the game were simply hallucinations brought on by Reaper psycho-conditioning and blood loss.

If that's true, BioWare successfully pulled off the greatest trick in gaming history since Samus Aran took her helmet off. But there's also a danger that BioWare will release the endings as DLC, which will possibly simultaneously be the lowest point in gaming history.

In spite of the hugely ambiguous ending, the rest of the game definitely merits at least a 9, to me. Simply excellent.

Posted via m.livejournal.com.

100412
21SA, Combat Medic
241 days to ORD

You know, an unexpected part of what I really enjoy about army is my ability to eat Khong Guan biscuits.

I was just telling Tim this the other day. Usually mom's in charge of getting snacks in the house, whatever little there are. Occasionally, yes, she does cave in and buy things like Lay's sour cream and onion, but those are still fairly high-class. Other things she buys are (off the top of my head) Jagabee potato snacks, dijon mustard/sea salt and vinegar Kettle Chips, this weird-ass Australian brand of chips that come in sea salt and vinegar, honey soy, or lime and black pepper, and FairPrice house brand thick muruku. "For your father," she says about the last one. "He likes it with his beer. Otherwise I wouldn't eat it."

The best is when she buys big packs of Doritos, in good, classic flavours like Nacho Cheesier or Cooler Ranch. Reminiscent of the "extras" we could've bought after recess in Valley Ranch. Not the newfangled shit they're coming up with nowadays -- I tried a pack of Grilled Basil Chicken, which was a sorrowful mixture of strange and disappointing. Not outright bad, just... oddly sorrowful.

Or when she gets Tostitos Scoops! and a jar of salsa. Not the restaurant-style chips, those are so salty they kind of burn my mouth, sans any kind of salsa.

First problem about my mother's snack choices is that the primary potato chip is Lay's. I... dislike them. They are substanceless. Pringles have this strangely satisfying dry, dusty crunch, almost more like a cracker than a chip, while Ruffles is the dreadnought to the Pringles frigate, loaded with flavour and sinfully oily. But Lay's are like tugboats compared to the other two, wisps of potato drenched in oil and salt that don't give you any fulfilment out of eating them. And when you eat more to make up for it, you just feel guilty, suddenly realising the grimy slickness of oil on your fingers and lips.

And don't get me started on Kettle Chips. To me, they are essentially overpriced, slightly healthier Lay's that don't even have the full-bodied flavour of them. They may make you feel all hoity-toity when you're eating them, like "Oh yeah, I'm eating classy potato chips, only shitty", but afterwards you're just unsatisfied. I bet their primary purpose is to serve as a side to a sandwich, which would make a lot of sense to me, since they seem to taste better that way.

But the foremost issue is that all those snacks are fairly high-class, see. There's nothing cheap about them. I think I didn't inherit my mother's taste buds, because she's really into all these bourgeois foods. Yes, I do like some of them, like when we dine out at some Italian restaurant, but when I get down to snacking, I daresay I'd rather take a pack of Twisties or Mamee (shit, I love Mamee). Monosodium glutamate never tasted so good.

Mom's only biscuits are either these weird things called Waterthins which taste like dust, or Meiji crackers. Now Meiji crackers are pretty damn awesome. They go well with anything. Put Nutella on 'em, or ham on 'em, or a spread of ricotta cheese, and it'll still taste good because they start off salty, but they break down fast to become sweet in a jiffy.

But even Meiji crackers taste weirdly refined to my palate. They taste so clean, it's ridiculous. You can have one and it'll leave no trace of it ever having existed. It's like spending the night with a beautiful woman and waking up alone in the late morning to find the sheets undisturbed next to you, dust particles floating in the sunlight streaming through the window, and the curtains rippling in the cool breeze. Very typically Japanese.

But a Khong Guan, now that's different. Khong Guan isn't a specific kind of cracker or biscuit, per se. It's a manufacturer. But they make biscuits that are somehow imbued with nostalgia. They have this "homey" feel that just can't be replicated anywhere.

I remember during my driving course, the STK instructors lugged over a huge tin of sugar puffs, which everybody immediately fell upon and devoured within three hours (having discovered them on that fateful day, I have about five packets sitting in my bottom drawer now). Or in the EMT course, after our final 8km route march, Danial smuggled a whole package of lemon puffs up to the bunk, and we feasted on artificial citrus paste between flaky crackers late into the night. At least, until lights-out at 2230, so it really wasn't that late, but you get my drift.

They aren't delicate at all, whatever kind you eat. There's no finesse that goes into a Khong Guan biscuit. Whether it's lemon puffs, or chocolate cream crackers, or sultana biscuits, or those Oreo knockoffs that every biscuit company seems to manufacture by the truckload, they all taste cheap.

But there's a certain charm in eating them. It's almost like a heritage, like a part of my childhood I rediscover every time I bite into one. Or a forbidden fruit -- in this case a biscuit clumsily laden with sugar and dry cream, something I eat to subconsciously rail against my mother's regime of healthy, high-quality foods.

Whatever the actual reason may be, I love Khong Guan biscuits.

Day 59, EMT Course
141211

All lectures this week. It's a brief respite before crunch time -- death by combat phase. Thankfully it's only two weeks, but I'm so not looking forward to it. My only consolation is that the weeks are short, since there's Christmas in between. Still, though, can't help but think of combat route march, buddy lifts... All that jazz.

Anyway, recently I was just wondering about my family values, and whether they're different from most people's. Well, no. Not my family values per se, but just my upbringing. Maybe it's due to being brought up in two countries, or maybe my parents just found a unique blend of parenting that suited them (and my siblings and I) the best. There are a lot of things that I do that other Singaporeans don't, but I'm pretty sure there are a lot of things I ditched from Texas too.

Like, say, spitting. I've noticed a lot of people just hawking and spitting everywhere they go. They'll just step up to an empty grass patch (and sometimes they won't even bother doing that), lean forward like some mythical dragon of lore, and release a projectile of bubble-filled sputum and phlegm, spattering noisily into the grass or on the metal grilles of a drain cover. Then sometimes it's not very accurate and it oozes down in between the gaps, gravity smearing it everywhere.

Now, I don't know about you, but that's bloody disgusting.

Seriously, after meals here, a bunch of guys just cough up and let loose. I never walk on the grilles outside the cookhouse any more specifically for this reason. And here I thought us medics were supposed to be hygienic.

What pisses me off even more is the people who spit on urinals, on trashcan ashtrays, in stairwells, at bus-stops, everywhere. It's not like Shanghai where every inch of exposed pavement is a minefield of spit, but it's bad enough. Just seeing a gob somewhere is enough to turn my stomach.

Obviously, I was never taught to spit. Maybe I was just a helpless kid who didn't even know basic bodily functions, and hence couldn't hawk up a good gobbet even if my life depended on it, but my parents never taught me anything about spitting. My mom doesn't, and dad does it strictly in the sink. Even then, he does it discreetly, and makes sure to wash it down the drain.

Speaking of doing things in the sink: there are a lot of people who wash their mouths after they eat. Sure, makes sense. Food particles lingering in the mouth is never a pleasant feeling, and washing the mouth helps cleanse the palate. But washing your mouth doesn't entail spraying the entire contents of your mouth all over the sink, admiring your handiwork, and walking away. Wash it down the sink, dammit. Nobody wants to see what you ate for lunch. It's not like a culinary Where's Waldo.

There's a lot of things I get very annoyed at, regarding general civic-mindedness -- and most of them involve public toilets. I mean, people blow their nose or spit and leave it there, or they wipe their boogers on the mirrors or side of the sink, or due to their penis having a mind of its own, they spray pee on the toilet seat and just leave it to dry.

The pee-drip one particularly cheeses me off, especially if I need to take a dump. There's a saying, "no matter how hard you shake your peg, the last two drops go down your leg". I believe that needs to be revised to "Your little brother -- even if you shake him, you're gonna get some on the rim". Yeah, everybody's done it, dripped the last few drops of pee on the seat. So put up the damn seat.

And for the rim, for goodness' sake wipe it off. I know nobody sits on the rim. But it's still gross to see a few perfectly isolated droplets of mysterious liquid there, because you know exactly where the hell it came from. And you don't wanna sit on anything that has fluid that came from another guy's wang.

It makes sense to be annoyed at these people, of course, but looking at it from another point of view, I wonder: do they think it's ok to do all this, or do they just not care?

It extends to smaller, less body-oriented things too: holding the door open for people, which is something people tend not to do here. Clearing your tray after eating at a fast-food restaurant. Thanking the service, and wishing them a nice day. Or, say, calling a stranger "sir" or "ma'am". I don't know, that's generally part of Southern hospitality, but apparently here "uncle" and "auntie" have the same cultural significance. To me, though, "uncle" sounds slightly offensive. I always call my friends' parents "Mrs. X" or "Mr. Y" because to me, it sounds more respectful than, you know, "uncle". See, if I was still studying ELL this would've made a pretty good example to link to a case study.

The other day I was doing guard duty with Sergeant Wei Ping, an engineer specialist, and as my sergeants left one by one, I wished them a good morrow and that they'd enjoy the weekend ahead. Most of them just kind of waved and smiled awkwardly; some said the same to me after doing a double-take.

"That's the trouble with us," Sergeant Wei Ping sighed, turning to me after noting down another license plate number. "We're so used to ignoring each other that when somebody's actually nice to us, we don't know to react."

And my parents are a strange, eclectic mix of east and west, having been exposed to Western culture just as much as I have. Before you ask, no, I don't have to call my parents "sir" or "ma'am", or do I have to salute my dad in the morning and ask for permission to carry on sir, thank you sir. But they're not typical "tiger" parents, nor are they completely Americanised either.

They're fairly ok with me going out; they're just concerned with me eating meals at home, and what time I'll be back. At 11 on the dot (he IS a military man after all), if I'm still out, Dad'll give me a call to ask where I am, and when I'll be back.

They forbid me to smoke, take drugs, have sex before I'm married, or get any tattoos, which is all fine by me. They're alright with alcohol, though; they'll even pay for a cocktail if I go out with them. Heck, the first (and only) time I came home bordering on drunk, Mom thought it was pretty hilarious. I don't club, so I don't know what their views on the subject are, but I'm sure they wouldn't have any issues with it, so long as I didn't hang out in bad company.

When I told them I was dating Pris, two years after we initially got attached, they shrugged and said they'd already known for a long time, via Facebook and various other signs. I didn't have to ask them for permission or anything; they didn't force us to break up because we were both minors or something along those lines. Dad did tell me that I shouldn't be dating so early, that I should wait till university ("because there are so many other fish in the sea, son, and listen to me, you're a big fish"), but now when she comes over I feel like she's part of the family.

When I was young, they didn't throw me into every class imaginable; I learnt to swim, after much difficulty, because they knew it's a life skill. I stopped piano at grade 6, because I told them that while I had a vested interest, I clearly wasn't progressing. They gave me what help they could in my studies; and while Dad and I had our nights of arguments, fights and disagreements over my subject combination in JC, he's accepted that he's not going to have a doctor or lawyer in the family (though he does have a medic, but I'm not sure how much that'll assuage his regrets), and I know he'll wish me all the best in future.

My parents taught me to approach everything with an open mind. They taught me, everything in moderation, keep myself clean, eat healthy, exercise regularly, and though my values and beliefs may change, never forget to, above all, love God, and to love the people around me. Yeah, I figure those are ok principles to live by.

In other news, I finally got around to writing out that dream I had way back in J2, with all the Hobos being some badass warriors. Pretty well-received, I gotta say, and it was nice to write something that wasn't an LJ post for once; something narrative-based. I'm trying to expand it now, especially after Ken and Andrew posted their own additions to it. As is always the trouble, plot holes abound, and I don't really know how to resolve them yet. But hopefully, with time, it'll come. As of right now, though, I'm just trying to fit a whopping 16 people into sufficiently interesting characters, and giving them all some decent screen time. 16 people! Even the largest RPGs have, like, ten characters.

Another complaint I have is the issue of romance. I mean, no story is really complete without it. But if I'm using real people, it just becomes awkward. Like... Yeah. Geez, it's awkward just talking about it.

Still, I really hope it gets off the ground and I don't just peter out halfway because I get bored. Andrew suggested a collab but I don't really gel with his style, and I don't want to cramp his by directing where it goes. Has the potential to be really epic, though.

Title from one of Wallcroft's lines in Modern Warfare 3.

Day 29, EMT Course
141111

So I bought and finished Modern Warfare 3 yesterday. It's bloody exorbitant, some of the prices -- most places were selling it at $86.90 (I'm looking at you, Challenger). Thankfully FunzCentre was letting it go for $69, if you paid cash, so I gladly forked it over, and got me a membership too.

I can't really say much about it. I don't know what to say, actually. It was spectacularly meh, which was surprising. And unlike most people, since I don't have Xbox Live, I play Call of Duty primarily for the campaigns, especially the Modern Warfare series, since they have gloriously elaborate setpieces.

Spoilers to follow.

But the campaign was four hours long. I shit you not. It's without question the shortest campaign I've ever played in a game. Ever. The game tells me I've only played for 4 hours 37 minutes. And I'm a lot slower than most people when it comes to playing games. Everybody talks about Gears being a six-hour campaign but I can honestly say that I've never finished it in a day. This, though, can't even be said to be a six-hour campaign.

Sledgehammer/the remnants of Infinity Ward, to compensate for this, have tried to cram in as many explosive setpieces as possible. If you thought Black Ops was massively over-the-top, Modern Warfare 3 puts it to shame. Buildings collapse in a shower of concrete and glass; boats sink, shearing metal screeching in protest. Damn near every helicopter you get in explodes. And in every level, a helicopter has to explode. It's like Michael Bay walked in and staged a takeover, proclaiming, "There are too many intact helicopters in this game. Make them explode!" And Bay said it, and it was good.

It's really ridiculous, by the way. The first level, Black Tuesday, has you shoot down no less than five Hinds with a minigun on a Black Hawk. These are hunter-killer attack gunships, and your door gun can take 'em down easily. In Goalpost, while your own chopper remains intact, in the opening moments a Black Hawk succumbs to anti-aircraft fire, and seconds later an Osprey follows suit, tumbling end over end into the sea. Seriously, they must be made of eggshells or something. Essentially, if there's a helicopter in the game, there's a 90% chance it'll crash.

I have a lot of gripes with the game, actually. Mainly, well, you never get attached to the characters. I mean, you have the old guard like Price, Soap and Nikolai -- and in an awesome homage to past games, Wallcroft and Griffen (from Crew Expendable in CoD4) fight alongside you in the level Mind the Gap. Adding on to that is the presence of MacMillan (Price's old superior), a high-ranking officer in the SAS now. It's quite brilliantly done -- Price is talking to an unseen "Mac", and later says "You owe me for Pripyat". Revelation!

But those are all old guard. The new characters aren't endearing at all. The new American team, a Delta Force fireteam under Staff Sergeant "Sandman", doesn't quite capture the same essence of "oorah" that Griggs and Vasquez had. I mean, there's the by-the-book team leader in Sandman, the token cool black guy in Truck, Grinch is the tough-talking marksman, and the silent killer Frost, but they all don't get the kind of fleshing out that the older teams did. There's no wit or banter in their dialogue, just the occasional one-liner that really isn't very funny anyway.

Some might argue that Foley, Dunn and Ramirez of the 75th Rangers didn't get very fleshed out either, but Foley got plenty of characterisation in his comms with Overlord. And Dunn is a character all on his own.

Also, I can't help but notice that all the Delta guys are only sergeants, which as far as I know, is erroneous -- Delta requirements are at least sergeant first class. But, as I said, I could be wrong.

And the SAS/Task Force 141 teams, which have traditionally been more colourful characters, are honestly pretty boring this time round. But that's also an issue with the plot direction -- TF141 is essentially gone, with only Nikolai's band of mercenaries left to help Soap and Price out with their plan to stop Makarov. No room to introduce another Gaz or Ghost. The new player character, Yuri, has about as much character as a sack of bricks. It's just said that he "hates Makarov even more than [Price does]". And the interaction between the Delta Force and TF141 is kind of halfhearted. It's implied that Sandman and Soap have worked together before, but the dynamic between them just isn't very well done, and it seems like just a convenient excuse to have them collaborate.

And as usual, the plot makes no sense -- even less than that of Modern Warfare 2, which had me checking the CoD wiki to find out what actually happened. All of it involves them going to locations all across the globe for seemingly no reason. Halfway through I stopped caring about what the characters were doing or where they were going and just looked for intel.

Admittedly, their plot twists work both ways. There are some brilliant moments that really take your breath away with the sheer gravity of the revelation. Nothing on the scale of the end of Loose Ends in MW2, but there are enough of them. Like, say, after a tense holdout defending the Russian president against waves of terrorists trying to recapture him, you (a Secret Service agent) throw open the door to the evac helicopter only to find a smirking Makarov inside, who shoots you in the chest and leaves you for dead. Or hearing Makarov go "Yuri, my friend..." Or thinking that Price is going to kill you on his revelation that Yuri and Makarov have a history.

But on the flipside, as a result of those said plot twists, characters keep getting killed off, though admittedly it wasn't as bad an offender as Modern Warfare 2. Still, to mark the end of the trilogy, it's as though they were trying to put in as much hackneyed emotional impact as they could. That Secret Service agent and his entire team die. In the eyes of a tourist in London, your wife and child are killed in a chemical bomb blast. Kamarov is murdered by Makarov; Soap dies in a similar incident. To buy time for Yuri's escape, Sandman, Truck and Grinch all sacrifice themselves. In the final level, Yuri is shot to death by Makarov, and finally the man himself is hung by Price. It's like a holocaust of main characters.

And the worst part is that you don't really feel any emotional attachment to most of them. I felt sad when Soap died, but that's because he's Soap. You've had three whole games to get attached to him. Hell, you WERE him. But when Yuri died, I wasn't especially moved or anything; in fact, I was kind of meh. Even as the chopper pulls out of the diamond mine, leaving Sandman, Grinch and Truck for dead, I didn't really care. Sandman is just not a very likable character.

On the positive side, though, there isn't "That One Level". You know, that one that you spit blood at, just trying to get through it on Veteran in spite of dying over and over again. CoD4 was full of them, with Charlie Don't Surf, Hunted, War Pig, the beginning of Shock and Awe, Safehouse, One Shot One Kill and No Fighting in the War Room all contenders for that position. MW2 was significantly easier, but also had its moments, like Takedown, the ending of The Only Easy Day... Was Yesterday, the ending of Loose Ends, and that godawful The Enemy of My Enemy.

Modern Warfare 3 toned down the difficulty significantly. It did away with all the cheap tricks that the previous campaigns had, like grenade spam or infinitely-spawning enemies (this practice was stopped in MW2 for the most part, with notable exceptions being Takedown and The Only Easy Day... Was Yesterday). Enemies still have unerring accuracy and you still die after about two shots, but it's still markedly easier than the other campaigns.

The exception to the no-infinite-spawn rule is very rare. I've only noticed it twice, once in Blood Brothers and another time in that one Somalia level, Return to Sender, but those levels were still fairly manageable. To me, Goalpost was pretty tough due to the lack of cover, and Bag and Drag made me nauseous with all the close-quarter maneuvering in a gasmask, but aside from those, the campaign wasn't legendarily hard, as other CoD campaigns were.

I'm pretty happy that they didn't make it damn near impossible. But while there's no That One Level, there's also no Crowning Moment Of Awesome on the flipside. It's strange. With all the setpieces and explosions and spectacular pyrotechnic displays of American firepower, there's no level that really stands out to me. If I had to pick a favourite one it would be Persona Non Grata, because of the street-level fighting in the burning streets of North India. The UGV was pretty fun, too. But I don't see myself replaying it, or any other level in MW3 over and over like I did Loose Ends, or The Hornet's Nest, or The Only Easy Day.

If anything, MW3 levels stand out because they all have fantastic openings. Every fight throws you right into the action. Goalpost is particularly memorable, with a whole fleet of assault landers and VTOL transport making landfall on the beaches of Germany. Back on the Grid has an infiltration sequence that begins with you, Price and Soap slowly slinking down a river; Hunter Killer, like its spiritual predecessor The Only Easy Day, starts out underwater, waterlogged corpses and burnt-out carcasses of cars strewn around you. Setpieces to remember indeed. But arguably the best of them all is the ultimate level Dust to Dust, which has Price and Yuri suit up in Juggernaut armour and wreak havoc on Makarov's private army with a pair of machine guns.

What I also liked about MW3 was the less outlandish weapon selection. Yes, less outlandish. MW2 and Black Ops were just strange sometimes. Heck, in Black Ops there was a freakin' G11 and infra-red optics, in the 1960s. If that's not anachronistic, I don't know what is. And what bothered me the most about MW2 was the fact that while the American forces were using things like the SCAR, M16, M240 and M4, the Russians had this crazily varied selection like the Vector (a Swiss weapon), the TAR-21 (an Israeli weapon), the FAL and P90 (French weapons), the AUG and Glock 18 (Austrian weapons), and very few actual Russian weapons. MW3 solved this somewhat by bringing the AK-74u back and introducing more guns like the PKP Pecheneg.

And the Intervention! It's the one of the most expensive rifles, with some of the most expensive ammunition on the market, and MW2 throws it around like nobody's business. Every time they give you a sniper rifle, it's either an M14 EBR or an Intervention. There's a huge selection available in MW3, most of which I've never even heard of. But all look very cool.

My main gripe, I guess, is the length, and lack of mission variety (you're either sneaking around, or going in guns blazing). And certain plot elements. Like, say, I wouldn't've made Yuri a player character, just an informant with a vendetta. Then there'd be one mission dedicated to tracking him and extracting him from a safe house before Makarov's men kill him.

And I definitely wouldn't've made Price a player character either, because it kind of detracts from his character once you can step in his shoes. I wouldn't've made Sandman's team and Price's team interact; I think MW2 had the right idea keeping the Rangers and TF141 completely separate, because you can tell two different sides of the story that way. Also, Price having all these weirdass connections, especially to a non-commissioned officer in Delta, is just strange.

And Soap shouldn't have died, Price should. Then the final mission would have featured him and Yuri, and killing Makarov to finish what Price started. That way it'd be a poetic, satisfying end for both of them. Then Soap, instead of Price, would do the ending narration (I think MW3 should have had one, actually), talking about what the war had cost him; all his friends, his comrades, even his freedom (he's still a fugitive on the run), but also reminding the player that if the will of a single man can start a war, the will of a single man (Captain Price, duh) can end it too.

Gosh, just thinking about it makes me think about how much better it would be for Price to have died. Then Soap would take the 1911 from his body with some line like "It's been an honour working with you, sir" (if you haven't noticed I really like that line). Then there'd be this awkward conversation between him and MacMillan. When he finally calls Makarov, and Makarov demands to know who it is, he would say something like "the ghost of Prisoner 627" before cutting the line and racking back the charging handle on his Pecheneg.

The fight between Soap/Price, Yuri and Makarov would've been more epic, too; it wasn't bad, true, but Yuri should have played a bigger part. Like, he should have done more than just waylay Makarov long enough for Price to kill him. That way we'd be far more emotionally invested in his death; if not for him, we (as Price or Soap) would be dead. But we never saw the extent with which he wanted to kill Makarov and atone for all the wrongs he'd done.

Like, say, take Soap, for instance. Soap wanted to kill Shepherd and save Captain Price so badly he actually pulled a knife out of his chest to stab him. He even tried to save Yuri before himself, which resulted in his death. Now that's sacrifice. And that's emotional investment. But Yuri? He just kind of slapped Makarov and received some bullets to the face for that. It just doesn't have the same kind of impact.

MW3 doesn't quite feel like it's part of the Modern Warfare series, actually. It doesn't have the same kind of innovation that CoD4 or Modern Warfare 2 did. I admittedly have to blame the departure of most of Infinity Ward's core team. Think about it. CoD4 had some moments and setpieces that were absolutely unheard of prior to its creation. The AC-130 sequence in Death From Above. Infiltrating the Ultranationalist compound in All Ghillied Up. Having to know exactly when and where to place the shot in One Shot, One Kill. Putting you in control of Paul Jackson's death following the events of Shock and Awe. Hell, the first time I used the Javelin in The Bog my jaw dropped.

The same applies for Modern Warfare 2. The first time using the Predator missile is something that still sticks in my head. The infra-red scope to see through enemy smoke. Heartbeat sensors. The riot shield. Navigating through a snowstorm. Snowmobiles (which Black Ops ripped off). Slow-motion breach-and-clear sections. And let's not forget the ending sequence.

But there was no innovation, at all, in Modern Warfare 3, aside from the hybrid sights. Setpieces that were a visual treat, reminiscent of the best action movie out there. But the gameplay brought nothing new to the table, shamelessly reusing old gameplay elements like the AC-130 and lots of sniping/stealth sequences. In fact, most of the missions where you're given a sniper rifle just felt like rehashes of All Ghillied Up in different settings.

And the overall feel of Modern Warfare 3 feels even more out of place than its predecessor. Call of Duty 4 was two armed groups, using regular equipment, fighting a war against terrorism. It felt like a modern-day war; a conflict that actually felt plausible. The plot was basic, easy to understand and yet not overly simplistic.

Modern Warfare 2 changed all that. The introduction of Task Force 141 and all these newfangled things like the Predator drone's AGMs put it firmly out of the "realistic" spectrum. And the plot had more holes than Swiss cheese attacked by a family of mice. But at least Modern Warfare 2 acknowledged that it wasn't plausible; it didn't seek to emulate realistic combat as its predecessor had, it just wanted to give people a glimpse a few years into the future.

But MW3 doesn't even know what it wants to be. Its portrayal of Delta makes it come across only as a knockoff of TF141, with all the fancy codenames and advanced technology. It's so far removed from its roots in the gritty CoD4 that it makes my head spin. Maybe I'll get used to it in a few months, but for now it really bugs me.

All in all, I don't have an extremely positive or negative verdict on the game. I'm just disappointed with the length and lack of innovation, but I won't deny that I enjoyed it. I'll explore more of SpecOps and online multiplayer, and I'll see where it takes me from there, I guess.

Title is arguably the best line in Dark Crusade.

Day 83, no vocation
111011

Man, the date looks like a word in binary or something.

Today's my last day of leave I'll ever get this year. There are two days left, technically, but my combat medic course starts in two days, and it'll only end in January next year, so I'll have wasted those two precious days. Ah, well. I enjoyed my leave while I could -- well spent, I believe. Because the best way to spend free time is to do nothing, and that is EXACTLY what I did.

Had a great time a couple days ago at Chris' place. I lugged my Xbox over to his place, and the two of us, along with Dave, Sam Wang, Mark and Cheng Heng, had a glorious Gears of War 3 four-player co-op campaign session. On Hardcore. Or rather, we did once we'd solved the issues plaguing the system-link. Apparently a patch went wrong somewhere that forced it to fail to detect LAN connections, so we troubleshot with the help of Google for a couple hours before finally getting it to work.

Once we'd got the ball rolling though, I have to conclude that it definitely wasn't easy, especially with no nigh-on invincible AI there to revive you when you're down. They're a lot more useful than we often give them credit for; they gladly swap weapons with you, they don't take up ammo, and their first priority is to revive you should you die. Major difference between screaming at Cheng Heng "Get me up, you dumb shit" as he runs around cackling, chainsawing everything he can get his Lancer on.

But wow, really, those ammo issues are harsh with four different people using the same weapon. Cheng Heng wasn't really having problems because he was always using one weapon anyway, but the rest of us were chucking aside whatever was in our hands as we scrambled to prise a new one from a fallen enemy's grasp. The "power weapon handicap", as I have dubbed the new inability to restock from ammo boxes, really gets you down. When the Torque Bow came in in the middle of Act 2 the problem was slightly relieved (they're in plentiful supply) but I refused to pick up a Longshot for the entirety of the game.

Recently I've been thinking through it and reading posts on GameFAQs, and more and more I'm realising how dissatisfied I am with Gears of War 3. A bit like the wedding life after the honeymoon period, if that's to be believed. But really, as much as I disliked the grander scale of things in Gears of War 2, I've come to realise that it was a much better game than Gears 3 (multiplayer server issues aside, of course).

For one, I often talk about how Gears 3 has no particular setpiece that I really enjoy playing. Anvil Gate is the closest I'd get, I think, along with most of Act 5 starting from Shattered Paradise, but otherwise, Gears 2 has far more moments I enjoyed. Act 4 was just pure fun, as was Act 2, but you really don't get the same kind of rush of enjoyment from the third game. And really -- I'm just replaying Anvil Gate multiple times because I don't enjoy the rest of the game so much.

And yeah, at first I said I liked the story, but now I realise it's because Epic finally had the cojones to not set up an ending that would allow them to create a sequel. Now there are so many plot threads left unfinished -- in fact, the Epic Games Forums were so ablaze with questions that they had to Joss a lot of things; the developers actually came out to explain things, like Myrrah's human countenance, or the origin of the Locust, and exactly what the hell was happening at the New Hope Research Facility. Now that's the mark of a weak storyline.

What made it worse is that Karen Traviss tried to pass it off as ok by saying "some things are better left unknown". Maybe. But not something that you've teased your entire fanbase with ever since the first game. If they decide to explain it in another book I will kill somebody. Gears of War may be a franchise, but above all -- it's a videogame. You're just not allowed to introduce elements of a universe into a book, then go to a different medium and automatically expect people to understand. If Mass Effect didn't do it, and Halo didn't do it (and these are two very deep franchises that also span other mediums like comics and novels), why should Gears be allowed to?

Which is why I was so pissed off at the script. They expect you to know every single element that happened in the books. Even the "Previously in Gears" didn't explain it well at all. The more I play, the less subtext I seem to catch and the more annoyed I get. That's just bloody unreasonable. If Nylund had done all three games I bet things would've been different.

Also, it's probably just me, but overly feminist dialogue really pisses me off. In the game, Sam says things like "You just got beaten by a girl!" and Anya has the famous "Nothing like a woman with power". Look, if you're trying to make a feminist statement, that's not the way to go. If anything, it's counterproductive because it draws attention to the attitude that women are naturally weaker and less capable on the battlefield, and actually encourages it.

To make a true feminist statement, have your female characters say regular things and ignore the fact completely that they're women in a man's role. They should be portrayed as capable soldiers, period, not capable soldiers in spite of the fact that they're women. I should be thinking "Holy crap, Anya's awesome" and not "Anya's awesome even though she's a girl". But the fact is, neither of the above statements are true. Anya is a really dull character. And I will never like Sam, I'm sorry.

And I have to admit, after replaying the game, I was honestly quite annoyed that the giant deus ex machina happened. The weapon that Adam Fenix creates conveniently wipes out all of humanity's major antagonists. Easy resolution.

I bought the hardcover TPB of Birds of Prey: End Run on impulse -- it was 20% off at Harris Planerds, and it was the amazing combo of Gail Simone and Ed Benes again. I love reading that, because Gail Simone's writing sort of absolves my guilt about looking at gloriously proportioned female characters (oh yes Huntress, mm-mmm).

But this time it was Alvin Lee who stole the spotlight, I thought. He has amazing work -- not as cheesecakey as Benes, but very expressive. My one issue was that if you hid the hair of most of the central characters, their faces looked identical (the exception being Lady Blackhawk), but then again, the same could be argued for just about every single comic artist out there.

Still, I think I'm just kind of biased towards Lee because he illustrated quite possibly the most awesome Huntress sequence that I'll ever see in my life. Basically, so Dinah won't have to (she's in no state to fight), Helena issues a challenge to Lady Shiva, to fight in her place to the death. Cue Helena getting the crap kicked out of her by the best martial artist on the face of the planet. But she spits blood in Shiva's eyes, and lands just two solid hits on her, knocking her to the ground -- and that's enough for Huntress, knowing that Shiva's vengeance for such an act will take her to the grave. It also helps that it's a really emotional sequence bolstered by Simone's writing -- if there was anything to bolster my undying love for Gail Simone, it's the Two Nights In Bangkok arc. So bloody good.

One thing that kind of bothered me was that Zinda keeps getting jobbed. I mean, this is the Penguin. He's just about the most useless supervillain combatant in Gotham City and he still gets the jump on her (the bird analogy is quite ironically hilarious though). She's not as good a fighter as Black Canary or Huntress, maybe, but aside from her utility as a pilot/driver and the wonderful comic relief she provides, she doesn't do much else. I'd love to see her doing more kicking-ass. 'Much as I love to watch Huntress brutally beating down crooks, a little more Zinda badassery would help too. Like in that arc when she drives across the country to put Barda's picture on the wall. I absolutely loved that.

Tried out the Space Marine demo on Steam this morning. I gotta say, I'm really kind of shit at it, but my shittiness-at-video-games factor aside I can already see why it's a flawed game.

Still, let's talk about the good first. For one, it's immensely satisfying. You're Captain Titus of the Ultramarines, and every aspect of the combat does its best to emphasise that. Every swing of the chainsword or power axe has weight behind it, although I thought the stun moves could have a little more oomph. And eliminating a whole horde of Slugga Boyz with four sweeps of the chainsword is something extremely empowering. Can't get enough of that feeling when you land a solid hit and see time slow down to watch your brutal handiwork unfold, especially if it's the final hit of the combo.

And the chainsword doesn't even come close to how powerful the power axe is. The chainsword's final hit is just a delayed strike, but the power axe's is something right out of a kung fu movie -- Titus leaps and brings his axe into the air, torquing his body to bring it whirling around in an omnidirectional sweep of death. To see a three-metre-tall giant do that is simply awe-inspiring, especially when accompanied by a tide of gore and dismembered Ork limbs.

And the demo also allows you access to the jump pack, which is a wonderfully destructive tool all on its own. All you have is your chainsword, and you can't use any projectile weapons besides the bolt pistol and bolter with the jump pack equipped, but mid-flight you can kick in the afterburners to slam Titus into the ground like a fiery meteor of Imperial justice. Again, this is most satisfying when performed in the midst of a horde of Slugga Boyz. I never fired a shot throughout that level, just gleefully jumped around turning Orks into red paste with the wonderful combined forces of inertia and gravity.

Now, well, here come the gripes. Some are about gameplay, others are artistic direction. First off, my pet peeve with the game is a lack of a parry function in any way. Space Marine is not strictly a third-person shooter. In fact, I'd sooner consider it a beat-'em-up because of the heavy emphasis on melee combat. I was beating Orks up far more than I was shooting them. So I'd expect it to have a more advanced melee system than, say, Gears of War. I'd go as far as to say it should have something more akin to Heavenly Sword or God of War.

But it turns out there's no parry system, or even a counter system, for that matter. The most you can do is do an AOE stun attack, which will knock enemies to the floor around you so you can run away and let your armour restore itself. I thought it would've been nice to have a designated block button, except maybe on Nobs/Bloodletters, who would have unblockable attacks.

Then maybe if you blocked and countered at the perfect time, you'd pull off an execution that either restored health, knocked back enemies around you, or both. That would've made for more enjoyable gameplay, I think. But I have to concede that Relic's fairly forgiving by making you not flinch/stagger if you get hit by regular creeps. Only Nobs knock you down, and boy, do they do some serious damage.

I've complained about this before too, but the fact that you can take regular damage while performing an execution bothers me. It should be reduced damage, or no damage (even though the latter would break the game, because all you would ever have to do is stun and execute every single enemy). Dawn of War had sync kills -- these were specific sequences in melee combat that units would sometimes pull off. They were long, drawn-out and flashy, but they were fun to watch, and they were at no cost to you because you were impervious to damage when pulling off a sync kill.

The fun of pulling off an execution is significantly diminished if you're always worried about taking damage during the animation. This applies even more because executions are the only way for you to regain health. If regular kills let you regain health, sure, why not? But having to kill a bunch of people before tactically executing the very last guy is a bit annoying, and like I said, detracts from the whole experience of playing as a Space Marine.

Weapons don't feel very solid. The bolter feels alright, I guess, a pretty decent compromise between power and rate of fire -- the stalker-pattern bolter feels bloody fantastic, though, with thick, visceral thumps of detonation on every contact with a target. But aside from that, ranged weapons aren't nearly as fun to use as melee combat. Hell, the Vengeance Launcher was actually annoying. The only time I got it to kill something was amongst a bunch of gretchin -- used on regular Slugga and Shoota Boyz, the mines didn't explode at all. I wonder what I'm doing wrong.

And this isn't a complaint, but a question -- how the hell are you supposed to kill Nobs? They're bloody impossible. You can stun them, after multiple (and I really mean multiple, like slightly less than 20) swings of the chainsword, but when you try to execute them, they grab you, hurl you to the floor, and stomp on you, leaving you with a smidgen of health left. And their melee attacks HURT. I remember being down to my last bar of health, but with full shielding, so I figured I should isolate a Slugga Boy and execute him. But as I rolled past him, the Nob's swing caught me in the shoulder and I died immediately. The most success I've had is just activating Fury mode and hammering away at them the best I can, preferably after pouring magazine after magazine of bolter rounds into it first. Grenades help too.

The moment in question I'm talking about is when you've called Corporal Antioch and asked him to bring the elevator up. Before you do, though, Orks swarm the elevator lobby from all sides, and it's up to you to remove them with bolter and chainsword (the latter of which I swapped out for the infinitely better power axe). But towards the final stages of the assault a pair of Nobs barge in, which resulted in a total Benny Hill moment as I ran screaming around the room firing my bolter in their general direction while they pounded doggedly after me. Took me five tries to beat that on Normal difficulty. Can't imagine Hard.

Day 69, no vocation
270911

Don't you just hate those times when you're doing nothing, nothing at all, and suddenly your brain flashes back to those really embarrassing moments in life? Really sickening. It always happens to me on the bus. And I've got a LOT of really embarrassing moments in my entire life I'd rather not think about. A lot of them are theatre-related, which makes them fresh scars in my ego.

I mean, I'm just sitting there, enjoying the ride, watching the sunlight mingle with the trees, and suddenly my scumbag brain decides, "Hey, remember that time when you (insert life screwup here)? Man, you loser" and I rage inside at the inability to forget those things. It really pisses me off. Because it's over, long since, and while some people may've forgotten it, I definitely haven't.

I probably react more strongly to things like that than most people. I'm really self-conscious if I haven't psyched myself up for it. I've done really, really crazy things in an attempt to make other people's day a little more surreal, but that's when I'm mentally prepared for it. If something unexpected happens, it's akin to a traumatic incident to me, because it just doesn't disappear from my mind.

Speaking of reacting strongly, I think I'm secretly a very violent person. There's Sam, who's, on the flipside, unabashedly a very violent person, and there's Cheng Heng, who's a mountain of a man (well, a small one) but seems to me like he's afraid of hurting people, because it's just not nice. I think I belong to the latter category. But every time I think about something that makes me angry my body tends to move on its own. Sometimes it's just a clenched fist, which is normal, but sometimes I'll take a swing at empty air without thinking.

I attribute it to repressed violent tendencies. I haven't hit anything or anyone with malicious intent since primary school, and really, fights in primary school are the dumbest things ever. Kids just try to replicate whatever they've seen on WWE. It involves people flailing at each other ineffectually, wildly-aimed punches, kicks, slaps -- the hard, precise exchanges of blows in movies are full of crap.

I'm always looking for an excuse to get into a fight, actually. Obviously things might be different if I'd actually been in one before. I mean, I'd get steamrolled by anyone who's larger than a raccoon (and even then, people smaller than raccoons have about a 75% chance of beating me). I've got an inhumanly low pain tolerance; I have no martial arts training; I have no muscle to speak of; my stamina is like that of a fish out of water. But one day I'd just like to let everything loose.

Or, alternatively, I could invest in a punching bag.

One scumbag brain memory that constantly pops up is being sent for Chinese classes in the States and not knowing a single word of Chinese at all. I couldn't talk to anybody there, not even the teachers, and I'd just sit around not comprehending what the heck was going on. During break time I'd just pick pins (like the kind used to stick stuff on corkboards) out of the carpet and stick them, point down, in the ground, and I'd do this all the time until a teacher found me doing it and bodily lifted me away, scolding me in Chinese, to which I was terrified because I had no idea what she was saying. And then there was this performance where everybody was singing and dancing and me, not understanding the goings-on in class, just stood there mortified at being the only person not knowing the lyrics or the dance steps that I just started crying right there on stage. Mom came up on stage to comfort me, to tell me to be brave and keep going, but I was just bawling right there. I'm not sure what exactly happened after but I'm definitely sure those classes ended shortly following that incident.

Was probably the beginning of my vendetta against Chinese. I was good at it all the way up to P3. Then maybe my subconscious reminded me of the humiliation this language put me through. Then my brain must've been like "yeah, screw you, Mandarin, and the Speak Mandarin Campaign, this guy's gonna be monolingual for life". So I am. My subsequent attempt to learn Japanese externally has failed miserably. All I can remember from my classes is "gohan" and "shashin". Oh, and "ginkou". I think I'm restricted to romanised languages (though I've never tried any actually), like French or German or Spanish. Should try to pick one up and see what happens.

I can't help but hate the name "Retro Lancer", honestly. "Retro Lancer". Sounds like a bad '70's band name. They should've called it Lancer Mk1, and called the current one Lancer Mk3 or Mk4. And "Sawed-Off". They can name every other weapon, why not the Sawed-Off? Same goes for the Mortar. I mean, sure, they ARE a shotgun and mortar respectively, but it'd be nice to give them some names, I think. Like call the Sawed-Off the "Sledgehammer", and the Mortar the "Hellfire" or something.

In conclusion, I dub this the most random post EVER.

Title is Dom's last line in Gears of War 3.

Day 64, no vocation
220911

Today (well since it's past 12, technically yesterday) was the first day of my leave, officially, and I spent seven hours of it cleaning my room on mom's orders. You so owe me a free day, mom, thanks a lot. On the bright side, in the morning until about 2 in the afternoon, I managed to finish up Gears of War 3 on Normal difficulty.

Worth nothing that this post will be full of nothing but MASSIVE BLOODY SPOILERS for Gears of War 3, especially its ending and the revelation behind the whole damn series. Which I must confess, I didn't really see coming. I had hoped it would be more complex, actually, but I think Epic knew what they were doing. Hell, now Ortega's half-assedness in Gears of War 2 makes a lot more sense (though the dialogue is still inexcusably bad), with the story having come full circle. Why? Read on to find out.

So apparently, Adam Fenix is still alive at the end of Gears of War 2, and Gears of War 3 starts with Marcus receiving the news via Prescott, returned from the dead (and flanked by a pair of Onyx Guard too, that's just badass). Not only that, but they also find out that he has a cure for Lambency, something that could end the threat of the Lambent forever. So Marcus and his merry band go off to find him. On the way they're attacked by Lambent and the Sovereign is shipwrecked. Prescott dies, but not before he passes Baird the encryption code to some data disc that Hoffman has, which has a clue to Adam Fenix's location. Meanwhile, Hoffman's at Anvil Gate, so they go off to find him, traipsing across the Deadlands in a gas barge.

They meet the Locust Queen, with her massive frickin' giant bug helicopter thingy, and after a series of tussles they get shot down, crash-landing conveniently in front of a patrol led by Hoffman himself. Hoffman passes them the disc and they defend Anvil Gate as Baird figures the whole thing out. In the aftermath of the battle they find out that there's this island place called Azura where the COG shuttled all their best and brightest minds, so they would be safe from Locust attack and they could rebuild humanity. It's surrounded, unfortunately, by a large man-made hurricane (this really pissed me off honestly), so they have to go the undersea route.

Their situation being what it is, though, they really need fuel to get to the closest shipyard, so they set off towards Mercy, which is a mining town that also happens to be Maria's old hometown. The sequence of getting there is absolutely insane. I loved it. It's a high-speed chase with a pair of miniguns and the Locust are throwing everything they have at you -- Reavers, Boomers, pretty much half the Locust army. And the scenery is downright bloody gorgeous. It's not much for gameplay, but the whole cinematic feel of it is unmatched.

They reach the town but it's deserted; there are traps set up everywhere, and a crazy old man who babbles about monsters as he tries to barricade himself up. Instant zombie movie reference. And yup, it's true -- apparently Mercy, being a town heavily exposed to Imulsion, has had all its inhabitants turned into zombified creatures known as Former. So Delta fights its way through hordes and hordes of Former as they try to get fuel to reach Azura, but Dizzy says he can't plug all the leaks. Marcus calls the mission off and tells everyone that priority goes to escape. However, back at their vehicles, Lambent and Former swarm them from all sides, barring their escape.

Dom, seeing his friends desperately fighting off the assault, leaps off the building and into the truck, telling them to save themselves. Disengaging the fuel trailer from the cab, he drives down the tunnel, his jaw set, and spins it around, ignoring Marcus' frantic yells as to what he's trying to do. He floors the accelerator, screaming "Never thought it would end like this, huh Maria?" and closes his eyes as the truck slams into the fuel tank, igniting all the Imulsion in the town and obliterating the Lambent threat, and himself in the process.

The rest of Delta, in a grim silence, rides on with what little fuel they have, stopping in the decimated city Char, controlled by former Imulsion magnate Griffin. He agrees to let them have some if they can reclaim it from the refinery in the Lambent territory in the lower half of the city. He then reveals that he's captured Dizzy as collateral, and so Delta reluctantly decides to retrieve the fuel.

Fighting through Lambent and Former, Delta sends the fuel back to Griffin, only to find his building under heavy attack. They save Griffin and Dizzy, at the cost of the inhabitants of Char, and get the fuel they need to get them to the shipyard. Once there, Dizzy prepares the submersible, fighting through Locust resistance (this is where the extremely annoying Armored Kantus make their first appearance) and finally departing for Azura.

Underwater (the scenery here is absolutely breathtaking, really), they encounter a Leviathan and fight it off, navigating through a maze of sea mines and the currents of the Maelstrom. They surface in Azura, and deactivate the Maelstrom, allowing the COG and the remnants of the Union of Independent Republics to land reinforcements. The Locust Queen on her Tempest (the giant bug) constantly harasses them all the way, with constant swarms of Theron Guards and strafing runs from her Tempest. This whole section is like one massive homage to Bulletstorm, really. The environments are also stunning -- Act V Chapter 3 is by far my favourite for this reason, honestly.

They seemingly kill the Queen and the Tempest, releasing Adam Fenix from his prison. He explains, over a series of short skirmishes and cutscenes, that Imulsion is actually alive, and it's been constantly evolving, hence the emergence of the Lambent. If it were allowed to progress to the next stage in its life cycle, it would result in an apocalypse. Everybody, due to their exposure to Imulsion, has been infected with the parasite in some way, and it's only a matter of time before they, too, become Lambent.

In an even further twist, the Locust Queen had initially approached him twenty years ago to find a cure for Imulsion, which he failed to do. As a result, growing desperate as more of their number fell victim to Imulsion infection, the Queen ordered the invasion of Sera's surface as the Locust tried to escape the clutches of the Imulsion.

How Adam proposes to solve the problem is to detonate a pulse from Azura that will destroy every Imulsion-infected cell in the body. Lambent lifeforms will be obliterated, their cellular structure beyond repair. For those not infected beyond a certain stage, though, as most humans are, they will be unaffected. Baird is skeptical, but Marcus gives the go-ahead. They fight their way to the accelerator, which will detonate the global pulse.

The Locust Queen reappears on her Tempest, not quite dead, and tries to stop Delta from detonating it. Delta fights her off, killing the Tempest with the Hammer of Dawn, and the pulse is fired. Marcus tells Adam that they have to get out of there (actually I don't know why either, it's not like the thing is gonna explode or anything), but Adam responds that he's not going to make it off the island. He reveals that in desperation, to find out the effects of Imulsion on living creatures, he injected himself with it in extremely high dosage. At this point the veins in his body start pulsing with yellow light, and Marcus realises that his cellular structure will be completely destroyed. With the third pulse, as he's about to embrace his son, Adam Fenix's body disintegrates into dust.

The Locust Queen staggers out from beneath the corpse of her Tempest, bitterly talking about how Adam was only good at finding creative ways to commit genocide. Marcus just regards her with a grim look on his face before stepping forward and sinking Dom's commando knife between her ribs, saying that she finally feels the pain of Dom and all the other people she's killed, before tossing her lifeless body aside.

The COG make landfall with the UIR, and everyone stands around congratulating Marcus and the rest. He ignores everyone, however, and stalks off to the beach, tearing off his armour and his bandanna, revealing his crew cut for the first and last time in Gears history. Anya excuses herself from the rest and runs out to comfort him. He sadly asks her what's left, and she says with hope, "A tomorrow, Marcus. We finally have a tomorrow."

Great ending to the series, I thought. No stupid cliffhangers, no nothing. Just plain and simple bittersweet ending. More games should do this.

And while the ending didn't make me cry as much as Halo 3's did (I still get all misty-eyed even now, just thinking about it), it was still pretty well done. There was nothing quite as emotional as Dom and Maria in Gears of War 2 (kudos to you for that, Mr. Ortega), but I actually found Dom's death scene really moving. As he rammed the truck into the fuel tank they slowed everything down to a crawl; and best of all, which really sent chills sweeping down my spine, an instrumental version of Mad World started playing. The fire and thunder, the look of horror on Marcus' face, accompanied by haunting piano... everything was fantastically done. And there's actually a lot of emotion on the faces of the characters. Dom looked so scared, but yet so determined at the same time; and as he closed his eyes in resignation as the truck screamed forward my heart really sank. I knew it was coming, really -- with a chapter title of Act III Chapter 5 - Brothers to the End, what else could happen?

Of course Dom's voice actor still sucks, and I thought the lines could've been better (if he'd just whispered "I'm coming home, Maria... I'm coming home" I would have absolutely bawled right there and then). But Ms. Traviss, you didn't disappoint. Hats off.

And Adam Fenix's death, too. While it was good, it could've been improved somewhat. I thought he should've started turning into a Former. "Don't let me die one of them, Marcus. Please," he'd say, and Marcus would open his mouth in silent protest, then shut it as he realised what had to be done. Then he'd draw his Snub and flick the safety off. Adam would close his eyes and whisper "I'm so proud of you, Marcus... So very proud. You're all a father could ever have hoped for."

Then he'd close his eyes and smile. "I love you, son."

"I love you too, dad," Marcus would whisper in reply, and pull the trigger.

Cliche? Yes. Tear-jerking? Definitely.

The problem with this is that Resistance 2 ended almost exactly the same way. Nathan Hale started succumbing to the Chimera virus, and Joseph Capelli knew what had to be done. "It's been an honour serving with you, sir," he said sadly, and shot his friend in the head.

I realise, though, the ending is really horrifically depressing. No Locust, no Lambent. All's supposed to be happy. But think about it. About 98% of humanity is dead. There's no ruling government, and everything is pure anarchy. There's no hope for agriculture -- thanks to the COG's scorched-earth policy, everything is barren. And worst of all, there is no fuel. Fossil fuels have been completely depleted since before the beginning of the Pendulum Wars. Every piece of machinery has to be reverse-engineered, at best. They would probably have been better off succumbing to Imulsion infection. At least they wouldn't KNOW they'd be suffering.

One major gripe I had about the way Karen Traviss wrote the story, though, is that she sort of expects everybody to know what happened in the books. Even the "Previously on Gears" video doesn't do a very good job of covering what happened in Jacinto's Remnant and all the other books I never got around to reading (past Aspho Fields I kind of stopped caring). She suddenly throws in Bernadette Mataki as Hoffman's second-in-command and they're acting all lovey-dovey and you're just wondering why Hoffman's fraternising with a non-commissioned officer -- especially when he's already married. Or, say, all the constant references to Anvil Gate. A lot of people don't actually know that it cemented Hoffman as one of the heroes of the Coalition. I bet most people wouldn't even know what the UIR is unless you're a really big Gears fan.

Also, a lot of the script requires you to fill in the gaps yourself. I had so many Fridge Logic moments (i.e. those times where spontaneously, the reason behind something unexplained suddenly occurs to you) today as I cleaned my room and was pondering the plot. Like, for example, the Queen doesn't want Adam to fire the pulse because it will kill her people. It took me a long time to figure out why. So if everyone's infected, they'll just be cleansed, including Locust, right?

Wrong. I only just realised (when writing this) that the Locust, being a subterranean race, would have been exposed to Imulsion for a far longer time, and in far greater quantities, and thus would have a far higher level of Imulsion contamination than humans. So the Locust would be completely eradicated by the pulse.

What I still don't get is how come Adam Fenix kept the existence of the Locust, and the harmful effects of the Imulsion, out of the knowledge of the public eye. Wouldn't it be a lot easier if it was made common knowledge, then both races could, you know, work together instead of starting a war that lasted 14 years and wiped out almost all humans on Sera? And the Locust didn't have to attack, really. All they had to do was climb out of a tunnel and say "Hey, the stuff you're using for fuel is alive and it's evil, and it wants to turn us all into glowing zombies -- can you help us find a way to destroy it?" See? Good end.

And they keep mentioning this, but it's never explained as to why the Queen looks completely human. Baird asks this question at least twice in the game, but he just gets blown off. I think Epic doesn't really know the answer either, so they just sort of hope nobody notices. They just wanted a shocking revelation in Gears of War 2, but didn't know how to explain it away. And why didn't she disintegrate with the pulse too? She's been exposed to Imulsion as much as any other person has.

And Adam Fenix! He's been working with Imulsion for bloody ages. I doubt he only injected himself a few days before Marcus came to rescue him. When they broke into his room he should've long since been a slavering Former.

If the Locust have been around for so long, why haven't people noticed them? Imulsion isn't exactly the hardest thing to find. It's even more abundant than oil. And where Imulsion is, Locust are too. And it's not as though they're as innocuous as, say Tickers or Wretches. People can apparently not notice Corpsers and Brumaks lumbering around below the ground. It's just strange and really stretches the limits of suspension of disbelief.

Character dynamics were really forced, though, I thought. I don't know where Epic got the idea to so aggressively ship Marcus/Anya. Baird/Sam is ok, it's actually kind of funny (there is so much unresolved sexual tension), but Marcus and Anya don't go at all. They started it from Gears 2, and it's just been really awkward ever since. They only see each other once in the first Gears, and they don't even have the faintest inkling of recognition for each other (plus she looks hideous in Gears of War -- though in Gears of War 2 that is a completely different story). So the last scene of Gears of War 3, for me, was just uncomfortable.

Also! A man-made hurricane? Seriously?! In a universe that's as pseudo-realistic as Gears of War's, the idea of a man-made hurricane is really kind of ridiculous.

EDIT: I wonder if Karen Traviss specifically made the last line to match the constant motif of "no tomorrow" in Mad World (which is still Gears of War's unofficial theme song). "We finally have a tomorrow." If she did, wow. Kudos.

EDIT2: More Fridge Logic. I've always been asking myself, how did the Lambent always manage to pop up wherever Delta Squad was going? It's mentioned several times in the game that it doesn't disturb the Stranded, and only seems to show up wherever Marcus is headed.

But then I remembered that Imulsion is one giant organism. It's a giant, collective consciousness. And there are infected cells present in every single human and Locust on the face of Sera. It's communicating with itself -- it knows that Adam Fenix has a cure, and it's trying its best to stop him and his son from obliterating it.

Title is one of Baird's lines in Gears of War 3. Pretty funny stuff.

Day 62, no vocation
200911

So today I had my medical appointment, following which I took the time to play Gears of War 3 for the first time.

I gotta say, on first impressions... I was pretty much exploding with joy. It's a great opening sequence (NOT the movie, the gameplay introduction), with voice acting that absolutely puts the second game to shame. Marcus actually sounds human again, and Dom doesn't sound like a robot anymore. The only issues I had were that Anya is trying way too hard to sound gruff, and Jace sounds so ghetto it's almost comical. He had a great voice in Gears of War 2, one of the few people who actually did -- I wonder why it changed so much.

And I know I should like Sam Byrne a lot. I mean, she's a total wiseass, she's sexy without being too revealing, and she uses my dream weapon combination. Hammerburst and Longshot.

But her voice is AWFUL. Don't get me wrong. It's not a bad Australian accent, but it's just bloody annoying. She's got this horribly nasal twang and every time she opens her mouth I feel like shooting her. Hearing that over and over again, especially since she fights with Baird a lot, has almost driven me to insanity. Still, I've resolved to maintain my sanity until I finish the game, and only then will I let myself succumb to the brain-melting annoyance of her voice.

By the way (I'm not spoiler-marking this because it's common knowledge already, but just in case SPOILER WARNING STARTS HERE), Cole suddenly became a lot more annoying. Previously his antics were pretty ok by me -- in fact, he was kind of cool sometimes, with some of the most quotable lines in Gears of War. Sam likes to call him a giant teddy bear, that could tear you apart with his bare hands. Yeah, he is. But you play as Cole for half of Act I, and hearing him whoop over and over again kind of grates your nerves. I was so glad to hear Marcus again once the whole thing was over.

I thought Karen Traviss did a pretty good job on his reminiscence of his past glory days, though. There's an entire section where they visit Hanover, his hometown, in search of supplies, and for posterity's sake he drops by his old thrashball stadium. There's a whole series of flashbacks that takes you back to the heyday of his career, where the Locust hadn't emerged yet and he was still Hanover's Favourite Son, Number 83 -- The Cole Train. It's quite a heart-wrenching sequence to see him slowly walk around his old locker room, rusted and decrepit, and watch him soak up the adulation of the crowd in his mind's eye. SPOILER WARNING ENDS HERE.

Something I thought was very strange about the graphics, though, was that they don't have nearly as much detail as they used to on the characters. In fact, their faces seem kind of flat sometimes. And Baird's hair really annoys me. It's just like a yellow cotton ball stuck on top of his head.

But let's talk gameplay for a while. Needless to say, it's fundamentally the same as the previous two games. One-button action system, over-the-shoulder camera. You're used to it by now. But at the same time it's also been completely overhauled; actions are now so much smoother, be it rolling or sliding into cover, or what have you. You feel more like a ninja than an armoured hulk of rippling muscle. It's that good.

The gameplay doesn't come without its faults, though. Some things people see as progress, I see as regression. One thing that's most glaring is the inclusion of reticle bloom. For those who don't know what this means, it's the same principle in games like Counter-Strike or Call of Duty; when you move, or when you fire your weapon, the crosshairs grow larger, simulating inaccuracy. Stay still, and the reticle shrinks back to a far more manageable size.

This seems to be the trend in games nowadays. First it was Halo: Reach who introduced it into a longstanding series of no reticle bloom, and now Gears of War 3 follows suit. It's really annoying actually. Don't get me wrong, it definitely ups the challenge; I can't run around pouring streams of lead from my Lancer into Locust flesh with unerring accuracy anymore. But I greatly dislike reticle bloom. Mainly because I suck at games with it. It just doesn't feel right in Gears. It didn't feel right in Halo, and now it doesn't feel right in Gears.

What made me the most horrified, though, and with good reason, was the fact that ammo from power weapons is no longer restored through ammo boxes.

Seriously, I thought I was dreaming. In Act I Chapter 1 they already gift you with a Longshot, and I was so happy I thought I would explode. It only had 8 rounds, but why would I care? It's still a Longshot, and all I had to do was pick up an ammo box to get another 11 rounds. So I trotted over to one of the handy-dandy blue boxes and held down X.

Nothing happened.

So I tried again.

I didn't cry afterwards, I swear. But I came pretty damn close.

I know Epic is trying their damndest to create this whole sense of "desperation", which is why everything in Gears of War 3 looks far more decrepit. Nobody wears a complete set of armour anymore. Sleeves are torn off, rags flutter from beneath tarnished armour plate. So they figured they'd take it further than just aesthetic value and extend it to the weapons too.

In Gears of War, ammo for most power weapons was hard enough to come by. In fact, the only power weapon that received ammo from said boxes was the Longshot, and let's face it, as much as I liked it, the Longshot in the first Gears was kind of a pile of crap. Perfect-reloaded, it packed one heck of a punch, but it didn't have the accuracy of a sniper rifle. Inexplicable, really. But it just isn't the Longshot of Gears of War 2.

Now that was an absolute beast. The firing sound wasn't quite as satisfying (like a bolt-action rifle and a laser had a bastard child), but the lateral crosshairs made it far easier to sight up targets, and the penetration was far more effective (you could score a headshot by shooting a hidden enemy through his spine). The reticle was smaller. Everything about it was an improvement. Heck, in campaign it was the go-to weapon; I don't recall ever using another weapon set besides Lancer and Longshot, because ammo was in such abundance.

And Gears of War 2 was far more forgiving with its ammo distribution. It WANTED you to use exotic weapons, enjoy them, and keep using them because you actually had enough ammo. So Locust ammo boxes were introduced, which would give you ammunition for explosive ordnance like the Boomshot and Torque Bow, which were ridiculously hard to come by in the first Gears of War. The Scorcher still had to be replenished by picking up other Scorchers, but truthfully, nobody really used the Scorcher when the Gnasher was available.

And even when ammo boxes weren't available, there were still plenty of enemies that gave you sufficient ammo by using the same type of weapon. As always, the Hammerburst and Gnasher were always readily available, being the choice weapon of Drones and Grenadiers respectively, but Snipers with Longshots were now far more abundant, allowing you to pick up their weapons when they'd fallen to your fire. The Boomshot was still relatively rare, but that made sense for its power level. The Torque Bow, in spite of the extreme dumbing-down that it received from the first game, was now slightly more of a viable option, since Theron Guards, Theron Sentinels, and Palace Guards alike all wielded them readily. I think, in retrospect, this is why I enjoyed Gears of War 2 so much. The freedom of weaponry.

But Gears of War 3 rescinds all that and forces you to replenish ammo by picking up the exact same weapon. Not only that, but they cut your max ammunition counts by a ridiculous amount. The Lancer ammo count goes from 660 in Gears to 550 in Gears 2 to 420 in Gears 3. The Hammerburst is even more staggering: 780 to 323 to a measly 140. Yes, 140. Gnasher ammo count remains at 39, Torque Bow remains at 12, but the Boomshot goes the way of its fellow weapons and starts at 8, jumps to 12, but in Gears 3 sinks to a pathetic 6. Hell, even the godlike Hammer of Dawn has an ammo count. The Longshot may stay constant at 24 rounds, but it's so inaccurate now I don't trust myself to make the shots count. The reticle is HUGE and it expands even larger when you start to move around.

I was sorely disappointed. They try to quell this issue by making the standard, replenishable weapons a heck of a lot more powerful. It is true, admittedly. The Lancer is essentially the same, but the Hammerburst has been made significantly more accurate (at the expense of some power, but when you can land a nice grouping of shots in the torso and head, you don't really care) and the recoil dampened. The Sawn-Off Shotgun will obliterate anything within three metres of you, and the Gnasher now fires a crippling spread of a whopping seven shots with every shell.

The Retro Lancer, though, what the heck. It's absolutely ridiculous. Epic needs to tone it down. It essentially replaces every other close-range weapon, honestly, because the damage is so ridiculously high. It has the same damage rating as the Gnasher, and the effect is even more ludicrous. The recoil isn't something to be sniffed at (with five shots your reticle is about one and a half times the size of a Gnasher's), but once you get in fairly close, out of shotgun range, just slam the trigger home and watch your bullets tear an enemy apart. Who cares when you have only 210 max ammo, you only need about 20 bullets to kill an enemy.

And let's not get started on the bayonet rush. It's like a ranged chainsaw. They try and pass it off as less broken because it requires a run-up distance for an instant kill, but let's face it -- the distance is only about two metres. Before you can even bring your shotgun or chainsaw up, six inches of cold steel will be between your ribs. It's ridiculous. I have more bayonet kills than I do any other kill in the game (save regular Lancer kills).

It's come to the point where I don't even bother picking up power weapons. I'm just going to hoard them selfishly until I come to the point that they don't become useful anymore. Like for the whole first half of the game I had 6 shots in my Longshot and I was just saving them for when I'd need them, not even going for headshots on Drones because I might need to shoot a Drudge in its weakspot. Then I had to go below decks on the Raven's Nest and I chucked the Longshot aside for a Gnasher, and later a Sawn-Off.

It's so sad. I used to swear by the Longshot. I was the angel of death on the battlefield, calmly picking off targets at my leisure from a comfortable vantage point and sticking the active reloads every single time (another reason why I don't like it was because my hard-wired reflexes from Gears and Gears 2 are now screwing up my Longshot reloading; they changed the timing for perfect reloads now). Now I'll barely take a glance at it because there are more abundant weapons to be found.

I can't imagine what four-player co-op would be like. I have so little ammo for myself as it is, and when four people are sharing one ammo source it must be hell. I bet four-player co-op just involves everybody picking up a Retro Lancer and not firing a shot, just sitting behind cover and charging forward to impale anything that gets too close.

There's this ridiculous achievement called Judge, Jury and Executioner that's the rough equivalent to Gears of War 2's Kick 'Em When They're Down. Basically you have to carry out all the executions in the game to unlock the achievement. Gears 2 had 13 unique executions; Gears 3 has a whopping 24. And some of them are just ridiculously difficult, seriously. I bet most people will do them just to get the achievement and never do them again, even if they're cool.

Executions with heavy weapons are just ridiculous, I'm sorry. You expect me to get executions with the Mortar, Mulcher and OneShot? You do realise that all of these weapons tear enemies apart rather then force them to their knees for me to execute them. And even if you down them with a different gun, you have to pick up the heavy weapon, walk over at the speed of a tortoise on LSD, and then pray somebody doesn't get there first or they don't die before you reach them. I still haven't done any of the heavy weapon ones because they're just annoying.

And having an execution for every single weapon in the game is dumb too, as well as tedious. There are some weapons that are just not meant to have executions. Like the Hammer of Dawn. Seriously? Why would I ever execute somebody with that?

Executions aren't fun anymore, Epic. Gears 2 was great fun to execute with because enemies had a much higher chance of falling to their knees rather than outright dying. It made executions easier and more satisfying. It was a great improvement from Gears (I've only, to this day, done the curb stomp in the campaign three times), where enemies just outright keeled over and died. The same thing happens, however, in Gears 3. The guns are so ridiculously powerful enemies either get torn apart with the sheer force, or they die without giving you the chance to execute.

I don't know about this for sure, but why does every single member of the COG seem to know that the Queen's name is Myrrah? It's not as though there's intelligence that explicitly says that. Heck, I think most Locust don't even know that their queen's name is Myrrah.

HERE BE SPOILERS

I just reached Act III Chapter 3, and seriously, what? Lambent humans? Shit. I mean, the whole chapter leading up to that part was totally hinting at that, with the typical deserted town and the one crazy old man, but I always entertained the thought that the Locust were once human. The reveal of Lambent humans totally makes that a moot point. Unless I haven't reached that far into the game yet, and the loose threads of the Sires of Mount Kadar are wrapped up. I dunno. Mom made me stop playing so dad could sleep -- otherwise I wouldn't've stopped until the credits rolled.

And I knew Prescott would be the bad guy. He has the face and the evil voice. And he generally behaves like a prick, so I really saw it coming.

The Tempest is an idiotic idea, I'm sorry. Who thought it would be cool for the Locust Queen to fly around on a giant beetle? The Hydra was fairly awesome, but the Tempest is actually just laughable. It shoots FRICKIN' LASER BEAMS out its mouth, though disappointingly not with a SHOOP DA WOOP accompaniment. I half expected a Gundam to fly out of the clouds and engage in mortal combat with it.

SPOILERS END HERE

As a parting note, well, Anya was so much hotter in Gears 2. Hey, it sounds weird, but...! It's totally true.

Title is Dom's last line in Gears of War. Predictably, before Joshua Ortega got all ham-fisted with the script.

Day 61 part deux, no vocation
190911

I have it. I really have it. Gears of War 3 Limited Edition. It's not the Epic Edition, granted, but I just want to play this game so frickin' badly.

So today I met Genevieve-jie at Funan for dinner. It never materialised because the line was so ridiculously long. I came at 7.40 thinking nobody would care about the launch of a game, even a triple-A game like the Gears of War series.

How wrong I was.

The line was absolutely massive. It snaked all the way from the main floor of Funan into a tightly coiled spring, past Pastamania and all the way past the foyer in a line that ran all the way back to Peninsula Plaza. I thought there wouldn't be a queue at all, but I was sorely mistaken.

Thankfully I had the privilege of standing next to this Caucasian guy, Darren, whom I immediately took a liking to. We chatted idly as the hours dragged on, about gaming mainly, but also about some other more important things (drug trafficking, pursuing what you want to in life). Meanwhile the staff were running around checking ID, letting people fill out lucky draw forms, etcetera.

Yes, checking ID. Apparently they're taking ratings very seriously now. They banned Mass Effect when it first came out, slapping an M18 rating on it with a large "Sexual Scenes" notification. If I'm not wrong The Witcher was banned too, for a while.

"'Scuse me," I asked one of the staff, clad in a bright red tee with a jet-black Crimson Omen glowering on his chest. "I have a pre-order form already... Where do I go?"

"Outside," he smiled, beckoning, then stopped. "Wait, are you 18?"

"Yeah," I said, confused.

"I'll need to see some ID," he said apologetically.

"What, I don't look 18?" I replied incredulously.

"Well you sound it, but you don't look it," he told me sheepishly.

"I feel vaguely insulted at that," I grinned as I flicked out my 11B.

"It's my job, sir," he apologised as he passed it back to me. "MDA's actually rated this game M18, and it's actually illegal to sell it to anyone who's underage. We'd be breaking the law if we weren't making sure... Thank you, sir. Please follow me."

"I understand," I laughed as we trotted through the glass doors. "I'm just kidding. Don't worry, I know how it works."

"In any case, consider it a good thing," he smiled as he waved goodbye, depositing me at the start of the queue outside. "You have a young face."

"Thanks a lot," I grinned. "You have a good evening, sir."

"You too."

Strange that they'd put such stringent measures into place. Back when we were playing in the Interschool E-Gaming Tournament, we were obviously underage -- we weren't even the youngest people there, and we were still happily shotgunning people into oblivion, and sawing Locust in half without batting an eyelid. I mentioned this to Darren, before we were interrupted by a pair of staff members coming down the line, checking IDs too.

"Can I see your ID please?" one asked.

"What, I don't look 18?" I repeated.

"No, you don't," the other smirked. They laughed. I joined in and passed them my 11B.

"Shit," one said disbelievingly, running a thumb over my scowling portrait. "This guy's serving."

"Stay-out, baby," I grinned, pounding a fist on my chest.

"Eh, call the MPs," the staffer said seriously, turning to his friend. "Get this guy back to camp. Excuse me, sir, I'm going to have to ask you to come with me..."

We all laughed. "Just kidding," the first one said, patting me on the shoulder. "Have fun! Enjoy the game."

"I will," I called after their retreating backs, waving cheerily.

It took ages. I waited for a good hour and a half before getting what I richly deserved -- my Gears of War 3, and the Survival Pack, which was an urban-camouflage duffel bag, a towel, a poster, a t-shirt, an exclusive Adam Fenix model in multiplayer, and oddly, a can of 100 Plus.

Now I'm waiting for the bus to take me home, sitting at the 169 bay in AMK. Keep this LJ updated as I play! Fair warning -- here be spoilers, but I'll put headings up, so don't worry about it. Don't disappoint me, Ms. Traviss, I fully expect to shed a tear or two.

Title taken from potentially the dumbest line in Halo 3. Bungie doesn't usually go wrong with their script (aside from "Someone built it, so it must lead somewhere"), but this was just awful.

Day 61, no vocation
190911

Total videogame post. Not interested, I suggest you skip this.

A lot of people have left me feedback on my last post, be it by Facebook or SMS or even just talking to me in real life. Primarily, it falls into two categories: the first is the "hey that's awesome, I totally feel like this all the time, you're not alone man" response. The other is the "that's bullshit, you're one of the most sociable people I've ever met, give yourself some credit".

For the people who try to convince me of the latter, I really appreciate your efforts to do so, but you're either one of my closer friends, or you've never talked to me for more than 30 seconds at a time. Or you've been somehow deceived by the veneer of encouraging nod, constant eye contact, and timely chuckle.

I asked Sam and Cheng Heng about it when we met to sup. "Why does nobody believe me when I say I'm socially awkward?"

"Because you always seemed like the most normal out of all of us," Sam said, taking a sip of his Coke. "We all feel that way, but we probably wouldn't have written it out so openly. Besides, we expected it least from you, mate."

"But I'm, like, one of you guys," I protested.

They just shrugged. "You're still the least sociopathic."

Gears of War 3 is coming out. I'm on the verge of exploding with anticipation. By tonight I'll have a Limited Edition copy sitting on my shelf, waiting for me to explore the secrets within.

I'm not gonna lie, it's not exactly something I can really afford. But it's the final instalment to a trilogy I daresay is my favourite. I haven't even checked out forums and stuff because I don't want the story to be spoiled for me.

And since I have to clear my leave this week, I figured I might as well get a game. It was between Space Marine and Gears of War 3, and I doubt I could spend the week playing Space Marine. I hear it's pretty short. And I may want to hold off on getting it, because I may borrow it from somebody first. I doubt the replay value will be very high, anyway. Like Bulletstorm, I have to confess. After playing through all the Echoes, I'm slightly bored with the game, because I don't have access to Anarchy mode. I'll just play it again to snag a couple achievements, but the campaign is actually not really worth playing again, I think.

One thing I kind of liked about Bulletstorm, though, is that it actually had a boss that wasn't complete rubbish, the Hyper-Mutated Flytrap. Admittedly it's very hard to do bosses in shooters. Most of the time it's just unlocking a specific weapon to kill it. Like, say, the Tentacles in Half-Life, or the Uroboros Aheri in Resident Evil 5. Or, for something less pseudopod-related, Gears of War's Corpser (which is more of an environmental death, I guess -- another convenient excuse). Even the Berserker, as terrifying as it was, was just rolling out of the way until the Hammer of Dawn was available. So you don't actually get the satisfaction of having killed something with just the weapon in your hands.

But by contrast, you also feel kind of let down if you kill a boss with just an assault rifle. Then you think that it's been too hyped-up, and that it really should've been more difficult. I've mentioned this before; the continual appearance of the Scarab in Halo 3 is this.

But Bulletstorm pulls off exactly the latter, to the extreme (only the Peacemaker Carbine does any damage) and makes you feel good about it. It's pretty difficult to kill the Flytrap, but it's not stupidly hard either. It's not even a particularly innovative design. It's just a boss battle that I greatly enjoyed. And I can't even tell you why. This is why Borderlands bosses are so bloody fun. MOSTLY (will never understand why Crawmerax is supposed to be enjoyable).

Surprisingly, I actually quite enjoyed the bosses of Halo 2. Combat Evolved had none to speak of, but Halo 2 graced us with the Heretic Leader, the Scarab (when it wasn't wussy), the Sentinel Enforcer (if you decided to be a man and fight it outright), and finally, Tartarus himself. All of them were actually pretty fun to fight. Halo 3 was honestly quite pathetic in that regard, though. They lamely chucked Scarabs at you, and at the end of the game tried to get 343 Guilty Spark to turn on you. Admittedly he wasn't a pushover, with some cheap-ass lasers and the only way to kill him being the Spartan Laser, but it was so amazingly dumb. I always thought (I've also mentioned this in another post) that he should've been assimilated into another massive Sentinel construct. Now that would be one hell of a fight.

Reach had absolutely no bosses, but that's because it was a homage to the first Halo, so I guess that's understandable. ODST didn't either, but I was actually fairly appreciative of that. Helljumpers aren't Spartans. No matter how they try, if you have one average Joe taking down, say, a Scarab, it would just feel contrived.

So, Halo 3, what do you have to say for yourself? You've only brought us pain and disappointment. First you gave us all those retarded "Cortana moments", and later, "Gravemind moments". Then you halved our grenades. You made all our favourite characters physically unrecognisable. You took away our Elites. You neutered our Scarabs. You gave us Flood Pure Forms. Unforgivably, you gave us Cortana, which comes second to only The Library in terms of frustration in the entire series (though I may be forced to reconsider after trying Two Betrayals on Legendary). You murdered Miranda Keyes and Avery Johnson. You gave us one of the dumbest final bosses in gaming history. And your multiplayer may have been magnificent but I'm not utterly sold. Bungie, where did you go so wrong?

Something I was talking about to Genevieve-jie yesterday was how much I appreciated Gears of War's gameplay. It's something I really enjoy. It's not like most other cover-based shooters, where a lot of them are "take two bullets and die". Like the Rainbow Six series. As much as I love Vegas and its sequel (more the sequel actually), I really can't stand it sometimes when you just move so sluggishly and bumble around trying to walk to a more favourable position. It was also why I started getting frustrated with Resident Evil 4 and its sequel. The lack of mobility in a game really annoys me.

In Gears of War, though, you can take quite a few bullets before dying. You have the capability to roll out of the way, or intuitively slide into the nearest available cover, even sprint away to get a better angle. You may be a hulking soldier laden with a ton of armour but you can still move how you want to. It's an excellent balance between tactical play and action.

Which is why I thought Gears of War 2, with its vastly improved mechanics, was still the inferior game. The whole increased scale of it was ridiculously incongruous with the play style. You're fighting massive, four-storey-tall monsters bristling with machine guns and rocket launchers, and you have a little slab of concrete to hide behind. And two soldiers can completely destroy the Locust infrastructure, which wiped out about 11 billion of Sera's population. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed playing Gears 2 because it really was an immensely fun game. But it felt like it didn't know what it was trying to be, throwing in new twists and innovations and bosses around every corner to try and mix things up a little. Like that kid who tries to impress his friends when they come over to his house by showing them his immense collection of what-have-you. With the ambition that the game had I thought it should've played more like God of War, not Gears of War.

Oh, and happy belated 25th birthday, Ms. Aran! May you continue to be a shining symbol of feminism (done right) in gaming, discounting the horrific mangling of your character in Other M and the recent surge of games/pictures of you in your skintight bodysuit, which while I would normally enjoy, kind of detracts from the image of you being an enigmatic stone-cold killer. Ah well. See You Next Mission.