Concert

concert last sat was great! yayy.. the juniors are good, i think we can dont go back to help le muhahah. we're not really needed anyway, feiling's just missing us haha..

me and yuqin really want to be at the reservation/ticketing counter next year. pls employ us, ntuco! afterall, we're accountants-to-be..

planning for the europe trip is harder than we imagined, from google-mapping to translating foreign phrases on babelfish.. 2 sleepless nights and we're only halfway thru the 13 cities to visit. but still... it's gonna be so *quotes jiakai* eggciting!!

The Golden Compass

Like Narnia, The Golden Compass is a game based on a film based on a fantasy novel, and it even goes so far as to summarily lift hunks of gameplay directly from the older title. Yet for some reason, the designers picked all of the bad stuff while leaving behind the good. And just for good measure, the psp version suffers from incomprehensibly awful glitches that essentially break the game.

If you aren't familiar with the accompanying film or the novel on which it is based, you will probably be rather confused by the game. As Lyra, you seek to save your friend Roger from the grasp of evil folkloric kidnappers known as Gobblers. Lyra is accompanied by her daemon, Pan, who is the physical embodiment of Lyra's soul, and she is occasionally joined by a hulking armored polar bear named Iorek. Lyra also possesses an instrument (the golden compass of course), which can answer any question that she asks it. You'll figure out what's going on piecemeal and with the help of short clips from the film. Yet, you'll likely never care about Lyra or her companions, and important chunks of exposition are completely glossed over, leaving you wondering what's going on or why you should care.

Gameplay is a mess. There are a lot of ideas at work here, but none of them pan out particularly well. First, exploration. You spend a lot of time roaming about doing busywork, particularly in an insanely long and boring sequence on the Gyptian vessel. The highlight during this level is... ...mopping the deck. =\ In other levels, these tasks may have you hiding under furniture or throwing snowballs, but none of them are interesting. They are also generally sliced up by cutscenes and other gameplay mechanics. Platforming ushers in more mediocrity. Granted, there are some nice ideas here. Lyra can use Pan as a grappling hook and latch on to poles for simplified Prince of Persia-inspired swinging, which allows the duo to glide for short distances. There are also beams to keep your balance on as you cross, though these moments seem to take forever because Lyra walks across them so slowly. The controls are superloose, which is deadly on the dock level--one of the dumbest platforming sequences ever concocted. Not only do the slippery controls make Lyra a pain to maneuver, but you can't manually control the camera, which makes it impossible to judge distance. Even worse, the camera has a tendency to move on its own in the middle of jumps and balancing acts. Expect to reload this level countless times while cursing the designer who created it.

The game relies heavily on timed button sequences, already one of the most overused mechanics in modern-day games. Attacked by a giant bee? Press some buttons in the right order. Need to push over an ice bridge? Press some more. Even some boss fights are won in this manner. There is some action buried in here, though it's found mostly in the game's first and final levels. Playing as Iorek, you'll paw through three types of enemies: witches, Tartars, and wolves. Once you build up enough rage by using standard melee attacks, you can pound the ground to do extra damage. You can also hold two buttons down to grab an enemy and fling it around, but for the most part, you can defeat this tiny assortment of foes by mashing a single button. Some levels are capped by boss fights, which aren't hard, but thanks to the lack of player camera control and the shoddy hit detection, they're plenty annoying. There are still more elements at play. Sometimes Lyra will try to deceive other characters, which requires you to perform a set of minigames. Some of these games function properly, at least, such as one where you push the left analog stick in a whack-a-mole variant. Others are simply terrible and so poorly explained that you may have no clue how the minigames even work the first few times they appear.

At their best, the production values simply fail to capture the fantasy magic of the film or novels. At their worst, they're broken. Animations and environments are crude while there is absolutely no imagination to be found in the bland art design. There are also some weird graphical bugs, such as blinking polygons and pixelated seams. These issues are less noticeable on the psp's small screen than on its console counterparts. Sound fares even worse. The musical score is fine, if unmemorable, but most sound effects are either embarrassingly clunky or missing entirely (and this version is missing even more than on the console versions). The only consistent audio comes from the spinning of the umd as the system is forced to constantly pull data from the disc. Loading screens populate the game with wild abandon – you'll find them between levels, during levels, while engaged in conversation and, astonishingly, even in the middle of combat. Furthermore, sound is often not synched with the onscreen events, to the point where unrelated noises, such as the noises of Iorek fighting, will occur when something else is happening onscreen.

Initially, the wide variety of gameplay elements make it seem like there's going to be a lot to do in the game. Unfortunately, most of these facets are too repetitive, too frustrating, or too boring to keep anyone's interest. The fact that the psp version suffers from a string of unimaginable technical problems makes it even more embarrassing. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, the game is just the latest in a string of movie tie-ins that sacrifice good gameplay and proper quality assurance for the sake of a quick buck. It's without question amongst the worst games to be release on psp.

Me and My Katamari

As a portable interpolation of Katamari Damacy, Me and My Katamari pretty much makes good. With hundreds of unlockable items, plenty of new challenges, and some downright zany environments, the Katamari series is surely going out on a good note.

At the beginning of Me and My Katamari, the King and the rest of the royal family go for beach-blanket fun, splashing about in the ocean. Unfortunately for the inhabitants of a chain of small islands nearby, the King gets a little too rambunctious, causing a tidal wave that wipes the islands off the map. He then makes amends by sending his son, the Prince, out to collect matter out of which to create new islands. This is where you come in. The opening cinematic sequence for Me and My Katamari establishes the delightfully irreverent and mildly insane tone that the series is best known for, though the game is pretty lean on cinematic sequences through the rest of the game, which is a little disappointing.

The game uses an island interface that allows you to view the islands you've created while also allowing you to see what needs to be done. Animals will start popping up on Prince Island asking the Prince for help. Every mission you receive on said island has the same objective; you'll have X amount of time to get a katamari X meters wide. Even though it seems like this would get repetitive and boring, the diversified environments generally help the game stay fresh. The Prince can also travel to the Volcano Island, where creatures will present him with strange requests. Instead of constructing a katamari of a certain size, these missions require you to build a katamari containing the right products. For instance, one gorilla needs enough energy to fuel his rocket, so it makes much more sense to run over power plants than trees. Even so, it doesn't hurt to build up a large katamari simply because you'll be able to obtain more objects, which therefore adds a whole new element to the game. The final isle is the Beanstalk Island, which allows you to switch between characters you've collected throughout the levels.

While it might not have as many wonderful cinematic sequences as the Katamari games for the PS2, Me and My Katamari nails the overall look and feel of the series almost perfectly. The environments, which start you off inside a tiny room in a tiny Japanese home and eventually reaches the scope of a decent-sized metropolis, feature purposely blocky designs and a random selection and placement of items, both common and exotic, and often straight-up imaginary. The game has an incredible color palette of bright primaries and subdued pastels, and its unique sense of design saturates everything from status screens to the bear that walks around wearing a T-shirt that says "bear" on it.

While it almost perfectly captures the Katamari style, it makes also a few technical sacrifices in the form of midlevel load times, but are never more than a few seconds long. During these loads the game also kind of fudges the scale of the katamari to its surroundings, making the ball itself bigger while shedding much of the complicated geometry of the items stuck to it. Me and My Katamari's sound design matches suit, providing a catchy and eclectic soundtrack for the surreal action. A lot of the music is identical to that found in past Katamari games, which makes it an easy fit, though it would have been nice if the game featured a little more original music. Though the soundtrack is largely dominant, it's regularly punctuated with the confused, panicky cries of people and animals that you pick up with your katamari, which can be hysterical.

If you know what you're doing, you can play through Me and My Katamari in just a few hours, and it feels slightly shorter than its predecessors. Part of the sense of brevity can probably be attributed to the fact that there just aren't that many different environments, and they get recycled often, so that by the time you get to the end, you've pretty much had your fill. If you're looking for a reason to go back, there are gifts from the King hidden throughout the game that you can pick up and outfit the Prince with, as well as a small army of cousins that you can pick up and then choose to play as. There's also a pretty simple multiplayer mode, in which up to four players, each with their own copy of the game, can play a competitive game in which everyone tries to collect more items while knocking items off the other players' katamaris. Or, for the less competitive, you can exchange royal gifts with the other players.

The paltry number of levels in Me and My Katamari proves to be its biggest shortcoming, as the game otherwise does a pretty phenomenal job of re-creating the Katamari Damacy experience on the psp. The game's refreshing aesthetic, fun and simple gameplay, and its unhinged sense of humor is unlike anything else on the psp. If you've never played a Katamari game before, you owe it to yourself to try this one out. For fans of the series, this is a must-have.

Chocolatier

Gone are the days when we could fire up a game of our choice and spend hours toiling away, now we seem to game in stolen moments here and there. With that in mind, perhaps it is no wonder that casual games have become such a popular gaming choice (especially with women who make up the vast majority), as casual games allow us to either jump in and get those quick fixes of gaming bliss or either play them for as long as we want when we do have the time. In honor of casual games, we have Chocolatier, where a chocolatier sim that has you jet setting around the world, trying to find the best ingredients, and selling off your product to make the highest profit you can. Thanks to Sheya for the game =)

The story is that two sisters who have been fighting over their family's chocolate business, but neither could decide on what the other wanted to do. So, they splintered off, becoming business rivals, though one wants to restore the honour to her family. To do so, she is passing along what she knows to you, so that you may make the family business grow and prosper once more. In the beginning you will be handed a factory and a recipe for simple chocolate bars. With the recipe in hand, you will need to gather and maintain ingredients, ensure the fatory is in production, and sell the products to increase wealth and ranking in the chocolate world.

Ingredients can be found at every port city in the game that you can land at, though they would not offer the same goods. Though sugar is constantly prevalent, other ingredients like cocoa beans, coffee beans, cashews, lemons, vanilla sticks etc. can only be found at certain specific ports. You can choose to pay the full price for what the merchants are asking for, or you can attempt to haggle with them, but too much haggling can anger them them and cause their prices to soar. Prices at the various markets are also determined by things such as shortages or too much supply. Get news of demand and supply shortages or hikes from random characters at the bars or inns. In the factories, you will get to determine how many chocolates of that type that factory will make each week. You will have various revolving circles on a machine moving around, and how many complete firing of the required ingredients into each circle determines how many boxes of chocolate that factory will produce each week, as long as you have all the required ingredients. With the goods on hand, you can now head to the chocolate boutiques to sell them off. Now, there are several factors at play when selling your goods. For starters, sometimes people just get tired of eating your same chocolates over and over, so the longer you have one single chocolate bar going over and over, the lower and lower the cost you will be able to sell them at. Also, though people from an area might still love a specific type of chocolate, another port like London might be tiring of them. Throughout the game, you will be able to purchase some shops as your own, and there you will always get better than usual prices.

Along the way in the game, you will be stumbling upon odd quests, such as delivering a letter to someone or producing certain amount of chocolate boxes for a person and delivering them to them. Completing quests will net you more money or things like new recipes. Recipes come in four different flavors, such as bars, squares, infusions, and truffles, with each generally more valuable the one before. Still, you will have to spend quite an amount at each factory for upgrading to allow the making of more valuable candies.

Switching between ports costs you money and weeks , so plan your inventory full of supplies before you wander on an adventure. Graphically and visually the game is alright, simply doing what it needs to do to get its gameplay across. Music comes in several forms, such as the tense "factory out of cocoa beans" quickened paces to the more leisurely "explore as long as you want" background sounds. The sounds are pretty good though, featuring things like trains and ships going on voyages, the sound of a ringing cash register, and others. I found myself throwing away hours (one full day =\) to this game when I really should have been doing some work. I'm sure that not only will you have fun with this casual tycoon game, but you might just learn something too (chocolate history and facts).

I have also tried a few hours of the sequel to Chocolatier, which is called Chocolatier 2 (obviously). You can even get to create new recipes in Chocolatier 2 using secret ingredients from hidden ports around the world. And the game now track prices of chocolates and ingredients for you so a mouse-over would reveal past transactions. Also, instead of spinning circles in the factories (which made me dizzy), the circles don’t spin and instead flow differently on the product line. The game is as addicting as chocolate, and I’m all for a third edition of the game if it’s done right.

菊花台 Lyrics

This is for me and angl and yuqin so we can sing during practices! (yes, huangsheng is doing the pop thing again)...

你的泪光 柔弱中带伤
惨白的月弯弯 勾住过往
夜太漫长 凝结成了霜
是谁在阁楼上冰冷的绝望

雨轻轻淌 朱红色的窗
我一生在纸上 被风吹乱
梦在远方 化成一缕霞
随风飘散 你的模样

菊花惨 澹地伤 你的笑容已泛黄
花落人断肠 我心事静静淌
北风乱 夜未央 你的影子剪不断
徒留我孤单在湖面生霜

花亦相挽 飘落了灿烂
凋谢的石道上 命运不堪
愁没都江 秋心在两畔
怕你上不了岸 一辈子摇晃

谁的江山 马蹄声慌乱
我一身的戎装 呼啸苍苍
天微微凉 你轻声地叹
一夜惆怅如此委婉

菊花惨 澹地伤 你的笑容已泛黄
花落人断肠 我心事静静淌
北风乱 夜未央 你的影子剪不断
徒留我孤单在湖面生霜

菊花惨 澹地伤 你的笑容已泛黄
花落人断肠 我心事静静淌
北风乱夜未央 你的影子剪不断
徒留我孤单在湖面生霜

credits:
song by jay chou
菊花 by angl and chryssie