My fondue pwns. Just kidding. I found out why cheese fondue is not as popular as chocolate fondue the other day - it is quite oily. But it's cheese after all, so it's no surprise. What is surprising to me is that it makes me full faster than I expected. Couldn't finish all the cheese even with my bro. It's only 200g of cheese, half cheddar, half emmental.
Beer does add a certain flavour to the cheese. I'm going to try bacon cheese fondue some day. I have 300g of back bacon just waiting for me in the freezer. Muahahahahahaha! But there's no alcohol in bacon cheese fondue. Wonder when I'm ever going to use the little bottle of Burgundy. Probably never, with the expiry date approaching soon. Or has it expired already? Oh well.
The sliced roast beef at Cold Storage tastes just like the sliced ham they sell! The salt covered most of the flavour in the meat and the beef flavour is detectable only if it is eaten without anything else. And it costs $4.50/g! Wasted my $14!
Now I have the ingredients for cheese fries, I'm going to try someday soon when my bro finally books out for the last time. What would holidays be for if not for sinning?
I also have almost all the ingredients for bacon cheese fondue. Almost. I'm going to buy the parsley and etc on the day I make it.
And I've learnt why french toast is usually made from sliced bread even though french loaf tastes better - because unless you have a good bread knife, never attempt to sliced the loaf for the toast. At home, I have only 2 types of knifes - the meat knives for when my mum cooks steaks, and the omnipotent cleaver. What choice do I have but to slice bread with the mighty huge knife? And so I attempted 4 times and found out that the uneven surface is not conducive for proper frying of the whole surface. Sliced bread, on the other hand, is perfectly cut, so if the crust is removed, it is easy to fry. Good lesson, and at least the toasts taste decent, not burnt.
If I had burnt one of them, I'd have ruined another pan lol! How many years has it been since I burnt something on a pan... maybe 2, or 3.
Next time, I'm going to fry some of the bacon together with the french toasts, so that there will be something salty for the meal. Frying bacon is easy, especially since the no oil is necessary. I used to fry it in in microwave, but washing the plates I fry them in is hell... for the maid. :P Part-time maid, btw, not full-time.
Hellgate: London is just like Diablo in first-person view! Right now I have only a lvl 22 Engineer, and I've been playing in first-person throughout. According to my bro, and the online reviews, the two Hunter classes may be the only classes that require the first-person view. The other classes do not need to fight from far away, which I can tell from all those unusable weapons I've picked up so far. The weapons with the longest ranges (up to 40m) are available only to Hunters, while the Cabalists use short and mid-range weapons (20m or shorter). Templars use mostly melee weapons, but these are hard to come by. Most weapons in the game seem to be for Hunters, and this makes the two Hunter classes to be the most interesting.
Back to why HGL is like Diablo. Some monsters are very similar, like the small leaping thing in Diablo and its sequel, though in HGL it seems much larger. In first-person view, of course. The loot is also similar, except the names aren't as lame as those in Diablo, like "Scaly Ring Mail of Luck" and such. Bleh.
In fact, it is the variety of loot that makes the game interesting, since the story is quite minimal - you cannot understand the whole story unless you read beforehand the backstory. This is the one thing Flagship Studio is depending on the make it playable. Together with the MMO feature, it may just work, if not for the unimpressive bosses in the game. It could have made a good MMORPG, if not for the fact that the bosses are mostly normal monsters with different stats and names. Totally in contrast with WoW, where the bosses are bigger than normal and look different from the rest of the mobs.
There are some quirky minigames within, but those aren't enough. One minigame I've just finished requires me to fire cannons on a gigantic monster that constantly moves about. I cannot get near it or it'll either stamp on me or breath fire on me. I can't hurt it either unless 2 cannons are firing on it at once. These cannons only fire for a short while without me manning them, and they are placed some distance from each other. When 2 of them are firing on it, it will shrink and lose its immunity to my weapons for a short while.
And the minigame called Triage! It is just like the Triage quest in WoW Horde, except with mobs coming in while you save the dying soldiers within the time limit. Triage is the quest where there are eight beds in the room and Severely injured or Gravely injured soldiers suddenly appear on the beds and you have to save them while the clock ticks.
There really is little reason to play HGL offline, unless you are bored or you love loot. I love loot. :P When I finish HGL I'll leave it in my laptop so that I can play again, probably as a Summoner or Evoker. No way am I going to try Templars when my framerate can dramatically decrease at times, especially when things explode or many mobs appear. Not always, but often enough to prevent me from trying.
Or maybe I should just stop playing this and play Atelier Iris 2, then Xenosaga Ep III, and leave HGL for hall days. Hmm...
Valkyrie Profile 2 isn't a game that I like. The graphics are fine, but the gameplay isn't that interesting for me. Somehow I just dislike the combat style and the fact that I need to use things in dungeons that I may have left behind in previous dungeons. I hate replaying old dungeons in single-player games - feels exactly like my grinding days in Lineage 2, brings back bad memories.
Talking about Lineage 2, it is the first game that introduced to me the reality of gaming addiction. Before that, I always thought gaming addiction was meant the player loves gaming so much that he cannot stop. It was only through my experience in L2 that made me realise that love is not necessary for the addiction to persist. Something just holds me to the game, something I cannot explain that pulls me back from real life. I hate grinding, but I just want to play it, for reasons I cannot understand. Then with the help of a friend in the game, I moved to WoW, and I realised I hated L2. WoW is actually enjoyable because grinding isn't necessary to level, and the PvP games rock!
In L2, I grind 24/7 on the same mobs all the time. A small mistake can often lead to death and the loss of 4% of the exp bar. A small mistake can be running too far and agroing a high level mob accidentally. Worse is the lawlessness of the L2 world, where PKers roam free and farmers care about their quotas more than the area available for the other players. Because of the stingy loot drop chances in the game, demands for farmed gold and items are always in high demand, and thus the thriving farmer populations. These guys play like sweatshop labourers, never resting and always farming. Of course they most likely have shifts but I don't care. What I care is that they actually take up so many of the better areas that real players have only the worse rooms to grind in.
And it's boring as hell to kill the same things all day. Or watch your party members kill them anyway, if you're a healer like I was. All I did was watch their HP bars, and sit when nothing needed to be done. It was just like my 2 years as RP, doing nothing all day, but have to remain alert throughout - no sleeping, no other forms of entertainment even if you're bored of sitting, because the others may get seriously injured suddenly, and you have to spam the heal buttons right away.
Oh yes, I did manage to cause the party to wipe because I was watching tv while the tank suddenly died from a massive overdose of mob agro. And I got... shit for that.
WoW was heavenly compared to L2 hell, because there are so many areas I can roam, and so many unorthodox forms of entertainment I can find in WoW, like exploring unopened areas. But in a serious guild, it does get kind of like L2 because members will need to grind for materials for better items one is required to have. Which sucked. And made me quit. I hate grinding.
Time to go.
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