Rant 286 / Ha!

It's Monday, 1.46am. The first day of the first lunar month. I'm not celebrating. The only thing that happens in my home on Lunar New Year is that we have offerings for my late father. And red packets. Yu sheng, that intensely sweet dish that no one likes except myself (I like everything so that's not saying much), is bought only when someone wants to eat it. I know this is completely redundant but it's always I who ask for it.

After all, it makes for a great dessert.







Playing Fallout 3 again. Surprisingly, it hasn't crashed yet except for that one time when I exited tha game. Weird. Nothing goes wrong when I use Alt+Tab. Once, the music from GNR kept playing even after I went to Windows to check on something. And it didn't crash when I went back to the game.

This time, I'm taking things slowly because I know the story already. I take my time to loot everything that has a value/weight ratio of over 2 (eg valued at 50 and weighs 25, I'll take). I have 9 on Strength just so that I can carry tons of loot at one go.

I'm also exploring more of the map. Haven't found Paradise Falls nor the Ghoul city, but I'm trying. Map's too big to search randomly. I'm also intending to find all the vaults, which are even harder to find at random because all their entrances are built into giant boulders/hills.

For now, I'm still doing some quests to gain levels in order to get more loot. Mainly trying to complete Moira's Survival Guide and all the optional parts in the series of quests. For example, I went into the Mirelurk habitat and placed the observer without killing a single Mirelurk. Pretty difficult to find and I used up both my Stealth Boy to maintain my invisibility throughout my search and then my escape.

All those effort in looting is needed because I need a lot of the healing stuff aka Stimpaks. With over 50 points in my Barter skill, it is barely enough for me to buy up all the Stimpaks available from the 3 vendors in Megaton.

I keep as many of it as possible because I use a lot in every battle. Right now I have about 160 but I need more. I'm a melee fighter using the Shishkebab or whatever they call it. It's the best melee weapon I've found in the game in my first run. But melee fighting means I suffer heavy damage every time I fight. Oh well, at least the enemies also die quickly.

Since this game really isn't about accurate shooting, the gameplay is poorly designed for gun users. More specifically, they lack the suitable crosshairs for each gun. Instead they use the same tiny crosshair for all the guns despite having different accuracy.

With a good crosshair, the player can tell roughly where his bullets will fly. But in Fallout 3, I can't, and the guns are horribly inaccurate. So melee weapons are better and the Shishkebab is the best. It's essentially a flaming sword made from a motorbike tank and a lawn mower blade, among other things. Looks nice and kills fast. Only disadvantage is that sometimes I encounter gun turrets attached to the ceiling and I either switch to a gun in my loot or try to jump and slash it. Sometimes it is too high and I have to run instead until I find a gun.

Anyway so that's what I'm playing mostly for the last 2 days. Nothing special. Still waiting for the expansion for Fallout 3 that's going to be released soon. If it's released soon enough and I play slow enough, I may not have to stop in between.







So I have a bottle of gin at home that needs to be drank. I dislike the smell of it and need to mix it with something more palatable before downing any of it. But I only have lemon tea, orange juice and milk. The XO is out of bounds, access restricted only to my mum and my late father. XO and gin don't mix anyway, so it's not a big deal.

I've tried gin with orange juice but it tasted just like the original orange juice but slightly bitter. Lemon tea with gin sounds plausible but I don't see anything like that when I googled. Milk is obviously wrong. The idea of gin with milk really doesn't sound like it will turn out well.

Hmm....