I've also been able to discover that the Krogan doesn't attack me once I've found decent cover after killing all the Geths, so I can equip myself with the First Aid Interface II (Sentinels cannot regenerate naturally) to heal up before I attack the Krogan boss.
My Throw, as it turns out, was insufficient to push him back; it only made him pause for a moment. My best attempt ended in me spamming all my skills at him and he still killed me with his melee attack. Running doesn't work because once I stop he'd catch up with me and smash me with his gun. Barrier allows me to endure 3 hits instead of 1, but it's not long enough for me to do anything after spamming all my other skills.
My excellent Sabotage and Overload does hurt him but doesn't stop him for even a moment when he charges towards me. =(
In the end, I did some googling (as usual) and found that a lot of people have had problems dealing with him, except the people who ask are usually playing difficulty levels other than Insanity. Even those who play on Insanity claim to have finished the battle in less than 5 tries. Either they're lying or they're reusing a character they've used in a previous run.
Me, I'm playing on the toughest mode with a brand new character using the physically weakest class. And I'm probably underleveled as it is, since I was trying to get Liara asap without completing any unnecessary quest that could have raised my level more before stepping into this fight.
In short, I probably asked for this.
Because it is most likely that very few people have played on Insanity with a new character and that those few people are highly skilled gamers, I've found little that can help me. The most common advises are to kill the Krogan before the Geths and using Biotics like Lift and Neural Shock to disable him.
The only tips I think may help me is to
1) use Chemical Rounds that would stop his regeneration and, supposedly, his use of Immunity.
2) use a shotgun against him since a good shotgun can stop him for a moment (may need to use Sledgehammer Rounds instead of Chemical Rounds to increase force though).
3) go straight for the Krogan if 1 and 2 don't work.
Another thing that irritated me is that I had accidentally wasted a point on Intimidate some time back even though I was specialising in Charm. That one point, right now, could have allowed me to get Unity, a skill that revives my teammates. I must have made that mistake while playing when I was sleepy.
Now I'm considering replaying the whole thing again, or at least from the last save which is very far away (just before I reached the beacon on Eden Prime). I just hope I haven't placed that stupid point in Intimidate at that time. What a waste.
Now trying to make fake BBQ corn. I don't have charcoal but I thought the oven would suffice. My ignorance in how to cook corn also includes having no idea how long I need to bake it, so I decided to steam it first. Steaming is easy and it's hard to go wrong because it is very difficult to burn food in the thick steam, compared to oven baking. And I cannot tell whether the corn is done if I wrap it in foil, which is required to spread the heat evenly.
I'm baking it without foil and on a tray, hence the pre-bake steam. Now the corn is actually done, but I'm going to bake it to burn it a little and with some seasoned butter to enhance the taste.
At worst, it would come out a little burnt but very juicy (due to the steaming).
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Baking in process... waiting 2 mins before returning to watch the corn. My garlic-butter-sesame-seed-oil-salt-sugar mixture smells good.
Just so you know, I'm not actually hungry, but very curious.
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Alright something isn't going according to plan. My tray is collecting the butter but not all of it is flowing to the sides. Now the bottom of the corn is being fried instead of baked. I'll have to keep turning it, but one side is already browned due to frying. Now this is why I'm using only a single cob of corn - it's a potentially very delicious experiment.
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Confirmed that the baking isn't browning the corn, but the frying is. At least I'm sure it won't be bursting with juices after this and this is safer than actual pan frying (especially after the steaming).
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Turned it four times now (90-degree rotation), each time taking it out to apply another layer of butter on the whole cob. Just repeated it for the last time. Once this fourth side browns in around 2-3 mins I'm eating it.
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3 mins are up but the last side is not browning yet. =(
2 more mins.
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And it is done!
=D
Needs more salt. Next time I'll use three because all the effort (for cooking and cleaning up) just isn't worth merely one cob of corn.
It's now 2am.
The ongoing economic crisis has reduced oil prices to much decent prices, but Kuwait isn't happy about this. They're insisting that oil prices stay above $60 a barrel so as to maintain their budget. In other words, they've got richer in recent years and want to stay that way.
So now, various oil-producing countries are going to pump less oil to push the prices back up.
What. The. Fuck.
So I retried from the save just before I used to Protean beacon. It took only around 2 hours to finish everything up to the fateful battle with the bloody Krogan.
This time, things were very different. But it's my new Lift skill that allowed me an easy victory. Even though I was only able to put 2 points into it, the 6.4 seconds (actually slightly less due to the Krogan's biotic resistance) saved my life. I was able to reduce its HP to a pixel's width before he recovered and used my 2-points-short-of-max Throw on him to further disable him a second before killing him. The Chemical Rounds really helped by negating his HP regeneration while using Immunity (which reduces damage by at least 50%).
I also found out that the single point in Intimidate was given automatically at some point in the game and I really didn't waste a skill point.
One thing that worries me is that my squad has no firepower. I'm using Liara and Tali to make the game more interesting since they're both light-armour users with little expertise in weapons. With no point spent on their weapons skills and only 1 point in my own Sniper Rifle, I think I may need to concentrate more on the ability to kill enemies from now on. It may be easier now to do so because I already have Advanced level of most skills except Stasis, which I find to be not necessary to have 2 person having it (the other being Liara).
My mum boiled all the corn before I could steam them. She probably thought she was helping me. Now I baking them again, but they just won't turn brown! Boiling them made such a huge difference. I think I need more heat than my little oven can generate.
Lots of water being collected on the tray and condensation is appearing on the window. This looks more like steaming than baking.
Recently I've been noticing some new stuff on the Empires serves I play on. Both of them G4TC servers and they have recently implemented a ranking system for all players. Each time I kill or get killed, I get alerts telling me how many points I or my killer got. It's quite creative that they have different names for each number of kills I have before dying. For example, when I get 2 kills before dying I have Double Kill displayed in green and if I have 5 it's Domination.
One server is in the US, so my ping there is around 250-300. It's smaller with a 41-player capacity, so I don't like it as much. The other server is in the UK, giving me 350-500ms pings but its can take 22 players more.
With my sort of ping, I'm naturally disadvantaged. However, I do get top kills once in a long while, which is pretty sad for the other players. Not often enough though, because my rank is 124 with a o.77 k/d ratio. It means I kill an average of 0.77 enemy before each death.
Out of the top 300 players, there are 3 Singaporeans, a Hongkonger, a Taiwanese, a Japanese and a Korean. The other 2 Singaporeans have better k/d ratios and kills than me, but as the ranking system shows, Empires isn't all about killing enemies. Or I'm trying to justifying my crap shooting skills... whatever.
Sometimes I just suck at killing and it's as if my hand just won't move to where I want it to go. At those times, I go engineer and build stuff/resurrect teammates instead. I can't explain why it happens. I used to believe that I can shoot better if I sleep enough, but I've been proven wrong many times. It's just that at random times, I can be "in the zone" and my hands seem to coordinate better with my brain.
Anyway the ranking mechanism is still in beta with quite a number of unresolved issues and each time a problem is solved the ranks would be reset. So it's not important.
After the last 2 stalls selling Western cuisine in one of the coffeeshops in the neighbourhood have closed down, yet another has opened. These are not the usual Western stalls that call 3-mm-thick pieces of meat "steaks", but the kind that hire chefs from Europe. One of the last stalls had a chef from France while the other had a local chef who had previously worked in a fancy restaurant.
This time, it's even better - there wasn't a single local operating in that stall, not even the one taking orders. All 3 of them who were there yesterday are European and only one is able to understand a little Mandarin. One of them spoke French. I'm betting on 2 months before they close down.
Their food was actually very good. For $19.90, the beef steak set consists of a little dish of mushroom cream soup, a plate of spaghetti bolognese (beef), some onion rings, a small portion of potato salad and the steak drenched in mushroom gravy.
I'll begin with the parts I've no problem with. The soup was very thick and creamy. The bolognese was not sour at all, though I'm unsure if it was meant to be so. Either way, I prefer bolognese that is a little sour. The quantity of beef, however, more than offsets this. The onion rings were alright and it was definitely better than having the standard fries that all other stalls use in their set meals.
The potato salad was very good, except for one piece that wasn't cooked long enough. Half of it was crunchy. If not for this once piece, the salad would have been the best I've had in a long while. The steak itself was supposed to be medium rare and it was medium rare. Except those lines that the grills made on the meat were blackened. All the areas and only the areas in contact with the grills were burnt. What a waste of a perfectly done steak!!!
It was the chef's (or chefs') fault. Their recipes were fantastic, but the execution leaves much room for improvement. The potatoes were not cut in identical sizes. Most were, but the special crunchy piece was almost twice the size of the rest, which I believe is the reason for it being not thoroughly cooked.
The steak was a total failure just because of the small area that was burnt. The whole steak was barely edible because of it. The grills were probably too hot, meaning they left it on the heat and unused for too long before putting my steak on it, even though the fire was probably adjusted correctly. My first thought was that they were being too hasty (which can cause food to be under- or over-cooked), but they took 15mins to finish making the set. That has to be more than enough time to cook a beef (aka the fastest-cooking meat in the world) steak to medium rare.
I'll still give them another chance though, just because they've got what it takes to be the best Western cuisine stall in the neighbourhood. Just for that potato salad, I'd say they're the best to have ever opened in this area. The last two either gave boiled broccoli and carrot or coleslaw.
The present stall, however, is the most expensive.
Just downloaded this SiSoftware Sandra Lite, which gives me information about my computer. According to its reports, the internal temperature is around 50 degrees Celsius and the computer is consuming energy at 184W, meaning every hour I have it turned on is another 184Wh on my electricity bill.
Opening my windows and bathroom door for extra ventilation, I managed to lower the temperature to around 49 degrees. Locking my fan to blow straight at the casing at max speed drops it further to 48. Unfortunately I need the fan too - it keeps my internal temperature at 36.7 degrees. I begin perspiring noticeably at 37 degrees.
With computers like this, gamers probably don't need heaters in temperate countries. They can even hug their beloved computers for warmth or just stand at the back of the casing where the warm air exits.
The interest rates at Hong Leong this year are nothing short of horrible. For example, the fixed deposit interest rate for 1 year with an amount between S$50k and S$100k is only 0.95% today. It was around 0.7% just two days ago (they hadn't changed the sign at the branch near my home today). This month last year, it was at 1.5%!!! The present rate for an amount below S$50k is even worse at 0.6%! (Though it still beats the POSB savings account whose annual interest rate is slightly over 0.1%.)
Even now, certain countries are trying to change the global trade currency to something other than the USD. No one is suggesting the CNY (aka RMB), probably because it doesn't have the history nor the power to prove itself yet. Nor were the RUB and INR mentioned at all. I'd say that having the Euro as the replacement would be far more assuring than using any of these.
The idea of not depending on the American dollar would certain appeal to most of the world now because the situation around the world wouldn't be as bad as it is if we had some other global currency long ago. Though it is the IMF's policy now to use a mixture of different currencies, I think having one single currency would be more efficient and less confusing (for the rest of us non-economists).
Woot! Pushed my Empires rank up to 57 in one day! Ranking only applies to the two most popular servers in the game, not the entire game. However, there are usually only around 5 active servers whenever I open the game while the rest are empty.
Just checked the other rankings they have and found that there are only 6 Singaporean players playing Empires. I think I can safely say that since there are only 6 Singaporean players recorded by the most popular servers in the game.
I'm the top player! Actually my k/d ratio is like shit compared to the 3 other active players. The 2 remaining players have played only less than 4 hours combined in the last 8 days. My k/d ratio was already pretty bad the last time, mentioned above, but now it's at 0.68.
What I did was play as Engineer the whole day and resurrect my teammates all the time. I really didn't feel like playing as a Rifleman, for some reason. Anyway my success at using this class ended up raising my rank by 87 and pushed my country's rank to 2nd.
Singapore was 3rd previously but I gained so many points that Singapore's average went above Belgium's. Of course, we only have 6 players while Belgium has 17, so it is much easier for me to do it. USA is at 19, but there are 804 players from that country.
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