It's still easy.
Therefore, the game's easy only because I can use Stimpak to instantaneously heal myself at any time, as long as my desktop doesn't suffer from delays caused by too much strain from the graphics.
It happens. When there are lots of enemies or bullets moving around, the graphics can cause my computer to slow down, making it ignore my Tab-spam.
So I die.
But it usually doesn't happen too often. If there are too many strong enemies (eg a pack of golden geckos or night stalkers) I just whip out my grenade launcher. I'm not about to melee an entire pack of those wearing a leather jacket and wielding a machete, Stimpak or no Stimpak.
On Very Hard difficulty, a bite from an adult golden gecko takes out about a quarter of my HP and a leap-bite takes out even more, somewhere between a third and a quarter. Seriously, it takes only a split second for a pack to kill me if they all bite me at roughly the same moment. I can't spam Tab fast enough to recover from that.
And the 4 points in Endurance sure doesn't help.
Now that I'm re-reading The Book of the New Sun, a lot of things made sense now. I can't believe I missed so many details that it appeared to me that this book belong in the fantasy genre instead of sci-fi.
Even though they live in towers, the people work in guilds, they had libraries filled with books, the city relied on river trade and they depended on torture and execution to maintain law and order, this was not set in a medieval setting.
Instead, this is supposed to be in the distant future when humanity has past its peak and the Sun is dying, causing the decay of human civilization.
Hence, the soldiers used guns, the Matachin Tower where the protagonist grew up in had a propulsion chamber (ie it was originally some sort of spaceship or plane), they had torture devices that used electricity and the Moon had been terraformed.
I think the reason why wandering in sandbox games like Stalker and Fallout feels kinda pointless is that the number of ways we can affect the game's universe is so limited. For example, there's little reason to hunt for treasure because even if we get filthy rich, we can't buy anything big, like an entire building or a personal army.
Therefore the only reason players walk out into the middle of nowhere is curiosity.
What would it take to make games of the scale I have in mind?
So according to this month's National Geographic magazine, in the near future our oceans are going to be acidified to the point where fish will become a luxury. The most common seafood will be jellyfish and seaweed (and algae if we ever find some culinary use for it some day), which I guess means us Asians won't be too badly affected.
This is actually already happening in some parts of the world, like in China where some seas are so polluted fishermen can only find jellyfish in their nets all the time.
But hey, at least jellyfish is edible, albeit not all species.
Fish and crustaceans will be badly affected though, and crustaceans will have more problems than just starvation because their shells will be eroded by the acidic seawater.
Jellyfish sushis. Start thinking about how to make them tasty, for your children's sakes.
Algae too, if it's possible. And I guess it is possible given that any food with enough ketchup on it becomes edible.
Food prices are rising and will probably continue to rise for the rest of this year.
The ADB study finds that a 10% rise in domestic food prices in developing Asia, home to 3.3 billion people, could push an additional 64 million people into extreme poverty based on the $1.25 a day poverty line.
Bad? Bad.
The report adds that if the global food and oil price hikes seen in early 2011 persist for the remainder of the year, economic growth in the region could be reduced by up to 1.5 percentage points.
It's not just Singapore, everyone is having a bad time in Asia.
Asian governments have already taken many short term measures to cushion the harsh impacts of food price inflation, including measures to stabilize prices.
Sounds familiar. Isn't this what we're doing here? Hawkers promising not to raise prices for a couple of months?
However rising demand for food from developing Asia and low food productivity mean policymakers must also focus on long term solutions to avert a future crisis, the report says.
More taxes, the PAP way. I'm not saying it's bad; I'm just saying it's inevitable. Taxes apparently solves everything here in Singapore. Again, I'm not saying it's bad; I'm just implying that it's getting old.
Holy crap! The recent PSN downtime was caused by a much bigger problem than I thought! Apparently, it got hacked and 77 million accounts got compromised.
An "illegal and unauthorized person" obtained people's names, addresses, email address, birth dates, usernames, passwords, logins, security questions and more, Sony said on its U.S. PlayStation blog on Tuesday
Since they can't confirm that credit information has been stolen, well, that really sucks. It probably means users should change their credit cards just to be safe and, of course, change their passwords.
Y'know, someday someone's going to have to come up with something that helps people remember their passwords. Even now I find it difficult to remember every single password and user ID I use for serious stuff.
Whoever can come up with a good way for storing passwords will probably strike gold.
Maybe a pager-like device with a fingerprint-recognition system. Or maybe slightly larger, like the size of a pocket calculator so as to allow users to input letters and digits.
But how can such a tiny thing be hack-proof?
Pistols may be stored in penises by terrorists now. Watch out for telltale signs like inexplicable erections during flight. He may be trying to get his gun out.
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