Rant 794 / Uninspirations

Tried World of the Living Dead. Not what I expected. Very distant.

When one sees something in the "zombie" genre, one would usually think of people shooting undead people while looking for places to hide and scavenging for supplies.

This game is exactly that, except you see none of the actual action.

Imagine there is a war. There are the soldiers who are out there fighting the enemies and the generals at the back planning the action on a map.

In WotLD, you're that general, and the map is a Google Map.

What you do is give orders to survivors assigned to your command in order to save their asses, and these can range from "GTFO AND HIDE!" to "Get in and find something useful" to "Move to this spot and rest".

The next step is Survival Points. These are points players get when their survivors do certain stuff and can be spent on raising their expertise in weapons or scavenging or whatever, or to build temporary safehouses to rest in.

In the larger picture, there are factions. I guess these are the game's version of guilds.

With guilds come PvP. It's logical. There's no point having factions against zombies.

So far I'm still a newbie. Got my party killed when I tried to complete my tutorial mission by going into a heavily infested area. Alright, the game's also not very newbie-friendly too. In my starting area, there apparently isn't any safehouses in the clear zones.

How am I supposed to recover Fatigue points when I can't safely reach a safehouse right at the start?

I mean I tried, and I went through hell for it! Seriously, my survivors had to trudge through multiple red zones, and red according to the map legend means "SUICIDE". What the heck?

Not entirely interested in playing anymore. It can possibly be a great game, but it is too harsh for newbies.











Aliens! When do we get to meet them? Perhaps after we finally eradicate racism among ourselves. Since they're going to look so much more different than people of other races, the racism and xenophobia will be over 9000 times greater.










Prosperous Kitchen is offering a half-price coupon today, $15 for $30 worth of food. But when I called them to ask if it could be used for takeaway, the answer I got was "No". Strange. What difference does it make if I dine-in or buy takeaway? Cost-wise, they should be roughly the same.

I'd have bought two if she'd given me a positive reply because they're one of the few places in Singapore that sells 咸水角 and it's the closest one to my home. It's so rare, they're usually sold out by late afternoon.

咸水角 is a Cantonese fried dim sum with a thick skin made of glutinous rice flour and contains a mixture of pork, chinese mushrooms, chinese chives, dried shrimps and turnips. Usually I can only recognize the pork, but it doesn't matter to me.











My current town in Die2Nite is awesome. They're so strict, one guy gave me a stern warning for using one piece of Semtex to make a Plastic Bag and Semtex, which can be filled with water to form an Exploding Water Bomb.

Actually I did it because I was bored and wanted to make something, and the items required weren't exactly in short supply at that point.

Still, that guy got a into a fit for the waste of one piece of Semtex, as if we were going to have to build a Waterminefield soon.

Anyway it's now Day 11 and we're doing very well. Most of the scavengers are now moving together in a single direction whenever one is replenished. Bad luck with the hacksaw though, because we only found one on Day 10.

In contrast, we've been having fantastic luck with the nightly attacks. Multiple low spikes cannot be anything but good luck. Not doing too good with the DOs (defensive objects) but we're still averaging 10 per day. Could have been more but I couldn't find any for the last couple of days.

Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy!

Soon. No date specified.
















Whoa! What have they done to incur such wrath from the earth?













Again they're predicting the possibility of a collapse of the Chinese economy.

Not new but has a point. Overinvestment is always a worry, just like what we're seeing in Singapore. All the hot money coming in, it's fun for now but not forever. Someday the investors are going to find a better emerging market and it won't be a pleasant experience for us.

"I was recently in Shanghai and I took their high-speed train to Hangzhou," he said, referring to the new Maglev line that has cut traveling time between the two cities to less than an hour from four hours previously.

"The brand new high-speed train is half-empty and the brand new station is three-quarters empty. Parallel to that train line, there is a also a new highway that looked three-quarters empty. Next to the train station is also the new local airport of Shanghai and you can fly to Hangzhou," he said.

"There is no rationale for a country at that level of economic development to have not just duplication but triplication of those infrastructure projects."

What I think he's saying is that the big numbers we're seeing coming from China may be hollow.

You can either see this as foresight or overspending on image. Right now in some parts of China, it's cheaper to take a domestic flight than a ride on a high-speed train, so I'm favouring the latter. Some of these are built way too early, and they cost tons of money to maintain, so it's not like having them pre-emptively is a good thing.