Rant 843 / Tuna Avocado Salad

A dog performs the Heimlich maneuver to save a cat. Very touching.












Whatever others may be saying about Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I know it's a good game.

Or maybe my standard has been lowered by the drought of such well-polished computer games since the release of ME2.

Either way, I like it.

Too bad the game favours stealth too much. It's supposed to be fair on both brute force and stealth, but there just isn't enough ammo ever to bust into enemy territory spraying bullets.

No, if I have to kill, I got to snipe. I do keep some weapons for special occasions, like this combat rifle for boss battles, but I have yet to collect more than 200 bullets (30 per magazine with upgraded capacity). How did they expect me to take out that army I encountered in the FEMA base with less than 5 reloads?

Fortunately, I favour stealth so I only spent one sniper round on a sniper just for the irony.

Moreover, the types of weapons are rather limited for a FPS game. So far I've only found two types of each weapon at most: 2 types of combat rifles, 2 types of sniper rifles, 2 types of handguns. On the other hand, there are at least 4 types of grenades which all can be converted into proximity mines.

It's kinda like they tried to accomplish too many things and made it a jack-of-all-trades instead.












The Chinese voice actors in Deus Ex are so bad I can't help but type this before I'm done with the game for the day.

They all sound like they're reading!

And you know why they sound like they're reading? Not just because of the emotions in their voices but also the way they phrase their words in a very English-like way. Translation isn't just about the words; it's also about the logic structure of every sentence.

Example: "You know how he loves to eavesdrop."

Nobody says "you know how" in Chinese. That's a very English way of talking. In Chinese, the translator should merely have translated just the rest  of the sentence or perhaps change that part to "have you forgotten that..." (难道你忘了。。。), although this change would have given it a more reprimanding tone.

It's true that a number of them have the proper accents to sound really Chinese, but they're definitely not voice actors professionally. Moreover, some of them sounded Taiwanese and few of them sounded like northerners.

Since so much money was invested into this game, why couldn't they fork out a bit more (relative to the entire budget) to get real Chinese voice actors?

And the NPCs whose voice actors were probably not Chinese pronounced Chinese terms like "laowai" and "gwailo" so badly. The letter "a" in both terms is supposed to be pronounced "ah".

More importantly, "gwailo" isn't even Mandarin! It's Cantonese! They don't speak Cantonese in Shanghai, and it's highly unlikely Cantonese (or any of the Southern dialects for that matter) is going to spread to northern China in the future.

On a more positive note, I guess I should give them some credit for finding out the term "laowai" in the first place.

They shouldn't have translated English scripts; they should have just hired Chinese writers to create Chinese scripts, especially since the game has an entire chapter based in China and they wanted the NPCs to speak Mandarin.











Joined a new town in Die2Nite this morning during the Mega-Meta Jump. Found a few familiar names, scavenged some useful stuff (deck of cards) and the people sound experienced. But the map's somewhat disappointing with the lack of water-dispensing buildings and someone had just falsified records on Day 1.

Not totally good nor bad. Unlikely to be number 1 again but it's hard to say.











Tried Blitzcrank on LoL today for the first time. That hero sacrificed so much damage for enemy-chasing abilities compared to Morde and Mundo.

The Rocket Grab pulls an enemy to himself. Crap damage and disables the target for a split second while it's being dragged.

Overdrive increases its attack damage and movement speed.

Power Drive makes its next hit do double damage and pops the enemy into the air, disabling it for half a second.

Finally, the ultimate skill, Static Field, does crap damage to enemies in a large area around him and silences them for half a second. When it's not on cooldown, it passively hits random enemy near him for... crap damage again.

See? It doesn't do much damage but is great for disabling enemies for a split second over and over again. Main damage-dealing ability is Power Drive which relies on its base damage.

Great support but IMO harder to gank anyone with alone compared to Mundo.