Best gaming tip that was never given.
Now thinking about the inevitable Shanghai trip near the end of the year.
Absolutely nothing has been set in stone but I have three options available.
First, I can go alone just like last year. It was simple and exciting, but only because it was the first time I visited a foreign place alone where people spoke a language I speak with a different accent.
Second, I can ask an uncle who offered to bring me around when I go on a business trip in Shanghai since he goes there every month himself, also for business purposes.
Third, I can ask a friend from my NS unit who gets sent there regularly by his company.
What to choose?
Personally I favour the first because it's simple and I can do as I wish... which is nothing but work, eat and sleep.
Yet I'm also curious about what I can learn if someone who knows that city better than I do can guide me around, particularly my uncle. I like his way of doing things and TBH I'm actually trying to emulate him in some ways.
I guess that's what people do when they don't have a father.
As for the third option, it could serve the purpose of improving my relations with everyone else in my platoon via this friend because I rarely have the opportunity to interact with them due to my role in the company.
Heck, I barely know any of their names at all. Gets kinda awkward when I ask for a specific name and the guy right in front of me acknowledges. It was alright in the beginning but now it's already past our first in-camp training. The fact is that I know all my company's officers better than the guys in my platoon and this doesn't feel right to me.
I'm thinking about it now even though it's only May because I might get better prices by booking early. Currently the cheapest I can get for a flight-cum-hotel package is just over S$700 nett and this is for the same hotel I stayed the last time.
I like the Bund Riverside Hotel but it's not one that you should bring your family to. It's just a business hotel - no frills, nothing, but cheap. Breakfast is bad, so the 104 CNY isn't really worth it other than for the convenience.
S$719 is cheaper than what I paid the last time IIRC and this time both flights are direct 4.5-hour journeys.
But this is only for three days. I should probably try five days this time.
Oh damn it's S$918. $200 for 2 more days!
Interesting. I can get $100 off for picking a midnight flight, but it will turn a 5-day trip into a 4-day one. Then again, 4 days are probably enough.
Except for the $100 off I will be arriving in Shanghai at 5am.
Very, very bad.
The reverse, where I get a normal flight to Shanghai and a midnight flight arriving at 5am in Singapore, doesn't come with this discount.
Sucks balls.
If I arrive in Shanghai at 5am, I'll get to the hotel at 6am. I can probably get them to hold my luggage for me and I can start walking immediately but... 6am in the Shanghainese winter?
Not sure if want.
It might be a good idea to consult my uncle then.
Free-to-play is the future?
I'm not sure about that.
“You’re either an indie game or you’re a massive AAA, IP-backed sequel with derivative gameplay that’s rehashed over and over again as it’s the only safe bet you can make when you’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars.
“The failure is that there’s no middle ground. All the games in the middle that could have been made but have been squeezed out and we’ve seen all these independent studios get closed down over the last few years.”
Unfortunately that appears to be the result of the circumstances surround the video games industry.
But he has a point. The big publishers are mainly focusing on sequels and rehashes. They make relatively few original games and some aren't even trying to make quality games anymore.
Yet saying that free-to-play is the only path might be stretching things a bit IMO. You could possibly have a system where most original games are produced by indie developers and the successful ones get bought up by the bigger players like what EA does, except the sequels are actually good.
I know, it's just a dream.
Also, consoles dying? Possibly, except consoles today aren't just for gaming. They have already begun to adapt via social media so the issue is what more they are going to put into consoles that will set them apart from computers.
As for portable consoles dying, that I can definitely see. Smartphones and tablets already have the potential to kill them since they have better processing power these days that will become comparable to new portable consoles, if it hasn't already. Throw in all the other things tablets can do and it's a simple slam dunk case.
An Elder Scrolls MMO in Skyrim set a millenium before the other Elder Scrolls game named after that place is going to be made.
I wonder why they are going to make a MMO, of all things.
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