Rant 1153 / New Recycling System

My cold's lasting a very long time. I just went back to the doctor, after finishing my antibiotics last night, and he prescribed more and stronger antibiotics plus this special decongestion spray that can't be used for more than 5 days and can only be used again in 2-3 months after that.

Looks like I can't exercise nor go out for work for at least the rest of this week and maybe the following week. I'm not sure how I'm going to handle the P90 after this.

















Since it's only a few more months before my 3D printer arrives (says "Oct 2013" but I'm betting on November-December due to whatever last minute delays and shipping), I'm looking into stuff I can print with it.

The first was of course a casing for my Lumia 520. Turns out there is already a customizable model that I can use but later decided against printing one at all. I wanted one with a cover and something softer than hard plastic so that it's more comfortable to hold.

In the end, I bought one from Ebay instead. It was only about S$9-10 anyway.

The next interesting object I found on the Thingiverse was the bicycle generator. There already is a blueprint for building a 3-phase generator, although it requires a lot of metal parts that had to be bought. With the semi-printed generator, the bicycle generator can be assembled.

After that, all I would need is an inverter to control the voltage and current and convert it to AC.

Also, there are so many iPhone casings on Thingiverse it's insane. They might as well create a new website dedicated to them to reduce the clutter on Thingiverse.








































Been playing some Tomb Raider and the quick time events (QTEs) are just... horribly frustrating.

The latest was the one in the wolf's den. Apparently, I was mashing my A and D keys too fast!

Too fast! What. The. Fuck.

I tried it like 10 times mashing like crazy and it never worked, so I googled and found the solution: mash it slowly and deliberately.

It's an oxymoron, really, "mashing slowly". According to various comments, it's because mashing them too rapidly makes the game think I'm holding them down.

Well, I think the playtesters need to be sacked and never hired again.

That wasn't the first bad experience, but the second. The first was the QTE with the Russian guy where the game didn't tell me what key that frigging hand symbol was about. I kept thinking it was F (since it was used before) or spacebar (since that's the most common key in most games).

Turned out to be E, which I learnt only after I gave up after about 20 attempts (I think I'm a patient man) and googled it instead.

How the feck was I supposed to know the hand meant E? Was it shown earlier in the tutorial section? What makes them think every player plays large sections of the game each time? For all they knew, we could be playing just the tutorial on one day, then the first area 5 days later. I can't remember what each symbol meant after that amount of time after 10 minutes of playing.

I have nothing against QTEs per se, especially since they were pretty exciting in Telltale's Walking Dead, but those in Tomb Raider were badly executed. How could this mashing key issue not have been resolved when it has never been an issue in any other games that I've played? How could they tell the player to mash the keys when they actually meant tap each key clearly?

As for the other problem, instead of that ambiguous hand symbol, they could have just given me the image of the E key! What's so hard about that?

Oh, and the instruction for the mashing was at the centre bottom of the screen - half of it covered by the subtitles. Thank goodness I didn't need to read to understand the blinking left and right arrows, but the instruction placement was still ridiculous regardless.

I only noticed it when I stopped mashing in one attempt and just stared at the screen to see if my mashing had been making any difference, which it clearly didn't.

So much money poured into the graphics (oooh, nice hair there) and the gameplay's like that?

What on earth were they thinking?

One more frustrating QTE and I'm turning the difficulty down to easy and treat it as an interactive movie.

To be fair, the rest of the game's pretty enjoyable.


















Organ Trail was a really easy game. As long as I focused on accumulating ammo and fuel in every settlement, I'm fine. I guess it's because it's easy to aim in the game since it's just dragging the mouse from each zombie to myself. With plenty of food and scraps, it's not too hard to trade for fuel. Regardless, it got somewhat monotonous after a few playthroughs so I'm glad I didn't pledge any money to its KS campaign. $2.50 was kinda worth it, but not more.


Also, the best music in the game: