Rant 1157 / It Is Really Impossible To Find Wool At Reasonable Prices These Days.

I'm surprised Magrunner isn't as famous as it should be.

Or maybe my standards really dropped after Remember Me.

Regardless, I find Magrunner to be a really good game.

This game is, just like many reviewers have said, a mix of Portals and the Cthulhu mythos. Instead of a portal gun, you get the Magtech gun. It does not open portals but it magnetises certain objects to allow you to solve puzzles.

In the place of the humour of GLaDOS and Wheatley, there is the horror of Cthulhu.

At this point, I think now that this game can probably be better described as a mix of Portals and Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

Part of the horror comes from a similar fear mechanism that was used in Amnesia where you get red veins and trembles when looking at monsters and certain "horrifying" objects. So far, I've come across just one statue was pretty scary, although IMO the pictures on some of the walls were even worse.

From my experience in Amnesia, it would be safe to assume that at some point, if I stare at those things for too long, I'd go insane and die or something.

Eventually, I believe I will have to actually fight monsters because one hint on the loading screens told me that explosive crates can be used to kill monsters.

So far, not yet. Things are just getting creepy but no combat at the moment.



















So I'm buying an extra casing for my Lumia 520 from Aliexpress. The prices are far better than the ones on Ebay, while those on Ebay were way better than those on Dealextreme.

Whatever happened to DX? Now their prices are ridiculous!

Tried searching on Qoo10 but nobody's selling flip covers for this phone.

At the same time, I also found ABS and PLA filaments for 3D printers available on Aliexpress, so if I don't use much in the future, I'll probably buy from those sellers instead of buying in bulk from wholesalers.




















Just like when I first used the N8, I'm really ignorant when it comes to the current generation of handphones. For one, I was impressed by the Panorama function of the Lumia 520.

However, I don't like how the clock on the lock screen cannot be turned into a virtual analog clock and the layout of the home screen.



















NS2 is now a lot more fun with the new stuff. Babblers look fun and they make gorges a lot more useful over the course of the game. The catch is that they only last a few minutes while costing 1res each, so it takes some intelligence to use them properly.

The game has also been sped up through the reduction of resource costs for all lifeforms, although upgrades for them now cost a bit of res. For example, an onos only cost 60 now compared to 75 in the past, but with 3 upgrades it can cost 84 res. One option for dealing with this is to evolve into an onos without upgrades, then wait for the res to upgrade later, if it survives long enough.

Still, I see plenty of onos dying too quickly, so I guess us pub players haven't really improved much after all these months. Me, I really suck. A large part of this has been due to the 200ms ping but then again, I wasn't a particularly good player in the first place.

The Singapore servers are always empty but I notice that sometimes, there are a few players with similar pings as mine on the American servers I frequent these days, especially Monash #2. I like the 24-player limit.