Winter's Grasp

Sooo cooollld outside today! Actually, it has been like that everyday starting from the snowday on Thursday, I think. This has been a very interesting weekend: I know that I'm kinda late on writing the first entry of my new blog, but well, better late than never right? :P

So, I had many ideas on how I wanted to start off writing in this blog. I was going to define the purpose of this current incarnation and what I wanted to do with it, but I think I'll have to save that for later, when I remember it more haha. This entry will also be used to respond to Bao's lastest comment in the previous (blogger)entry.

Things I've done this week, that I've never done before:
-talked with Mormons with Alex Lam and Betty Chan
-visited "Westcourt", the unofficial CCF house of UW (and watched Finding Neverland)
-played a 10-player game of Magic with about 6 ppl I've never met
-played a Magic multiplayer "Hunt" variant
-played Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
-stayed at school the weekend before Reading Week
-been the main leader in a Bible Study (okay, I've done this once before)

Okay, so some those things weren't really that special, but they were at least all pretty new to me. I mean, I've learned about Mormon's before, I'd heard of Splinter Cell, and of course I've played Magic, but it's always cool to try new ways of doing things, especially when they help broaden your knowledge and also develop more as a person. Keeping an open mind is a good thing.

It's kinda funny how in my 3.5 years of going to CCF, I've never once been to Westcourt. I almost wasn't going to go, 'cause I found out at the last minute that there was Smash Brothers going on at some other guys' house, and a bunch of other people were going there instead. I was thinking of calling Duy and inviting him over, but I figured that he probably was in the middle of a raid or something, so I didn't.

Finally, Splinter Cell is a very...unforgiving and ninjalicious game. I guess maybe it doesn't help that I've never really played any other games like it before. It was pretty easy for me to get spotted by the enemies, and then I always felt that I had to shoot them so many times in order to kill them. I also didn't like the fact that the game just throws you into the first mission with no story background at all basically. There is a tutorial mode that you can try first, but it's pretty plain and not well-laid out in some areas. It's pretty unimaginative and doesn't really prepare you that well for the real game. The game also has annoying long save/load times, and seemingly redundant status messages. (For example, after saving your game, a message pops up and says "Your game has been saved." and then you have to confirm again.)

In the second mission of the game, you have to find and get information out of this terrorist dude named Jong. And so me and Duy figured that we'd have to just locate him and knock him out. So at the start, we see two terrorist guys talking, and one of them is on the roof, of a short, one-story building, and the other is on the same level as us. So we kill both of them, and then we find out that the guy on the roof was actually the guy we were supposed to interrogate! Whoops...they could've at least given us some way to identify him. :P We retry the level a few times, and try many other methods of capturing the target, such as knocking him out from behind, or using a flash bang on him. Every time, we got the message, "Oh my God, what were you thinking, you killed Jong!?" and we had to restart. How a flash bang kills someone, I don't know, but I thought that was pretty dumb. Anyways, we were stuck until we finally looked in the manual and found out that there was a way to interrogate bad guys in the game. :P (Perhaps something they should've also showed us in the tutorial.)

There were also many times where we'd be walking carefully against the wall, when all of a sudden we'd come under from some unknown location and die within a seconds. So "from where!?" like. Made the game pretty frustrating. So, in conclusion, although I wouldn't mind trying it more, Splinter Cell probably isn't a game we'll be playing much of. :P It's a good thing that you didn't spend that much money on it, Bao.