Stay your blade from the flesh of innocents.

Always remain subtle.

Never compromise the brotherhood.

The three tenants of the Assassin's Creed. It's really a wonderful game. Few other titles offer such immersive graphics together with such amazing gameplay. The goal of a game has always been to provide a challenge, yet not so difficult that it stops anyone from playing it. In today's world, that translates to being able to make your in-game avatars perform the fanciest of actions with just a few keystrokes. Assassin's Creed does that very well.

As the name suggests, you play as a member in an order of assassins(pronounced many different ways, including the original word hashashin). Your enemies are the Knights Templar, and a large purpose of your existence is to keep bringing new blood into the ranks of city guards. Mostly by killing people on duty.

Naturally, you have to go around killing certain people. Your targets, usually big figures and rich guys. After they have become acquainted with your hidden wrist-blade, you have to make your escape. In my opinion, this is the best part of the game.

Thanks to this feature they call Free Running, it appears as if you have been endowed with the abilities of a Jedi Knight. You can scale walls with relative ease, and run and jump from rooftop to rooftop, over rickety beams and gazebos. All the while, guards on the ground yell at you while trying to follow you. The chase ends when you have broken the line of sight of any pursuing guards, and found a place to hide. It seems as if the guards are really underpaid, or just extremely lazy, since they'll just give up the hunt moments after losing sight of you.

One of my favourite things to do would probably be pushing an archer off his post, onto the ground below. After which, chaos ensues and I can slip into the citadels without detection.


The controls are a little different from what I am used to, mainly because the game was ported from the Xbox. Still, I think it works well.


-Joe

Bad things this week:

Bizarro was removed from the daily comics

And replaced by some unfunny crap. I don't even remember the name of it. I just think that it's totally weak, and boring, and disappointing. Seriously, why? Bizarro was an awesome comic.

Blizzard devs say that Diablo 3 "has a long way to go"

Shit. By the time it comes out, I'll have been conscripted. Either way, if it doesn't come out by next December, I'll basically not have any time to play it.

I have fallen ill

I seem to have caught a bug from one of my classmates. I'm having a sore throat and my nose is just being a bitch. I didn't go to school today. I woke up at eight, decided that I didn't need to attend any lessons today, and then slept till five. Which is about now. I still feel like I've been run over by a truck. Way to go, evolution.



Good things this week:

I have Assassin's Creed installed on my PC

Thanks, Shaun. (You asshole, you could have just said it was Simon.)

I am not dead yet

Whoohoo. See, it's rather difficult to achieve world domination if you die before you begin trying.

-Joe

Ugh. Pointlessness and pointlessness. Today, Daniel, Shaun, Jia Hao, and I went for some Urban Challenge thing. It's sort of like the Amazing Race, only a lot less amazing. Also, today was just a dry run. We were supposed to be station masters, not participants, but for some godforsaken reason, the organisers wanted us to play out the part of a team of participants. That basically resulted in us going around Singapore on what was a very warm, humid morning, which turned later into a horribly wet afternoon.

Oh, did I mention that the whole thing was based on the Chinese culture?

So anyway, at some point, I ended up in the Haw Par Villa(or however you spell that) looking for some sculpture of a pig, running low on energy... I don't know how people can survive without a full breakfast. I had a little bun for my morning meal, and by noon I was literally about to collapse from exhaustion.

It was also about that time that we got to witness first-hand the horrible drainage system over there. During our futile search for the pig thing, it began pouring. By the time we were ready to leave, the staircases had turned into mini rapids and the sloping path was a raging river of rainwater. Needless to say, my shoes got wet, and I spent the rest of the day sloshing around in sodden shoes, having my very hydrated socks do bad things to my feet.


Things took an upturn around lunchtime, when we went to Ikea for Meatballs. We pretty much dilly-dallied around there for a while before unconvincingly telling the organisers that we were lost... And somehow found our way into the Swedish furniture store.

If it weren't for the wet feet and worrying about smelling horrible (after sweating...and sweating...), I think that the day would really have been saved by meatballs and sauce.

Meatballs...mmm...

So anyway, I've just discovered that I have an organic chemistry tutorial to do by tomorrow, and that I have no scheduled breaks before that period. This means that I have to do it now, instead of getting to lvl63. Just 10% away... =(

-Joe

So then... I just went down for lunch, and I got Rick-Rolled.

For those unfamiliar with the term... Well, it's sort of hard to explain. One day on the internet, someone decided that Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up was the most annoying song in all of history. He also felt that he ought to spread it to the rest of the world by tricking them into listening to it, or watching the music video. Eventually, it caught on, and due to the fact that most people using the internet are total pricks, thousands of other internet users were soon bamboozled into clicking a disguised link, and were then subjected to Astley's music. They would then be greeted with a message saying "Rick-Rolled", usually with spelling errors or letters replaced by numbers.There were several variations to that, and even some malicious ones, where the user was forced to listen to the entire song(through the means of an uncloseable window).

...So yeah. The radio was playing, tuned in to some oldies channel. Right as I was about to deliver a spoonful of delicious battered fish into my mouth, that familiar tune floated out from the speakers.

It was just really unexpected. It's quite amazing, really, how these things wind up like this on the internet. Sometimes I wonder if Rick Astley knows that his music is being used as a weapon in online psychological warfare.

So, anyway. Mandatory donuts.

-Joe

Man, my legs are sore. Well, not so much my legs, but my feet. The ends of my feet where my toes come out of. Walking around. And around. And around some more.

It turns out that Plaza Singapura has had its top floor revamped. In a very good way. Just tonight, we went there and discovered that there's now a Simply Toys store, as well as that weapon replica place... I forgot the name. I just remember it as That Place With The Really Cool Swords. Same ones that were in Suntec City.

Oh, and a couple of game shops. We didn't go in, though, so I don't know how wide their selections are, nor their price ranges. I suppose I'll have to go down one day in the near future to have a look...

...Or not. I really can't tell how much time I will need to invest in schoolwork starting Monday. Even the less sciency subjects seem to be more complex and much deeper than anything I'd seen in the previous semester. At a glance, I seem to be finally going onward to acquiring the skills that I will need in my (hopeful) career as a scientist.


I'd say that I've had a rather enjoyable weekend. Even the thing with the mentally challenged people was fun in its own way. Mostly due to that idea of getting a bunch of people to wear alternating colours, and then walking past each other so as to induce seizures in epileptic patients.

After which, I went to NJC for some... thing. It wasn't the sort of thing I'd go for normally, but it ended up being pretty fun. Although not in the way that it was probably intended. While waiting for Mark, Hongjie and I were chatting up on this ledge where the school crest was...

"Well at least your school is... symmetrical..."
"Yeah, that means it's equally bad on both sides!"

Heh.

And then we went into a school hall to have our ears murdered for a while. I read somewhere that music of a certain volume or higher stimulates the pleasure centres of the brain.


Aaand I seem to have lost my train of thought. G'night everyone.

-Joe

So, I have received my new timetable for the next semester. The hours are longer than I had previously expected. There are still a few holes here and there, but it's starting to look more like a school timetable. It's a big jump from my previous timetable. I'm not entirely happy about the 9am to 7.30pm thing on Tuesdays, though.

I suppose that this is sort of what I had wished for during the first semester. Something a little more intensive, where there is a slight amount of pressure... Not too obvious, but not so little that it felt like a holiday. Without frequent stimulation, one grows weak and incapable of performing well. This philosophy can be used in several other areas of life. Heh.

I am looking forward to starting school again. Mostly, anyway. On the plus side, it seems like I'll be taking a lot more interesting modules. At least, the names are fancy enough. They're pretty much all science and technology-related, so I'm not very worried.

On the unplus, my teachers are going to be... Urgh, gosh. One of them is going to be the same person that caused... all my rants during the first semester. You know, all that stuff about incompetency. It's unbelievable. Once upon a time, school was a place where you were wrong, and the teacher corrected you. Now, school is a place where you double-check your teacher's work to see if there's anything horribly misleading in it.

Oh, and the explaining stuff to your classmates bit is the most horrifying. Sometimes, they let you go on and on for fifteen minutes, before saying "wha?".

...

Well, at least I don't really hate them now.

-Joe

Oh wow. It's October.

It feels weird, really. It's like I have wasted this entire year. The massive blocks of vacation, amongst various other things, have made me feel rather useless. Sometimes I regret being afraid at the start. Had I been more confident, I'd probably not be feeling this way now.

Adding to the weirdness, I will be going back to school in roughly a week and a half. It'll just be strange, writing dates that contain November and December. Since this semester extends till next February or so, New Year's Day just isn't going to be the same. You can't have a fresh start right after coming back from your CT break.

Well, not that you can't, it's just that you shouldn't.

Also, this entire 6 week break, I have done almost nothing but play World of Warcraft. Sure, I may have gone out now and then to buy some stuff... But all that stuff was mostly so that my computer would run better.

I guess you could say that I was waiting. Waiting for the promos to end so that I would finally be able to meet up with my friends from the various JCs. That seems to be working out well for the KI circle. Unfortunately, CJC decided to hold its promotional exams two weeks later... So Leonard is still doing his promos now. The really annoying thing is that by the time he's finished, those of us in polytechnics will no longer have a huge amount of free time anymore.

There's still the weekends, though. I wonder whether next semester will be much more intensive than the first. I sure hope that the difficulty level is raised somewhat. When everyone scores well, no one scores well.

... Sigh. I don't actually want to go back to school just yet. I feel as if I haven't done what I wanted this holiday.

But a week and a half is an entire ten days. I still have time...



-Joe