CNY eve!

Ah, the usual hustle and bustle on the eve! Went to my mum's side for a reunion lunch! Hehe. Ah, time flies! Tomorrow is the big day!

I think Xmas and CNY each have their own 'feel' to it; i've always found CNY a bit more energetic and rowdy!

SHOURYUKEN!

Waahah! Luckily I'm not seeing this in office! :p

 

Battlefield 4 - Vehicle tweaks incomingggg!!!!

Oh gawd, they're gonna tweak the game before fixing the major issues, I don't understand. Well, it's just gonna cause ANOTHER round of unbalance cos another group of 15 yr olds will be unhappy and rant on the forums. Way I look at it attack choppers will be the happy campers here, as though they're not overpowered enough already sheesh. I think sometimes these farking developers think out of their arses when they implement these tweaks.. and why touch the staff round? It's kinda shite taking out other tanks or anything else already and you're reducing the damage by 25%?

 

Sheesh.

http://blogs.battlefield.com/2014/01/bf4-balancing-vehicles/

DAM Toys Seal Team 1

Was contemplating for a while if i should get this, after seeing it in person, i decided to just go for it! Usual good quality from dtoys, amazing HS. :) Man, looking forward to seeing lone survivor too after this.

Soldier Story upcoming release

So, a new Navy seal guy? Somehow looks a wee bit strange; figure seems a bit stubby, neck too long, shoulders too wide.... guess some parts will be good for kitbashing.

 

Product Placement overkill

First it was Iron Man 3, with all that additional shot in CN crap (which they themselves didn't like) which doesn't add to the story, and now Transformers also? I think this is going a bit too far... I know the Chinese are rich and all, but I wonder what these studio execs are thinking...

http://www.tfw2005.com/transformers-news/transformers-movie-just-movie-31/transformers-4-age-of-extinction-more-chinese-brand-product-placement-179169/

 

6 days to CNY!

Oh man, Not enough time! Still a few things not bought yet. :p Also, no new shirt yet darn! :p

Worse, back to work tomorrow! ;__;

Schweet!

Oooo! Classic! Gives me the tingles. :)

LEGO 2014 Star Wars releases!

Looks interesting, bet the brick count is down and the price is up as usual. :

http://www.fbtb.net/2014/01/21/uk-london-toy-fair-2014-a-brief-report/

A sampler :

75054 AT-AT … £109.99

Again, smaller than previous versions, but captures the overall feel of the AT-AT.  The head is much sturdier than the original version, at least, including more new missile things under the head!  Includes General Veers, plus some Snow Troopers etc

75055 Imperial Star Destroyer … £119.99

AGAIN, smaller than the last one, built in a similar fashion, although the top comes off easier and the sides open out in a more robust manner.  The guns on the outside of the ship are connected and have a handle, so will rotate in unison, which was neat.  There is a sturdy handle too, perfect for swooshing.  The bridge, unlike the last one, cannot fit any figures in it, by the looks of it.  It looked like the printing on the Darth Vader figures was new, in fact most of them looked new to me!  Instead of having a large trans blue brick with a sticker to represent the Emporer, we get a custom moulded minifig trophy statuette in the shape of the Emporer, in trans blue.  A neat little addition.

ACE MAC V SOG "Blackjack"

Ummm.. this figure looks so wrong? What's up with the HS? :p

 

Cool... Airsoft

Man, the last frontier for me I thinks! Always wanted an Airsoft gun, but being here in SG, it's amazingly a no-no... after making males in this country fire real rifles duh.

Anyway, it would be cool to have an Airsoft centre in SG! I think long ago there was something like this here. :p

 

Toosday?

Oh My Glob, I woke up thinking somehow it's Wednesday already... must have had a quantum leap in my dreams I think! Nice weather too, chilly wind still brrrrr!

 

Oh the other hand, re-installed BF3... oh my gawd, haven't played it for so long, but forgot how smooth it is and how fast it loads! Yeah sure, everyone seems to be a lvl 100 colonel, and you get killed a lot, but at least you get kills pretty easy too.

 

Only thing I don't really like is the fact that the game seems sped up... like by 1.5x? So the movement is super unrealistic and everyone's twitching every. Ok, admittedly for that I like BF4's pace a wee bit better. Plus in BF3 it's still ridiculous trying to snipe.... the weapon balance in BF3 was atrocious, and you tended to stick with one mega weapon.

Mmmmmm...

.... Quiet... Nuff said! From Kojima's feed.

 

ThreeZero Robocop figure

So there's a whole host of the new Robocop figures coming out soon, in fact I've already seen the toys at retail here haha. There's the Kai Arts figs coming, and now ThreeZero is also releasing theirs. Dunno if it's a 1/6 scale or no scale fig tho!

 

Monday Bluesss... Helloki?

Argh, it's that most hated day of the week! (Unless it's a holiday that day) Back to the grind....

 

And in toy news, HT is releasing the Loki figure from the Thor 2 movie.... ummm.. somehow doesn't look like Tom Hiddleston at all? I know most of the figures have this sliggght change so they look only like, 98% of the actual actor/actress... but this looks like an 85%, granted it may be a good thing also, as the figures should be identifiable on their own without having to look like someone.

 

Still, the Loki from the Avengers movie looked a bit better methinks!

 

 

Pre-monday

Did a bit of shopping for cny today, town wasn't that packed surprisingly. There's still another 12 days to CNY! Hope the coming week will pass quickly... Hmmm, think i'll take nxt Friday off.. ;)

Brrrrr.... Chilly here these past few nights! Shiok to sleep! :D

Lazy Saturday

Hmmm, nothing much today! Brought the kiddies out for a bit, took down the rest of the x'mas tree and that's it! Woo! :)

Sorry, can't help it! :p

Oh man, again this video made me grin like an idiot in front of my computer.... :p Trying... hard.. not to burst out laughing!

 

TitanFail.

This looks cool! But oops. By EA.

Pass.

 

Terribad Connection

This is someone else's screenshot of course, I didn't think to try this at home to see what the issue may be, but apparently there's a lot of packet loss even for people with good pings...

 

NETCODE! :D

 

TGIF!

Oh man, it's another Friday already! CNY is 2 weeks away.... scary! Man, weather's been crazy around the world, It's freezing in US, burning in Australia and here in SG it's been kinda windy and cold too... went down to 27 in the room last night according to my dry cabinet. Brrrrr! Maybe the after effects of the polar vortex brushing by asia?

 

Anywayz, popped in for a few games of BF4 last night. It seems the Jan 13 patch didn't really fix the in-game problems (although thankfully the game has stopped crashing on me or giving me directx errors touchwood). It may have exacerbated the problem though; the game doesn't seem 'smooth' now, there's this slight 'lag' there, and it's not a framerate thing. Hard to explain, but those who play will know. This leads to a lot of sudden and unexplained kills by the enemy.

 

You can be around a corner or doorway or in cover, and suddenly you just get killed by someone who haven't even had a chance to see... oh gawd. And now you get 0 health trade kills instead of 1 health kills... nope they didn't fix it.

 

Well, they published a message last night that they were rolling out a minor 'fix' to the servers last night, and there may be intermittent connection issues.. this morning, they replaced that with another message on spawn issues and that they broke punkbuster... woohoo!

 

 

Firefly Serenity 1/250 Scale Model

Never really got into the Series Firefly although i did watch a few episodes, it was very reminescent of B5, with it's corrupt govt and all, and the Han Solo'ish main character. Still the ship itself was pretty interesting in it's design.

It's not gonna be cheap tho! US$350 for pre-order, more info on the ship here!

Thunderforce 3 OST

Redone on Electric Guitar! So awesome, i've always loved the game and the OST was soooo beautiful..... ah, the 16bit days!

Don't cross the streams!

Awesome! Need to buy in time for the 7th month! :) Now they just need to release the proton backpack since the PKE Meter and trap are already out!

Get it here!

 

Fansproject NOT-Menasor

Looks good! Haha, he must have a very narrow view with those 2 large blocks beside his head though! Man, these 3rd party companies are really upping the game on releases that the fans want... why isn't Takatomy making any combiners I wonder? (Masterpiece ones of course!)

 

Nice Company to work at!

Well, I guess for all the nice things there, the fact that you have BUNKBEDS there probably means you gotta pull all nighters for some games! Still.... nice!

http://kotaku.com/inside-one-of-the-worlds-biggest-game-companies-1500900528

More MP-20 Wheeljack!

Cool, more pics of the WJ prototype! Well, till the colored pics are out though!

 

SimCity upgrade!

Well, the games been out now for a while, the launch and the game itself was kind of a disaster; even with the offline mode (which should have been a default), the core mechanics of the game have yet yo be fixed.... So this is just a small consolation for players who had faith in the maxis/sim city label.

Way to go EA!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25715010

Even more BF4 madness!

Haha, ok I promise, last BF4 post for the day! Just as I was ranting, they rolled out a surprise patch, which caught a lot of ppl unawares apparently... is that how they patch nowadays? Suddenly and without warning? I guess their later in the month is pretty fast.

They must have detected my ranting haha!

Jan 13 PC Game Update Notes
-Various fixes for improving general stability
-Fixed a memory leak issue occurring after level shutdowns, which could result in a out-of-memory crash in longer play sessions
-Additional fix for the “sound loop” deadlock when running High/Ultra graphics settings
-Added a warning for using Legacy AMD drivers that were out of date
-Fixed a player feedback timing issue where blood was appearing before other damage indicators, and before damage was actually done
-Fixed a bug where players’ rank icons on the scoreboard would not be updated
-Fix for Asian users unable to start Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4 on Windows 8.1
-Normalized repair rates across all vehicles
-Fixed problem with killer health in kill card not being correctly updated (showing 100% health even though the soldier was hurt)
-Fix for friendly marker not always showing when needed to, resulting in players shooting team members
-Fixed a bug where a Main Battle Tank Coaxial HMG ammo box was occasionally blocking the driver’s camera
-Increased damage by 25% for the Stealth Jet 20mm cannons.
-Stealth Jets now have more similar handling attributes to each other. F35 & J-20 are slightly more agile, Su-50 is less agile.
-Attack Jets now have more similar handling attributes to each other, and all 3 are now slightly less agile than earlier
-Fixed camera glitch when switching weapons while moving in crouch
-Fixed an occasional bug where players could experience intermittent engine sound dropouts when driving wheeled IFVs
-Fix for player spawning under the map when deploying on Lancang Dam
-Fixed flickering in map and minimap on Rogue Transmission and Operation Locker

BF4 Thoughts

Well, after playing for almost a 100 hours, and with the patches released (notwithstanding the usual connection errors/crashes), here are my thoughts on some improvements the game can have :

 

TANKS :  Oh gawd, make the tank more resilient against infantry and light vehicles please, right now I feel like I'm driving a fragile plastic box around! Increase the number of rounds the primary weapon can fire... and what's up with the reload time? And the APS is basically useless!

 

I SAY : Give the tank an LMG as a default, so it has 3 weapons; the primary, secondary and the LMG (Not everyone can find a gunner in every match you know). Increase the armor rating OR make the reactive armor work! Everything seems to disable a tank now. Remove the reload time but give a fixed number of shells! That'll make people treasure the rounds rather than spamming them.

 

IFV's : Nothing much to say here! They seem to fare better than the MBT's.

 

JETS : After painful leveling of a stealth jet, and then going into conquest, I see no difference between an attack jet and a stealth jet

 

I SAY : Make the attack jets less nimble than they are now; they are supposed to take out ground targets after all, but can out-maneuver a stealth jet! Increase their armor though. And for stealth jets for cryin out loud, why is stealth-coating an unlock? To make a stealthier stealth jet? Make it a default! The 30mm cannon speed is about there so that's ok.

 

Player classes - Mostly ok with this, but giving the Recon C4 just kinda makes it annoying... right, cos in BF3 the support guy was blowing tanks right off the bat so make that the last unlock in BF4 great idea (sarcasm), and now the recon guy does that... great job dice. Keep the Claymore though.

 

Well, getting a bit tired of the game already, it seems more draggy than BF3, and the gameplay at this moment is not very consistent. Plus, there are a ton of hackers out there (no ones gonna admit it), but it's not something DICE or EA are interested in at this moment till they actually fix the issues that are plaguing this game.

BF4 Jet Aimbot

Oh wow, now I know how some people are so awesome in jets when I can hardly stay in the air! :p

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=risNE1yDOYc

Booooo!

Monday Blues!

Ah Monday already? Oh gawd, how fast the weekend goes by! Still, at least it was spent fruitfully, was packing up the Christmas stuff (tree is still there though :p), and doing some spring cleaning in the room.... man, I tell you, the amount of dust that just collects, what a nightmare!

 

And talking about dust, also yanked out the PC for some cleaning, darn, those filters actually work! The interior didn't have much dust as I remembered my other previous PC's having. So just some light brushing of the interior and good as new!

Old Spottiswoode Park

Wow, this is a great picture as i remembered it back when my grandparents were staying there when i was a wee kiddy, i remember my mum bringing me and my sis over to stay back then, and at night, i would look out over the balcony to see the lights from the train station and the harbor... ahhh memories... :)

 

MP-20 Wheeljack Part Deux

Yesss! It's gonna be a Lancia Stratos like the original! This is gonna be hot. ;)

 

Sideshow Han Solo - Hoth

Cool, there's going to be a Han Solo in Hoth gear by sideshow, the exclusive version is the coat in blue? Looks pretty sweet, I wonder if the actual product will be the same?

 

TGIF!

Wow, survived 1st week of work.... seems to long and stretched out although yesterday was a break at a seminar haha! It's exactly 3 weeks to the Lunar New Year! Scary. X'mas tree will be coming down this week I hope haha!

LEGO Simpsons House Part Deux

Hot darn! They've gone ahead and made the official announcements and released the official pics and videos! Somehow I wish the expressions on the faces were better? Still, it's a USD199.99, so won't be cheap here in SG!

 

Another BF4 Post!

Haha, I won't rant like him, but his point is there. :p

 

1/72 Diecast Saab Viggen

Man, been waiting for a decent Viggen for a bit! This one came early in the year, by a company called aviation 72, it's definately hefty, and the overall shape is good. The splinter camo is a bit fuzzy at the edges, but looks good overall. Now, compared the hobby master or cw, the surface has very little panel lining. Worse is that there's no instrument panel! Hopefully there'll be a better version of this released one day. :p

LEGO Star Wars 2014 Summer Sets

Hmmm... LEGO's really going the cheapo route for their licensed sets eh? Finally some OT items, this time the Snowspeeder (again), Cantina (Yay!), B-wing (Cool, 3rd version) and AT-AT(Again?). Thought there was supposed to be a Star Destroyer also?

Anyway, remains to see if LEGO uses more stickers, or if they improve on the designs at all. For sure, the price will be much higher than the original releases haha.

 

LEGO Simpsons House

Oh cool! If the exterior wasn't cool enough already, the interior of the house looks super detailed! And at 2.5K pieces it's gonna be like a modular house hehe.

 

MCToys 1/6 SAS CRW (1987-2000)

Looks like MCToys is releasing a SAS trooper? Been a while since Dragon's and Medicom's releases! I prefer the all black look though. Can kitbash a Engineer from BF4 with this haha!

 

Oh you buggy BF4..

Haha, good article to read! BF4 still crashes my PC; can't connect to games, hanging on launch with a sound loop which only a hard reboot solves, game crashes on deploy screen, directx error mid game and browser stuck in background.. OMG. BF3 DEFINATELY was not this buggy... actually, was in battlelog earlier, and looked and my old BF3 records... by jove, I think I had more fun then!

Oh, I didn't even mention the in-game problems, dun get me started haha.

http://www.polygon.com/2014/1/3/5269676/battlefield-4-spotlights-eas-inability-to-launch-games-treat-players

On the last day of Christmas...

... Oh man! Today's the last day of X'mas! How apt, weather's cold as sin (for this country anyway), and it's back to (urgh) work tomorrow.... So many things left undone, have to wait till the next holidays which should be soon. 3 weeks away only in fact sheesh.

Man, got to take down the decorations too, that's sux.. oh well, only less than a year away to the next one! :)

MP-20 Wheeljack

Only a silhouette now, but proportions look ok! Hopefully the full image will be out soon!

 

No more kopi?

Man, this was the last kopitiam that still retained it's old look, and bow it's closing to be god knows what. Well, at least ming garden will be there still for a while i hope!

If memory serves me correctly, there used to be about 4-5 coffeeshops; one at where citibank is now, one at maju ave where cheers and mugiya are, RK used to be a chinese coffeeshop with johnson duck too.

Ah, interesting to see things change as time goes on.

Smokescreen Part Deux

So finally transformed this guy, quite familiar with it by now since the last 2 gave me some practice haha.

The robot mode looks great, probably cos of the colors and him being slightly bulkier? Paint app's good and joint are tight, articulation outstanding as usual! Makes a nice addition to the previous releases in the series. Can't wait for wheeljack!

First post for the year!

Ah, it's the 2nd day of 2014! And i already have slight sniffles darnnit, weathers bonkers man :p

Work starts again next monday.... Darn, my leave just flew by just like that, hardly any time to savour it. And before you know it, will have to prepare for CNY!