In this week’s entry, mortifiedpenguin rants about his gaming experience so far and goes for a ride on a steamboat.

"Mum, I told you I will clean up the room when I get home!"

( Read the rest of the blog entry after the jump! )

This is the first Three Green Lights post in 2009!

I’m feeling damn old now – everywhere I go I see kids in school uniforms and here I am taking public transport in CVs.

With that annoying adult fare to make things even worse.

Argh I hate kids. 45 cents for any trip is a luxury!

And I hate it when I get pwned by a kid.

It’s damn obvious it’s an American kid through the headset – you know, the typical high-pitched unbroken voice of a boy you will probably hear on Nickolodeon.

So I was trying out EndWar’s online Theatre of War on Xbox Live, which is actually an ongoing World War 3 where every battle fought contributes to the final outcome – you will learn more in the official review. It was my first time in the ‘real’ battlefield so I selected ‘Quick Match’ and was immediately connected to this kid as mentioned earlier. I’ve forgotten the map but I didn’t like it because there was so little space to manouver. Basically it became a straightforward 1v1 head-on clash with my opponent.

EndWar employs a simple scissors-paper-stone mechanic. Helicopters beat tanks, tanks cannot beat helicopters – no you can’t add Stinger missiles and AA batteries to them.

So once the game commenced it was a gradual path to suicide.

How the hell would I know that my opponent would deploy three units of helicopters against my ground forces.

First he rushed me with one unit, so I’m like fine I will use my transports to counter you since transport vehicles have anti-air capabilities. I was too focused on deploying my infantry and engineers to capture the uplinks, and using tanks to protect them.

Then came the second wave, and then a third.

>> mortpenguin: Is there a button to surrender?

My ground invasion was annihilated. My command vehicle was the last to get blown up – probably because of the extra 10% HP for selecting the 3rd Tactical as my battalion.

You know, things would be so simple if they allowed me to use my single-player army to fight online, like what happens in Rainbow Six Vegas 2’s Persistent Elite Creation. I’ve got so many upgrades for my various units already. Online I got to start from scratch and since I started this game late, it only means I will get pwned even more.

And contribute to the US’s downfall in WWIII.

So after a bad day on the battlefield, I decided to switch to a more light-hearted game where you don’t have to scream and kill soldiers.

Leading the race in Midnight Club: LA was a thrilling experience.

You get that feeling you are about to win – on the GPS map the red dot is only like three seconds away.

So just to increase that lead over your opponents further, you decide to activate your last nitrous boost.

Woohoo you’re on your way to the finishing line!

Bam!

I drove at 120mph right into an oncoming car.

The result was some terrible cosmetic damage to my Ford Focus and a really bad spin.

All three cars which were behind me zoomed past.

Effectively I had just wasted about 4mins of playing time.

Oh well, let’s restart the race and get it right this time.

Repeat incident.

I don’t have to tell you that it gets annoying after a while.

>> mortpenguin: F%#& WHY DO I KEEP CRASHING ON THE FINAL TURN!!

Once again I screamed at my monitor.

After a few more tries I decided that I was probably contributing to virtual global warming with all that wasteful fuel consumption so I switched off the console.

That was a few days ago. I’m getting better now, especially with that Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution IX as my new ride.

This week is NS week – the January enlistment guys are slowly being drafted into paradise island.

So to send off the guys from class, we had a steamboat dinner. By ‘we’ I mean just 6 people including 5 guys, which is damn stupid but I shall not comment on that further.

Following a suggestion from one of the guys, I tried to search for value-for-money steamboats because I have had this negative perception of steamboats being expensive and lousy in their food range and quality.

Coca is too damn expensive anyway.

So I came across this review from Ieat who recommended Paradise on Earth which was situated along Tanjong Katong road. Not very convenient for most people, but worth giving it a try.

The emptiness at the outlet was a bit scary but I guess it had to do with the Monday night ( they have another outlet just down the street and it was slightly busier ). Whatever, ambience aside, I was pretty impressed by the wide range of food available for the buffet dinner. The beef was the most popular item at our table followed by the three-layers pork. Prawns were also surprisingly big. There was a selection of soup bases to choose two from and we had the ‘all-time-favourite’ satay soup and fish head soup. Both tasted nice but after some time of cooking the salt content increased as well. Did I mention there was free-flow of Yangchow fried rice too?

For $18.80 this was a really decent steamboat meal I’ve had in a long time, but be warned that there is no free-flow of drinks – my mistake caused the bill to skyrocket to $25.70 per person. Oops.

See ya next week when I hope to win at least one battle in the Theater of War.

P.S Sorry for the lack of posts in the past week as I never had the chance to try new places to eat.