Here's My Story

Recently, my online friend from Atlas Reactor, TheJoker , asked me to try playing Paladins. It's a game similar to Overwatch but with cards to customise the champion's playstyle (similar to Atlas Reactor's mod feature). It has a free-to-play version where 8 champions are unlocked at the start. They are: Fernando (front line) Cassie (damage) Drogoz (damage) Kinessa (damage) Tyra (damage) Viktor (damage) Pip (support) Skye (flank) You can then use in-game currency (gold), earned in game, to unlock other champions. You can also buy the game and unlock all current and future champions. Here are the official website of Paladins , a wiki website I often refer to, and a deckbuilding website . I like the game as much as Overwatch i.e. as much as a non-fps player would like :) It then comes to no surprise that, like Overwatch, I gravitate towards champions who do not require good aiming. One such champion, which I often play, is Grohk (support). Here's my fir...

OneDrive is a Microsoft software that allows you to backup files to their cloud server. It was pre-installed in my laptop and I left it as it was because I thought it was a good idea to have backup. However, recently I realised that it had its own Documents folder i.e. it wasn't backing up files from my the user's Documents folder where my important files are. A quick search on the internet revealed that, stupidly, OneDrive doesn't allow you to select which folders you want it to backup. Then I found a workaround here  given by Matthew Broady: " A Workaround easiest, although it would be a useful feature. Find the Address of the folder you want to be synced. (ie. C:\Games\). Copy it. Find the OneDrive location you wish for it to sync to. Hold shift and right click. On the context menu, click open command window here. In it type "mklink /j "YourCustomFolderName" "Address of Location(i.e. C:\Games\)"", without the outer punctuation ...

This is my first time seeing so many food trucks in one place: Know which is truck was the most popular? The one that sold chips. I've always though that food trucks are a foreign concept but then again we all along have those in Malaysia that sell chendol, rojak and burgers, right? I know they started off as stalls decades ago but more and more have switched to trucks.

Someone in my group wanted to play Phaedra to complete a mission. I wanted to play Rampart (also a frontliner) for the same reason. So I asked the group whether they are ok with that or they prefer me playing another role. Someone told me to play what I wanted but immediately followed by someone else's suggestion for all members to player frontliners. That got spontaneous approval from the other 2 who promptly changed to that role, leaving me still trying to lock in my choice lol. At their urging, I did choose Rampart and here's the resulting crazy match: I don't usually play Rampart. In fact, I believed he is my least played freelancer. The current set of mods I'm using are (loadout points in bracket): (1) Radamantium flurry: Battle rush (1) Because of the mods I chose for ability 2, 4 and 5, it's either this mod or Area Suppression (simply due to leftover loadout point). I don't like the latter. Decently skilled enemies wouldn't be surrou...

Lockwood, a firepower, is one of the original batch of freelancers. In fact, he is the introductory freelancer to beginners via tutorial. His abilities are rather straight forward and newbie-friendly, and yet once mastered he is a powerful freelancer. A popular choice of pick/ban during tournament matches. Initially, I didn't like to play him because I felt I'm underutilising him by not positioning well to take advantage of his Trick Shot's bouncing shots. I'm still not really good at positioning (hehehe) but at least, I think, I've improved on bouncing the shots. Of course it helps that I've finally found a set of mods that I'm comfortable with, after experimenting with a few sets. They are (loadout points in bracket): (1) Trick shot: On the move (2) (2) Light 'em up: Phosphorous round (1) (3) Trapwire: Trapwall (3) (4) Backup plan: Kinetic dash (1) (5) Run and gun: Burst of speed (3) Generally, for all freelancers, I look for consistency an...

I have already leveled Aurora and Orion to 20. Although there's no max level, it's the level that's needed to unlock Master title and skin. In any case, it's good to play other freelancers. I discover that I get rusty quickly if I don't play a freelancer for a few days. So I identified a few freelancers to concentrate on leveling them. Among them is Dr Finn, a support freelancer. After experimenting with a few builds and talking to others, I'm currently using this mod by default (loadout points in bracket): Water spout - none Refreshing spray - Self fish (2) Electrifying eel - That's a moray (3) Bubble trouble - Cast away (2) Maelstrom - Leech infestation (3) My alternate mod set, which was my default, is as follows: Water spout - Spray and play (3) Refreshing spray - Self fish (2) Electrifying eel - Master angler (1) Bubble trouble - Unstop-Bubble (1) Maelstrom - Leech infestation (3) The rationale behind the default mod set: Startin...

After I became the fourth player to level up Grey to 20 , I tried to level up Gremolition too and aim for the last 2 slots i.e. 4th or 5th player. I knew, from the game's Discord channel, there was one other person trying the same and he was very close to doing so. So the moment it was announced a 4th player did so, I knew I had no chance and thus abandoned it. Honestly, I was looking forward to play other lancers because somehow I felt I wasn't contributing as much as I would like to as Gremolition. So next I aimed to level up Orion since there was only 2 too. I was a little hesitant because during Beta phase I was much better as Aurora and Quark. I fiddled about some mod combination and I finally found one that I am comfortable with. First off, the list of his abilities and available mods can be found in Prep Phase site . Far easier than reading my wall of text :) Mods I've been using are: (1) Devour Energy (default is Amplified Eruption) (2) Shared Agony (default...

When I first started playing Atlas Reactor , it was still free-to-play but restricted to a handful of freelancers on a rotational basis. I gravitated to the only support character available during that particular rotation: Aurora. Soon I found her quite difficult to play, despite the supposedly "easy" difficulty classification. Later I found out that except for  Quark , all supports do not have any Dash ability. Hence, playing support was difficult without that obvious escape mechanism. Perhaps because of this or not, Quark became my choice for support. But much later, for reasons that I forgot, I tried Aurora again and prioritised trying to survive should she be cornered or chased by enemies. Hmmm I vaguely remember one particular game where I was amazed by how good an Aurora player survived onslaught by enemies. Perhaps that was an impetus to revisit this character. Her main ability (with no cooldown) is Shock Therapy (Blast), which damages enemies and heals allies...

Similar to Bastion , Torbjorn is also a scourge of newbies. Actually, it is both Torbjorn and his turret and at times, it's only the latter that matters. His turret is unique because it'll automatically turn and shoot, with unerring accuracy, at enemies that come into view. Obviously that means positioning matters but that itself is not easy to determine because ideally it should be positioned such that it can shoot as many enemies as possible and yet protected from range guerrilla attack. Consider corners and rooms. Maybe even on higher ground but you have to watch for enemies walking up the same way you did to place that turret. When Torbjorn first places the turret, it's only level 1 and has 150 hp with slow firing rate. With 6 swings of his hammer (when it's at full health), he can upgrade it to level 2 with 300 hp and faster firing rate. Level 3 (800 hp and even faster firing rate) can only be temporarily obtained by using his ultimate ability Molten Core. To...

Asana is a frontline freelancer and the squishiest of them all, but luckily she has some abilities that help her survive better. I think she's the second frontline freelancer I tried after Garrison . Including Rask, she's the least successful among them in terms of win rate. She's classified as "medium" difficulty and I agree that she's a little harder to use compared to Garrison (who's classified as "easy"). Still, she's still fun and effective. Her main ability, Whirling Blade, damages nearby enemies in a 270 degree arc. Default modifier, Swordmaster, increases the damage by 3 per enemy hit (oh yes, that's an increase of 9 if you hit 3 enemies). However, my innate playstyle is defensive and so I choose the modifier Leech Blade which gives her 5 health per enemy hit. Hence, this ability allows her to deal lots of damage and heals quite a bit when hitting multiple enemies. Her 2nd ability, Rebounding Charge, allows her to das...

Bastion is a newbie favourite and, yes, it was my favourite too when I was at lower levels. He has the highest DPS among all heroes and, on the surface, quite easy to use: find a nice spot and shoot all enemies that come into side. However, as pointed out by youtubers, players do learn how to deal with him later and his popularity drops as you level up. He is rarely picked for competitive plays. So until players learn that, he will remain a viable pick. As for me, I use him only as a surprise factor i.e. last minute pick for defense and so catch enemies off guard. Works quite well for the last defense point or the final destination of payload. The key to playing him, as with many other heroes, is to reposition regularly so to scuttle enemies' plan to counter him. Bastion has 3 modes. His default mode is a recon mode i.e. a robot. He then can reconfigure himself into sentry mode i.e. a turret-like structure that does rapid fire. Pretty much like a machine gun. Devastating and ...

Besides Reinhardt,  Mercy was the other character that I watched videos for guides, tips and gameplays before trying her out in the Open Beta. Mercy can either heal a friend or boost his damage. Only one at a time. She's usually better off doing this than change her healing staff to a blaster and shoot. However, do use the blaster if you suddenly find yourself all alone and trying to flee from an enemy. You'll never know whether you can outduel the enemy until you try. I did that a few times hehehe. She also has an ability, with cool down, that allows her to quickly fly towards any friend within a certain range (quite a long range though). I use this frequently so as to be unpredictable in my movement, and of course to quickly go towards a friend who's in need of healing. She can hold down the Space button to slow down her descend after that if she is in the air and chooses to stay there longer. She has a passive healing ability, which is great since she can't hea...

Reinhardt was one of the two heroes (the other was Mercy) that I had planned to play with in anticipation of the Open Beta. I had been watching many videos for tips and tricks. Of all the tanks, I played Reinhardt the most, followed by Winston. I tried only a few times the other tanks but didn't like them. Reinhardt is my favourite tank as he is quite easy to use and great to have in certain situations. During the Open Beta, too many people didn't want to play tank or support and so I switched, from time to time, character to Reinhardt to help the team. Won some, lost some :) Reinhardt uses his huge hammer to smack people around and it does lots of damage at close quarters. He can also Firestrike at quite a long distance but that has cooldown. Another ability with cooldown is his charge: charges and pins enemy to a wall, thereby stunning him for a short time. Then smack him silly :P His most used ability, however, is his 2000-hp shield. It provides protection to allies ...

Of all characters that I regular play with during the Open Beta, Tracer is my favourite but I'm least competent in playing it :) Tracer uses two rapid-fire pulse pistols that are great at short range. Unfortunately, she has low health to continuously engage enemies at that range. Thus her other abilities (with cooldown) help to increase her survivability: Blink and Recall. The former allows her to teleport short distance (can use 3 in succession before it has to go on cooldown) while the later allows her to "rewind" back to where she was 3 seconds ago and thereby possibly gaining back health and ridding of whatever debuffs she has at present. Her ultimate is Pulse Bomb. Stick it on someone or near some people and kaboom! Here are some of highlights:

Overwatch is an FPS game by Blizzard (same developer of Warcraft and Diablo). It is a greatly polished version of Team Fortress 2 i.e. you can change character midgame anytime in the spawn room and there are objectives for the team to complete to win the match. It's a buy-to-play game that gives you access to all 21 characters (and future ones, if I'm not mistaken). This is important because changing character midgame to counter opposing team's certain character(s) is a key feature of the game. Therefore it will ruin the game if there are locked characters. I've been watching Overwatch videos on Youtube since January when it was in Close Beta and was looking forward to play it. However, USD 40 is a hefty price for me (can easily buy me 27 balanced meals!) and also I'm not good at FPS game. Therefore, when they had Open Beta from 5 May to 10 May (was extended by a day), Ban and I tried it. At first, we find it hard going and that we still preferred Atlas...

Rift was a game both Ban and I played a few years back. We stopped mainly because the each character have too many similar abilities (how do you decide which ability to use?) and too many abilities to manage, so much so that using macros were essential. About a month ago, Trion, the game developer, invited us to try their new game, Atlas Reactor, during the short period of Open Beta. We tried but alas, it kept crashing mid-game. So we gave up. Last week, they once again had Open Beta just for the weekend and this time no crashes! Yay! Atlas Reactor is a unique game to me: it's a simultaneous turn-based game. Sound contradictory? Let me explain. Each turn, players choose an ability to activate. Free action abilities can be activated without utilising this quota of 1 ability a turn. There are 3 categories of abilities: Prep, Dash, Blast. After that, players choose where to move. Once all players lock in their choice of ability and movement path, the game resolve those choices...

I have never played the hardcopy version of this boardgame. I was interested in it after watching Aavak played with 3 other youtubers. The aim of the game is to be the first person to reach the last "tile" and use the Crown of Command to cast the Command spell. To get there, you absolutely need 2 things: sufficient strength or craft to open Portal of Power, and a talisman to pass through the Valley of Fire. It took me at least 115 rounds (each round = 1 turn per player) to finish the game. So, assuming it took a mere 5 minutes to finish a round, that translates to nearly 10 hours of play! The youtubers took about 2.5 hours. Now, 2.5 hours for a boardgame is nothing unusual but the amount of grinding and luck involved made this game tedious. Let's say you want to get to the village to see the mystic to improve your craft stat and it's 4 tiles away. You would first need to roll a die and you must get exactly 4 to move there. You can spend many rounds before fi...

I can't remember exactly when I started playing this game but for sure it's been less than a year because my old laptop's specification didn't meet its minimum requirements. I love mages and so after reading the description of various classes, called professions here in the game, I decided to start of as an elementalist. It was only after a few levels my friends told me that that was the hardest profession to play and boy they are right. Elementalist has maximum 29 buttons to handle (maybe more now since they patched the game to enable some commands for summoned creatures). Compare that to warrior (16) and mesmer (19). Yes, it's not necessary to use all the buttons (some you rarely use and some you never use) but it's tedious to be flipping around. A warrior and mesmer have 2 sets of weapons to use (and you inevitably will use both sets) and each set of weapon comes with 5 skills. Elementalist can only use 1 set of weapons but the 5 weapon skills change depe...

After started reading this a few years ago (yes, it has been years hehehe), I finally finished reading this about a month or two ago. It was a book that Ban lent me for reasons that we both forgot :P It was a recommended reading for Ban's course to understand research methods. This is a great book to read (and easy to read too) for anyone who is interested in understanding scientific methodology (despite its name). It opened my eyes to interesting things such as case studies & testimonials , guns in US , just-world hypothesis , and parsimony . It also reinforces statistical concepts that I learned in university. Boy, incidentally, I have a backlog of reading to do.

Recently, we discovered that there's Sukiya (the one that serves gyudon; not the buffet restaurant) at Uptown (Damansara Utama) and so one day, Ban wanted to go there for dinner (rather than our usual choice at Kota Damansara). We were lucky to get a car park spot nearby. That was when we spotted this mix rice restaurant that was just a few shops away from Sukiya. We decided to check it out. We were impressed by the variety of dishes (about 84 by my rough estimation). In fact, Ban changed his mind and wanted to eat there (probably because he didn't have chap fan for lunch that day). I had 1 serving of chicken and 2 serving of vegetables. At RM 5.50, it was probably a little expensive (maybe by 50 cents) but the food was quite good. Ban had 1 meat, 1 egg and 1 veg, costing RM 6.20. Drinks were definitely expensive: chrysanthemum tea RM 1.70, can of Coca-Cola RM 2.50. About 15 mins later, there were many more customers. Great that they had good business. We probably will ...