One-week diary part 1: Thurs, Fri and Sat

Our tutor has told us to keep a one-week diary, so here are the first three days:

THURSDAY

After 11am -ish - Morning lecture over, went fruit shopping in Leicester market with Miles for an hour or so.

12.30pm - Came home to quickly make packed lunch, packed laptop up and brought lunch box and laptop to the labs so that I could eat and work. Learned more about zbrush, started unwrapping in the labs.

Left labs at about 5.45pm.

Got home, started cooking dinner, all housemates are out at this time, ate dinner while watched South Park in front of the TV.

Seeing as housemates still have not arrived home after finishing dinner at just after 7pm, used this chance to play my beloved Dynasty Warriors 6 Empires game on the Xbox 360. Conquered some lands in ancient China.

8.45pm-ish - Went upstairs to room and do more unwrapping on self-portrait model.

10pm - Obligatory webcam chat with other half.

12.30am - bedtime.

FRIDAY

Being a non-lectures day, I let myself sleep in. Woke up at 9.10am, and thought I’d close my eyes for just a minute. Ended up opening them again at 11.45am. Uh oh.

Ate breakfast quickly, finished at about 12.30pm (including getting dressed, washing, and various other necessary morning activities), then decided to have a lazy day and worked at home. Paranoia about my rubbish topology loops around the head kicked in, so badgered Alan on msn who was really helpful and continuously gave me crits as I sent him lots of work-in-progress screenshots.

4.30pm - showered.

5.30pm - went to the kitchen to clean up a bit and do some washing up.

6pm - Came back upstairs to do some more work.

7pm-ish - dinner.

Played The Sims 3 whilst eating dinner. I like this game! Especially when I create Dynasty Warriors characters in it, heh. Wife character of Xiahou Dun Sim is now pregnant with second child. Gonna call him Xiahou Mao, as historically that was the name of his second son.

9pm-ish. More 3D work.

10pm - obglitaroy webcam chat with other half.

12am - bedtime.

SATURDAY

Since parents are visiting me today, I got up early at 9am. While I waited for them arrive, I continued re-modelling my head model to get the topology loops right, and this morning I finally did it. Was so happy.

12.30pm - parents finally arrived. Dad brought over the 20-volume Chinese comic (manhua) book collection of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which I love dearly. I can only understand about 60% of the words, but it’s enough to get by and keep me interested in reading. Plus the art style is gorgeous.

2.30pm - went out in town for lunch and shopping with parents.

5pm - arrived home, parents left at about 5.30pm. Continued doing more work on my 3D self portrait model while having a long and deep conversation with Mitch on msn about life, the universe and everthing. The answer was not simply 42.

9pm - dinner. I don’t usually eat this late, but since we had lunch at a Chinese buffet restaurant at 3pm, I couldn’t eat earlier than this.

10pm - finished dinner, obligatory webcam chat with other half. Showed him my beautiful RotK comic book collection.

Bedtime - 12.30am.

CHOOSE YOUR DYNASTY WARRIOR!

... I mean, choose the outfit design you like for my self-portrait in Mortal Engines theme (the items of clothing can be swapped around). Pilot of an airship, Eastern style:



Whoo, choosing to be a citizen of Shan Guo gives me an excuse to dress myself in a Hanfu-style outfit! Heh. I just love the fact that the name "Shan Guo" is a reference to Sanguo yanyi, aka "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" which I have been obsessed with for over a year now (the Dynasty Warriors games are based on this historical novel).

And my city is now complete!

Week 8 - storyline in games

Normally I play games for the storyline, but if I want to experience something fun and exciting, I would probably go for a good beat-’em-up game like Tekken 5 or Mortal Kombat, or a puzzle game like Portal.

Another game I enjoy is Dynasty Warriors. Koei based the Dynasty Warriors series on real historical events, a clever way to tell a great storyline from all the different playable characters’ point of view, and at the same time give players a fun and adventurous way of learning history of the Three Kingdoms in 3rd Century China! My favourite game at the moment is “Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI” by the same company. It is similar to the Dynasty Warrior games, however it is an exciting turn-based strategy game. And of course, being a strategy game, you have complete control over your people and your cities, allowing you to take control of your own events in parallel with the historical events during the game. Now I find this extremely interesting, weird and rather shocking sometimes because it means that I can change history… (in the game only of course)! It’s so strange thinking that had I not executed this one general, he would never have introduced the other general, which would NEVER have led to this famous battle of whatever, or had I released those prisoners AFTER whichever important events, would the historical events after that ever happen? The “storyline” and the way it lets you choose your paths in this game really makes me wonder… History is full of big “WHAT IF”s, and this game really makes me think.

I was pretty shocked when I executed an extremely righteous general (on the enemy side) and kicked the Emperor off the throne to crown myself, thus ending an entire dynasty and starting a new one of my own…















Right, enough fangirling from me…

In general, if the game has a storyline, then it should be strong and engaging, with interesting characters, preferably a loveable one! If I dislike the characters then I probably would not enjoy the storyline as much. I would like the characters to be intelligent and be involved in a complex and intelligent storyline with interesting twists. To me, a great storyline also evokes a lot of emotion to make me feel like I am completely part of it myself. A good example is Final Fantasy VII.