Pages of INK

Thanks to this hugely fun game introduced by Pris called Text Twist, we spent a large chunk of last Sunday exercising our vocabulary.

The objective of the game is to form as many words as possible from a set of 6 random letters within a given time. Words can range from 3 letters to all 6 letters. The caveat is that you must guess at least one 6 letter word in order to advance to the next level.

Here is us killing time waiting for a meeting down at church to start. Super exciting way to kill time!

And the final word that got us through was? Yeah right! Heh heh…

After the meeting, we were joined by the rest of the guys (Changky, Gab and Merv) for dinner, movie and, yup you guessed it, more Text Twist!

A few hours of Text Twisting results in very exhausted and “stoned” faces.

I’ve always wondered if all that multi-tasking makes my brain work any faster, having to react to so much information both visual and auditory. Anyway, I found this interesting test that aims to guage how fast our brains can process information.

Auditory processing speed is important because much of the information we receive each day is communicated through sound, especially speech. The faster we can take in information accurately, the better we can keep up with, respond to and remember what we hear.

Click on the picture for the test!

1st try – 58 points
2nd try – 54 points
3rd try – 34 points

Lower scores indicate faster processing speed.

Seems that after 3 tries, my processing power has shot up dramatically! No more excuses to wifey for not catching her instructions. Hahaha…

Saw this very interesting game on Tiger’s blog. Knowing how I love puzzle games, I had to try it out. Unfortunately, my brain wasn’t up to it and I died at Level 6. Haha…

This year, Singapore played host to what was arguably the best World Cyber Games (WCG) to date, with US$435,000 up for grabs and around 40,000 spectators walking through its doors. Team USA walked away with the most medals but it was heartening to see Singapore also managing one silver medal in Dead or Alive.

In the spirit of this great sporting event, the geekier wing of IslandHope popped down Suntec City after church today to soak up the atmosphere of all the matches (death matches!) taking place in the cavernous exhibition hall. Unfortunately, by the time we got there, the Warcraft III finals had already finished. Update: Seems like Tigerming managed to catch the Warcraft III match! Changky, Guppy and MC Hammer stayed on to watch the Counterstrike finals between Team USA vs Kazakhstan and I heard from Gab later on that it was an adrenaline filled match. Although Kazakhstan was totally annhilated, they still did their country proud by reaching the finals despite only having dial-up internet to train on (the rest of the world is probably already on broadband!).

The Olympics of TV and computer games, with a venue to match.

Note: Image taken from WCG official web site.

MC Hammer, Ariel, Guppy, Changky and Princess at WCG! The seats behind us were totally filled up when the Counterstrike match began.

INK cannot resist making a rare appearance on his blog for a geeky event like this! The proud wifey agrees.

Toys on exhibit! Check out that super duper old Nintendo Entertainment System clone in the middle (ah nostalgia). Those days, you didn’t need mod-chips to play “friendly” games.

Credits: Changky for lending his Lumix FX9 for the first two shots and for personally taking the third photo.

Been on a gaming binge lately thanks to some pals who introduced me to the following addictive (and brain cell vapourizing) online games. Try them at your own risk! And, as usual, let’s compare scores! Heh heh…

First off, a classic – Chess! I’ve not played chess in over 2 years when I last lost to an old classmate 3 games in a row. He was somebody I used to be able to beat easily in JC so I figured that my brain was degenerating at record proportions (only in Chess) so it was time to retire. My comeback match a few nights ago was marked with a very surprising win, much to the shock of my very confident challenger (don’t tell you who!). In fact, I was pretty resigned to losing until he/she made some mistakes towards the later part of the game.

Black (ME!) forcing White to exchange queens thanks to a fork and check on his/her king, thus, heavily tilting the endgame in Black’s favour (rooks are very powerful in the endgame).

Next, the current puzzle fad that’s all the rage right now – Sudoku! Sudoku is a puzzle game where you have to fill up a 9×9 grid of nine smaller 3×3 squares. The rules are simple:
(i) each 3×3 square must have all the numbers 1 to 9 and numbers cannot repeat,
(ii) each row of 9 squares (up and down) must have all the numbers 1 to 9 and numbers cannot repeat.

Try the online version! It’s free and allows you to rank your timing against everybody else.

Finally, this game was discovered by Pris during her trip to Germany earlier this year. It’s called “Set” and happens to be a Mensa Select Top 5 game for 1991 (gee that’s ancient!). The objective of the game is for you to create sets of 3 pictures consisting of either common shapes, colours, patterns or numbers.

Try it online! The daily puzzle is refreshed daily (doh!)

Hope you guys have fun! And, if you have other games or puzzles to recommend, do let me know in the Comments section.

For the unitiated, the thought of boardgames (or boredgames depending on your level of patience) evokes momories of classics like Monopoly, Cluedo and Risk that we used to play before console and computer games became the in-thing. Well, ok, I must admit that I didn’t really play these games much either as I had boxes of Mask action figures and Zoids to keep me occupied; but you know how parents would sometimes insist on playtime with their kids and I was nice enough to spare them the humiliation of playing with kiddy stuff.

Anyway, back to the main event, last Friday (14th Oct), we had the priviledge of hosting a boardgame night for IslandHope and it turned out to be a fun-filled success.

Click on the image below for all the action.

Some other memorable highlights of the night:

• Reindeer winning the “Underdog of the Night” award by triumphing twice in Blockus despite very tough and competitive opposition.
• Mermaid winning the “My One Longer Than Yours” award for building the longest railroad in Ticket to Ride.
• And finally, Guppy winning the “Sound System of the Night” award for his persistent (and very audible) laugh tracks during the Settlers of Catan smackdown. No prizes for guessing who won that game…

After many days of toiling, I have finally mastered Zuma! For my closest competitors, Guppy and Tigerming, level 12 is not the last level! Upon completing 12-7, the game reveals a hidden level.

You have defeated Zuma… or so you think.

Space! The final frontier…

However, level 13 isn’t as hard as it seems. You just have to make sure you don’t die as I realized later on that there’s no way to access this hidden level except to start from level 12 again.

Zuma and I are now brothers. We control the outer space together. All your base are belong to us!

*satisfied*

It’s been a week since my last post and I’m starting to worry about my blog growing cobwebs. Not to worry though, the delay was all for a good cause. After many days of finger twitching on this cool game, I’ve attained this ultra cool score!

Check out how I actually managed to dart the 2nd sheep right as it stepped up to run (for an amazing reaction time of 0.000 seconds). You can see the sheep on the left side of the picture with its toungue sticking out if you scrutinize the screenshot hard enough. So, how bout beating this all you folks who trashed me in the last game I put up.

Oh, since we are on the topic of sheep running away, just want to share this really cool verse from the Parable of the Lost Sheep:

“Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Does he not leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it?” Luke 15:4

That’s exactly what all of us, shepherds of God’s flock, should do if any of His sheep get lost. But, please don’t use a dart gun!

Now what is wrong with this!

a = n + d
a(a – n) = (n + d)(a – n)
a² – an = an + ad – n² – nd
a² – an – ad = an – n² – nd
a(a – n – d) = n(a – n – d)
a = n

Have fun! *grin*

Discovered a crazy Japanese flash game today and have since been hooked on it for ages, i.e. the past 10 mins. It reminds me a lot of the famous Pengu game (aka Yeti Olympics) – this game where you play a white yeti who has to hit a penguin as far as he can by swinging at it with a club. Except, humans get whacked in this one instead of a cute penguin. Hooray for animal rights!

My best score so far is 1323.33m. Top that!