Games

The torture of playing Arkham Horror

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As previously mentioned on this blog, we’ve purchased Arkham Horror but had to wait until we got new tables to actually be able to play it. We finally got around to it last Sunday. We knew that it was going to be a long game so we planned on it taking the whole afternoon. For the first test game, my wife and I opted to take only one character each, chosen at random, but a hand-picked Great Old One, Nyarlathotep, that I’d been told would make for a shorter and slightly less challenging game. Four hours later, we gave up in disgust without completing the game although it was clear that we would eventually lose.

Being such good sports, we tried again in the evening, this time taking two characters each for a total of four characters. We did play this one to completion, though we had to leave the board as it was overnight and continue on Monday evening. Total playing time was around five hours and we lost, but only just barely, during the Final Battle. I’ve written a fairly extensive post on our experience over on QT3 so I don’t feel like repeating myself too much here. The subsequent comments from others are worth reading as well. Summary: my wife felt that it was like being tortured the whole time. In my case, it felt like a game in which things happen to my characters rather than my character actually doing things.

We’ll probably try again another time, and this time, we’ll have a better idea of how to play to beat the game, but probably not too soon! For my wife, it’s a novel experience as it’s the closest we’ve come so far to a more traditional RPG, but to me, the game mechanics feel too archaic and clunky. We probably can enjoy the game, but it just takes too long and is too arduous to play.

On a lighter note, here’s a photo of our session at CarcaSean last Saturday where we spent a little over two hours playing Agricola. Amusingly enough, there was another person there who wanted to play the same game and had friends coming but we eventually decided to join together for a four person game including the friendly shop owner Sean. As expected Sean ran away with the game but I don’t think I did too badly. Agricola is a wonderfully elegant design and that I’m tempted to buy just to experiment with possibilities but it plays quickly enough that it’s probably a better idea just to play it at the cafe.

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Politics, Religion

No need to fill in “race” for official forms in Malaysia?

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I find the current debate about dropping the “race” column from many official government forms in Malaysia to be quite amusing. My views on the artificiality of ethnic and even nationalistic groupings are already well advertised on this blog, so I won’t go into them again. On the surface, this move is reminiscent of the French government’s official policy to never collect such details about its citizens. The basic idea is that all French nationals are alike to the government. So long as you hold French citizenship, the government doesn’t care what colour your skin is and treats everyone equally.

Of course, in our case, our minister makes it clear that race information will continue to be collected in cases where it is relevant to bumiputra special priviliges, which means that this is a blatant public relations exercise that will do nothing to change the status quo. Not that anyone expected anything more from the National Front government. But wait, if we go back to that comparison to France, you’ll find that not only does the French government not collect information about “race” from its citizens, it also doesn’t collect information about “religion”. However, as all Malaysians know, not only do our official government forms contain blank spaces to fill in your race, they also contain spaces to fill in your religion. Are we supposed to infer that while the government doesn’t care about your race except when it comes to bumiputra privileges but it does care about your religion or did the minister simply forget that Malaysian government forms also contain that entry?

To me, none of this really matters. Even in France, academics who need to study the demographics of the French population simply bypass the lack of official statistical information on race and religion simply by analyzing names instead. Given two names, say, Michèle Alliot-Marie and Rachida Dati, it’s not hard to tell who’s white and who’s not. Even though I detest the practice of classifying people into races, it’s an undeniable reality in the minds of most people and should be fought against on that level. I feel that as long as this is true, it’s more useful for the government to collect this information than to pretend that the phenomenon doesn’t exist.

One point of contention in Malaysia when it comes to bumiputra privileges is whether or not the 30% equity target for the Malays as stated in the Malaysian New Economic Policy affirmative action plan has already been reached. The government insists that the target hasn’t been reached yet so the continuing existence of the NEP is justified. However economists argue that this is only true because the government fudges its figures, in particular by using the archaic par value as opposed to market value to measure the proportion of shares held by bumiputra. It’s easy to see that by selectively collecting race information in some cases and not in others, the Malaysian government can obfuscate the true picture even more.

Personal Life

Mountain climbing

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As a self-confessed geek, I’m not much of an outdoors or exercise person. I do take short walks around the neighborhood with my wife everyday so that Spidey can exercise and staying in general good shape is never a bad thing, but that’s as much exercise as I’m willing to put time and effort towards. Recently, however, we’ve been kicking around the idea of actually attempting to climb Mount Kinabalu, which as all Malaysians know is the tallest peak in Southeast Asia. We don’t have a set date yet, but it looks like it’s going to be a family affair with lots of people and generally planned for early next year.

I have no illusions about it being easy. Sure, it’s not mountaineering with rope and pitons, but even fit and sportive people generally claim that getting to the peak is an exhausting and arduous ordeal. This means we’re going to have to put in some regular training and that in turn means going to the Bukit Padang recreational area to climb the hills there. It doesn’t take a lot of time, but even less than 20 minutes of effort is pretty hard on you given how steep it is and how many steps you need to climb.

We originally planned on going twice a week, once on Sunday and again on Wednesday, but we’ve found that the traffic in Kota Kinabalu gets too bad around rush hours to make that feasible. So we’ve decided to go only on Sundays for leg muscle training and jog around in our neighborhood as endurance training. We still have quite some time to prepare so I’m not unduly worried, but given how punishing even 20 minutes at Bukit Padang can be, I have a newfound respect for the people who manage to complete the two-day climb up to th peak of Mount Kinabalu!

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Films & Television

Favourite Films (Updated)

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It’s been nearly two years since I last wrote this post listing out five of my favourite films, so I thought it would be a good idea to update that list. Some caveats to preface this list with: first, think of this list as extending the previous one, not replacing it. By and large, I still like the films in the original list more than the ones here but I hate the idea of qualitatively ranking stuff in some numerical order, so I’m going to maintain the position that they’re always arranged in no particular order.

Second, the original dictum that these are films that are my personal favourites remains. There’s a reason why this list is called “Favourite Films” and not “Best Films” after all. I can completely understand if someone wants to counter one of my choices with something with greater artistic merit. I can even acknowledge something else as being qualitatively better while recognizing that I personally liked it less for a variety of reasons.

Continue reading Favourite Films (Updated) →

Politics, Religion

Did Bush ask France to attack Gog and Magog in Iraq?

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This Free Inquirer article has been making the rounds among atheists and agnostics on the net. In it, a senior editor of the magazine James A. Haught claims that back in 2003 when then U.S. President Bush was trying to assemble his “Coalition of the Willing” to invade Iraq, he told the French President of the time Jacques Chirac that Iraq had to be attacked because the Biblical demons Gog and Magog was at work in Iraq and that the confrontation was willed by God.

To the writer’s credit, the article details explicitly how this information was obtained so it’s hard to dismiss it as just hearsay. Still, I find it hard to believe that Bush actually meant it seriously. It’s one thing for Bush to throw in the Gog and Magog thing as a half joke, quite another thing to use it as justification to implore France to take action against Iraq. After all, why would Bush have expected Chirac to understand the obscure Biblical reference? It should also be noted that Chirac has a history of being quite derisive towards Bush’s religious beliefs, so mischaracterizing what he actually said would not be entirely out of the question.

Far from it for me to defend Bush’s record, it’s just that I believe in appropriating both blame and credit fairly and truthfully. For me, what is both more credible and ultimately more insidious are the accompanying revelations that the U.S. military regularly uses Biblical language in its reports. Quotes from the Bible for example are often used as prefaces to reports especially when it is known that the superior officer who will be reading them is a devout Christian. This practice apparently dates back from before the Bush era but seems to have become more common under his presidency. Needless to say, any attempt to reframe the mission and purpose of the U.S. military in Biblical terms, ignoring the separation of church and state, should make any reasonable person extremely nervous.

Games, Personal Life

Arkham Horror is here

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I thought it might be fun to take some photos of my opening the Arkham Horror box that we’ve just bought. Of course, since I just sat on the floor to open it, Spidey wandered over to curiously poke her nose in everything, which just makes it more fun. As you can see, the board is pretty big, certainly bigger than I expected it to me. There are also a lot of cards (nearly 400) and lots of tiny cardboard tokens and markers. We’re going to have to get a bigger table than we planned to to play this. I can’t even imagine what it’s like once you start adding the expansions with boards of their own.

We’re probably not going to actually start playing it anytime soon either. I’d like to get the cards into some protective plastic sleeves first because my hands tend to get sweaty, and we have to think about a way to store all those markers and tokens once we’ve punched them out of the cardboard sheets. We’re going to have to find a way to roll dice fairly without having them go all over the place too. We had a shot of making a dice tower of our own, but it ended rather badly. Unsurprisingly, cellophane tape isn’t sufficient to hold together a robust cardboard dice tower.

Incidentally we did manage to play a game of Battlestar Galactica at CarcaSean even if it started later than we planned and kept us out until much later than we usually like to stay. We were worried about Spidey being left alone in the room for too long. I wrote a simple after action report of our experence on QT3 that you can read here. Spoiler: my wife is a Cylon!

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Fun, Games

Real life Fallout

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Remember how I gushed about Fallout 3 in this blog? Well, my fanboyishness pales in comparison to these intrepid fans from Russia. Check out this site for more cool photos. I’m not sure what they mean by playing the game for real. I sure hope they aren’t shooting at each other!

Actually to tell the truth, I haven’t been much of a Fallout 3 fanboy lately because so far I haven’t bought a single one of the DLCs for it. The first of the DLCs available didn’t seem that interesting to me, and when I actually tried to buy them, I was put off by the complicated process of buying them for the PC on the Games for Windows website. I keep telling myself that I’ll just buy them when they eventually get collected onto a DVD, but I have so many games to go through at the moment that I’m not sure if I’ll even get to that.

Currently looking forward to our CarcaSean session on Saturday when we’re scheduled to play a game of Battlestar Galactica with Sean and his other invitees. My wife is panicking at the thought of being chosen to be a Cylon!

The unexamined life is a life not worth living