doctor who and all his companions

Below is an infographic showing all the eleven doctors plus all the companions. Pretty cool, huh. And it was done by the Online Dating Site. Click on the picture for the original source, where you could magnify it. Enjoy!

assassin’s creed 2 and brotherhood

Assassin’s Creed 2 picked up where Assassin’s Creed left off. Desmond Miles is still trapped at Abstergo Industries in 2012. Lucy Stillman, who’s played by Kristen Bell might I add, then helped to break him out.

They escaped to an Assassin safe-house where Desmond met Rebecca, who designed Animus 2.0, and Shaun, who’s played by Danny Wallace who has a column in Shortlist. If you live in central London and use the tube often, you’ll know what Shortlist is.

Desmond uses Animus 2.0 to access the memories of a different ancestor this time, Ezio Auditore da Firenze, who lived in Italy. You get to play as Ezio from when he first learns that he is of the Assassin’s Creed until he becomes a true Assassin.

The developers have indeed greatly improved the shortcomings of the first game, which I’ve already reviewed on this blog.

People complained that the first game was repetitive, now Assassin’s Creed 2 has a more varied gameplay. The first game didn’t have a lot of variety in the fight moves, now the second game has even more weapons and moves. You can even counter an attack by grabbing your opponent’s weapon.

It was annoying that in Assassin’s Creed that Altaïr can’t swim. An assassin that couldn’t swim? Quite ridiculous. I’m not a very good swimmer myself, but I’m not an assassin am I? Well now in the second game, the main protagonist, Ezio Auditore, can swim. Hooray.

Assassin’s Creed 2 is a more open game compared to the first one. Plus, there are many more things that you can do. There are several Codex Pages written by Altaïr. Ezio brings these to his friend, Leonardo da Vinci, to decipher. Some of them are cool new weapons such as a double blade and a hidden gun. There’s even a mission where you need to use Leonardo’s flying craft to get to a certain place.

Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood is really good as well. The game gets even better. You’re still playing as Ezio, but he’s now a bit older. Villa Auditore in Monteriggioni is destroyed by Cesare, so the setting of Brotherhood is mostly in Rome.

Since Rome is a very large city, you get to ride horses throughout the whole map. In the first 2 games, this isn’t possible; you can only ride horses outside the city walls. The really cool thing about riding these horses is that you can jump to an enemy’s horse and assasinate him with your hidden blade.

The interesting aspect of Brotherhood is that you get to train some citizens to become Assassins. You first save them from guards who are attacking them. You then send them on missions or “contracts” as they are called in the game.

These contracts will increase their experience points and upgrade their level until they finally become Assassins. Once you have your trainees, you can call them anytime they’re available to help you in your fights or just to kill some guards. Lovely.

Leonardo da Vinci is in ACB as well. If you complete all of Leonardo's 4 missions, you'll unlock parachutes that you can use to glide from high towers. There's also a virtual training mode in the game.

Brotherhood is the first in the Assassin’s Creed franchise to have a multiplayer element in it. There is a multiplayer mode that you can play online. I don’t have Xbox Live Gold so I can’t play this feature. Hmm.. maybe I should get it for a few months? Heh.

Both AC2 and ACB have glyphs hidden by Subject 16, who was/is the last Assassin abducted by Abstergo before Desmond. After finding all the glyphs, it will unlock Subject 16’s “The Truth” message. I actually looked for all the glyphs and solved all the puzzles to get the hidden video.

Please don’t play the following clips if you don’t want to know any spoilers. Here’s the “Truth” video from AC2:

After a lot of time playing AC2 and ACB, I just couldn’t be bothered to look for all the glyphs in Brotherhood. So I just searched for “The Truth” for ACB in Youtube:

There are some talking until 00:40. Then there are some uninteresting scenes where Desmond is climbing and running to get somewhere. Just skip to 12:40 for “The Truth”.

You must be thinking “what the-”, aren’t you? Well, you’ll get a similar reaction to the ending of both games as well, especially AC2. I can’t wait for the next instalment. It will be a different ancestor but there has been no confirmed news yet on what location it will be.

I really enjoyed playing both these games. The graphics are beautiful as was the first one. You still get some glitches where Ezio goes through parts of a horse or a bit of the wall once in a while, but I’m willing to close an eye on that as the games have great storylines as well as gameplay.

Bring it on Assassin’s Creed 3!

of market and crumble

It’s been a really long time since I wrote about food in this blog (and quite a while as well since my last update). If you look at the ‘food’ category, there were quite a lot of entries when I first started blogging. I used to make a lot of desserts during uni, but got lazy to make any since then.

Anyway, let’s change the topic slightly for the moment. Don’t worry, it’s still about food. Heh.

Last Saturday, Malaysia Kitchen organised a Malaysian Winter Market at Westfield to promote Malaysian restaurants throughout London. I went there with a few friends to check it out.

It’s a very good initiative as it ‘advertises’ some of the Malaysian restaurants in London. Apparently, there are around 40 Malaysian restaurants in London alone! I must admit I’ve never heard of many of them. My favourite one would be TukDin’s which is in Paddington. The mi bandung and nasi lemak there are amazing! 

Anyway, back to the Malaysian Winter Market. Puji-Puji were making satay beside their stall, so there was quite a long queue there. The chicken satay were quite good. Not as good as Sate Kajang of course, but you can’t complain if you’re here in London.

I also tried some laksa by 54 Pinang and they were not bad as well. We were given discount vouchers for some Malaysian restaurants. I must go to some that I’ve never been to before the vouchers expire!

Afif and Atiqah were staying over at our place. So the next day, I made apple and almond crumble. I actually planned to make it on Saturday, but Halo Reach-ing with Amer  It was a long time since I did any baking. The crumble was quite easy to make actually and it didn’t take a lot of my time. Thanks to Afif for shaking the ingredients together!

Afif, Amer and I ate the crumble with some double cream while playing ‘Glory to Rome’, a really interesting board game. I think it would taste better with vanilla ice cream instead of double cream. The mixture of hot apple crumble plus the cold ice cream would’ve been marvellous!

student march or student riot?

There has been a series of student marches in London recently to protest the increase of the capping of university tuition fees from £3290 to £9000. This is a maximum amount to charge local students. If you’re wondering what this is all about, here’s a good page for some Q&A info. For international students, there are no caps, so it’s hugely expensive to get a degree here in the UK for non-European students.

Anyway, back to the topic. Protests are okay if they are peaceful ones. There was a march at around noon that passed by the office and it was quite peaceful. Some police officers were flanking the march and there were several police vans at the end of it. It caused a little bit of a traffic jam later on but it was quite peaceful.

However, it became worse as the sun went down. Many students were protesting near parliament. When it got a bit out of hand, police started ‘kettling’ to one place in order to control them easier.

Even Prince Charles and Camilla didn’t escape the violence. They were on their way to the Royal Variety Show when protestors chased their car and threw paint on it. They even attempted to smash one of the windows.

This has gone a bit too far. If they want to protest, then please do so, but peacefully, not with violence. It seems that there were some of them who intended to cause problems.

Videos of the march/riot showed that it was a real mess. Protestors vandalised public property and were violent to police, while the police were hitting some protestors with their batons. Click here for a page with many photos of the day.

I’ve always thought protests in the UK were exemplary as they were always peaceful ones. People would march on the streets with their protest banners, and the police will watch over, making sure there were no funny business.

But these student protests are getting out of hand. Too any damages to public property and injuries to people. It’s worse than other countries where the police will just spray water to protestors.

Protests and marches usually will only have a small probability of changing things, but the violence will certainly not help them to achieve their cause.

royal engagement

I took the morning for Raya Haji, so after the prayers, I went back home to lepak a while before going to work.

Amer and I watched TV, the This Morning show on ITV1 to be exact. Suddenly, the host, Phillip Schofield, was touching his earpiece and then he said they just received news that Clarence House just announced that Prince Williams and Kate Middleton were now engaged. Clarence House is the official residence of The Prince of Wales by the way.

Anyway, we were quite surprised that this was considered ‘breaking news’, but I guess it’s some sort of good news considering the current economic climate. And the media seemed to love it as it was all over the news yesterday afternoon and today as well.

Well, I must say that they are a very good-looking couple. Will their wedding top the recent Swedish royal ‘fairy-tale’ wedding I wonder?

salam aidil adha

Selamat Hari Raya Haji to all Muslims out there! =)

Allahuakbar Allahuakbar Allahuakbar.
Laailahailallahu Allahuakbar.
Allahuakbar walillahilhamd.

ed's first prime minister's questions

Ed Miliband recently won Labour's leadership contest and has since selected his shadow cabinet. In the UK, the Prime Minister will spend half an hour every Wednesday morning to answer questions from Members of Parliaments (MPs). This is called the Prime Minister's Questions (PMQ).

And today was Ed Miliband's first PMQ and it was entertaining to watch. Although they did criticise each other, it was done in a respectful way. Plus, the speaker is fair to both sides. Note that non-UK viewers may not be able to watch the two videos, but for those who can, enjoy!

If you can't watch the videos and are desperate to know what happened, you can read a long and boring commentary at this link.

back home for raya

I keep having to dust off cobwebs from this blog. Doesn't matter anyway since I don't think there's much traffic anyway. Hehe.

I'm now back home in Shah Alam. Will be in Malaysia for 3 weeks. Cuti Raya yeay. Hopefully I'll be able to catch up with some old friends.

The flights home were okay, but both of them were delayed, quite unreliable really.

Maybe I should update this blog more often, but with short snippets instead of long posts. Wouldn't have to dust the cobwebs then. And write paragraphs which don't have much connections or flows, like the above.

Short snippets good, long posts bad, random paragraphs ugly, no?

england in the world cup

England played ok during their first game against USA (except that goalkeeping gaffe), but they were absolutely rubbish against Algeria.

My amateur opinion on what England's formation should be:

Rooney

J Cole                                      Lennon

Gerrard      Lampard

Barry

A Cole      Upson      Terry      G Johnson

James

England will surely win against Slovenia with this formation! Hehe. Don't think that Capello will use this though. Whatever tactic he uses, I really hope that Joe Cole gets to play.

Come on England!

Final prediction: South Korea vs Spain. =)

Update 23rd June:
So Capello didn't use that formation against Slovenia (as expected), but England did win nevertheless. Good, disciplined performance by England. (Though I still think will do better with this formation, well, maybe replace Lennon with Milner. Hehe.)

first election debate in the uk

It was a very interesting debate between the 3 main party leaders: Nick Clegg, David Cameron and Gordon Brown. I'm too lazy to elaborate here so I'll just jot down some quotes.

Nick Clegg on the duel between David Cameron and Gordon Brown:

The more they attack each other, the more they sound like one another.

I must say that there were quite a few jabs from Gordon Brown towards David Cameron:

You can airbrush your posters but you cannot airbrush your promises.

This is not Question Time – this is answer time, David.

And one very good one regarding posters like the above that the Tories put up everywhere.

I'm grateful, by the way, to David for putting up all these posters about crime and me. You know there's no newspaper editor who has done as much for me in the last two years – because my face is smiling on these posters. I'm very grateful to you and Lord Ashcroft for funding these.