Exams : The FEAR!

Sorry guys...my exams were on and therefore I couldn't blog much. Anyway if YOU find exams to be a pain...then read on!   WELL EXAMS ARE NOT A PAIN!

 

 

 

Exam Techniques, Tips and Tricks

Throughout my time at school and University, I had a friend called Graham. We did exams in exactly the same subjects from the ages of 15 to 22. Despite the fact that Graham is quite a lot brighter than I am, as far as I can remember he never beat me in a single exam. Why? Well, mostly because he got interested in the subjects, and started exploring them. I was just trying to pass the exams. (Graham is now a professor at the University of Glasgow. I’m just a lecturer here at York. Which goes to show that being brighter pays off in the longer term. However, there’s no reason he shouldn’t have beaten me in at least a few of those exams.)

Since then I've seen the issue from the other side, having set hundreds of exam questions and marked thousands of exam scripts. And I must say that the standard of exam technique apparent from many students at York, supposedly one of the top universities in the UK, is, to be frank, awful. It's almost as if many of you have no idea what you're doing. This is madness - don't you want to pass?

Here, then, are a few collected tips and tricks from, if I say so myself, quite a successful campaign to do well in every exam that was put in front of me, (given the limitations of my intelligence), and to try and understand the minds of students who have written thousands of exam scripts that I have read and marked. You might find some of them useful.

If you’ve got anything yourself to add to this list, please let me know. I’ll try to keep it up to date with the current state-of-the-art in exam technique.

Part A) Preparing for an Exam

1) Revise actively.

Just reading through your notes is the worst possible way to revise. Well, OK, perhaps not the worst possible, but it’s really not very good. The more of your brain you can engage in the revision, the more you will remember. Memory is not a box in one part of your brain that things are either in or out. Memory is spread out everywhere: there’s verbal memory, visual memory, audio memory, muscle memory, all sorts. The more your brain does with the information, the more you will remember.

So don’t just read. Make up poems and mnemonics. Summarise the notes. Set them to music. Extract key points and write them down yourself somewhere – even if you’re just copying them out, this is better than just reading, since more of your brain is involved. Make up quizzes and do them. Write limericks. Above all – do problems. Make up your own if you run out. Get active!

2) Plan revision.

Write a good revision plan, and stick to it. Don’t do just one subject a day, you’ll get tired of it; then again swopping too often means you don’t get the chance to get deep into anything. I used to do mornings on one subject, afternoons on another and evenings on a third.

3) Do past papers – as many as you can lay your hands on.

The internal web has (at least) the last three year's papers on it. Papers from previous years are stored in the library (at least that used to be true - it's worth checking if they still have them). Work through them. If you can't do a question, check that it is still in the syllabus (the modules change every year, and it's always worth checking what is new). With a good revision plan you should be doing nothing in the last week before the exams except working through exam papers and examples sheets making sure you can do them.

I can’t emphasise the importance of this enough. Anyone who doesn’t work through past papers has very little chance of doing well in an exam.

Oh - and do the past papers, and the examples sheets, against the clock. Time is short in an exam, you need to get used to thinking, and writing quickly. Get your hand trained up so it can write fast (but legibly, please).

4) Question-spotting.

This can be risky, but if you're playing the percentages it's worth a try. Look for any topic that was in the exam two and three years ago, but not last year. If you can get hold of papers from further back, try and spot patterns: does any topic come up every other year, for example?

Another good tip is to make a very careful note if the lecturer says at any point "this is new in the course this year". If he does, there's an above average chance that this will be in the exam - it gets harder every year to come up with new questions about the same old subjects, and putting a new topic in the course is an easy "new question" for the examiner.

5) If you can’t do the past papers – ask someone for help.

Study groups work well, provided you don’t think this will mean other people are doing your studying for you. They can’t – that doesn’t work. You have to go and study a subject, or attempt an exam paper by yourselves first, then meet together to discuss your answers. Don’t work through the past papers in the group – the temptation to let other people do the work is too strong. You need to learn to do it yourself. Always remember, exams are not a team exercise.

Failing that, make an appointment to come and ask the lecturer. Lecturers are usually perfectly happy to answer questions of the form “this is how far I’ve got, but I can’t see how to do the next bit – is this right?” However, anyone turning up and asking for the worked solutions to an exam question having made no apparent effort to try themselves first is likely to be told to go away and do some more work. This is for your benefit – if we just tell you how to do a problem, you won’t remember it very well. If you really struggle to get through it yourself, and then with some help finally succeed, you may remember it for the rest of your life. The more effort you put into it, the better it will stick in your memory.

6) If you just can’t understand something, learn it parrot-fashion.

This really is a last-ditch solution. But it gives you at least something to do with the questions on subjects you really don’t understand. Even questions on these subjects usually start off by giving you a few marks for “describing XXX”. Even if you don’t understand it, you can get a few marks by writing down the description straight from the notes.

Part B) The Last 24 Hours

7) Don’t be tired.

If you have to stay up all night to do last minute revision, you’ve already failed. It doesn’t work – you end up so tired in the exam you can’t work anything out. It might work for the first one or two exams in a year, but you won’t be able to keep it up throughout a whole series of exams.

8) Eat protein before long exams – not carbohydrates.

An exam is just as much a physical exercise as a race. Well, OK, perhaps not quite as much, but you can’t ignore your body if you want your brain to work at its best. Stuffing it full of sugar, or some Red-Bull type drink just before will work fine for the first hour or so, but by the end of a three-hour exam you’ll have completely run out of energy. You need some food that will slowly release energy. Try pasta, fish or eggs.

9) Get the important facts into short-term memory.

In the last 24 hours it's too late to try and understand anything new. What you can do is cram some facts into short-term memory. This is the time to go through the notes looking at those "key points" sections. If you haven't already done it as part of your revision (and you should have done it), write out a sheet with just the key facts. See how many you can remember. Then write out another sheet with just the ones you forgot. See how many you remember now. Continue until you've either remembered it all, or run out of time.

Also, read through your worked solutions for the last three year's papers. Then, get a good night's sleep, or go for a walk and get some fresh air into your lungs.

10) Exercise - get the blood pumping round.

In the last couple of hours, go for a run, or work out in the gym. Seriously. Studies have shown that the most creative periods come after a period of exercise, and that the benefits of taking exercise can last for up to two hours. Exams aren't just about memory, you'll need your brain to be in top working condition.

Part C) The Exam Itself

11) Planning your campaign

The first thing to do is read over, carefully, the entire exam paper. Spend a good ten minutes reading before you write anything. In this time, work out which questions you are going to answer, which order you are going to answer them in, and plan your time in the exam: how much time you are going to spend answering each question. Take careful note of the marking scheme (see later) when making this plan. Write down the plan on the back sheet of your answer book - you can always score it out later. It helps you feel in control, and that helps keep you calm.

Don't be tempted to do a question on subject X just because it's the subject you know the most about. It might be a real stinker of a question. Are you sure you can do it? Which parts can you do? How many marks do you think you could get on the parts of the question you can do? You might find there is another, much easier question on subject Y, which you might not have chosen because you found subject Y is harder, or because one part of the question looks really difficult. Work it out for each part of each question: which question is likely to get you the most marks? Do that one.

Reading the whole question is also important because many questions lead you through a problem - the answer to part a) is used in part b), etc. There might be clues in later parts of the question about what the examiner is expecting. Make sure you spot them.

As an examiner I am constantly amazed by students who set out to do questions that they've clearly got not the first clue how to do. Surely there would be another question on the paper that they could have got a few marks on at least?

When working out timescales, try and balance the time spend on a part of the question against the marks you will achieve. If it's a 90 minute exam, and it's marked out of 60, then on average you've got 1.5 minutes to get each mark. Plan time accordingly. Remember: exam questions are not about writing down everything you know about a topic - if you do this you'll almost certainly run out of time. You're trying to get the best mark you can on the whole paper, not just on the question you happen to be doing at the time.

Obviously, the plan (with timescales) is not a rigid one, and going a few minutes over on one question is OK – but try and catch it up if this happens.

12) Do the easiest questions first

There is absolutely no reason to do the questions in the order they are printed in the exam. I would recommend doing the easiest one(s) first.

 

That's it!!!

DJANGO : Is it the next best thing?

I have to face it: Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” is his most entertaining piece of moviemaking since “Pulp Fiction.” Some of it, particularly in the first half, is excruciatingly funny, and all of it has been brought off in a spirit of burlesque merriment—violent absurdity pushed to the level of flagrancy and beyond. That’s the place where Tarantino is happiest: out at the edge, playing with genre conventions, turning expectations inside out, ginning up the violence to exploitation-movie levels. The film is in two parts: the first half is a mock Western; the second is a mock-revenge melodrama about slavery, set in the deep South and ending in fountains of redemptive spurting blood. “Django” is a crap masterpiece, garrulous and repetitive, rich with jokes and cruelties, including some Old South cruelties that Tarantino invented for himself. It’s a very strange movie, luridly sadistic and morally ambitious at the same time, and the audience is definitely alive to it, revelling in its incongruities, enjoying what’s lusciously and profanely over the top.

What’s even stranger than the movie, however, is how seriously some of our high-minded critics have taken it as a portrait of slavery. Didn’t they notice that Tarantino throws in an “S.N.L.”-type skit about the Ku Klux Klan, who gather on their horses for a raid only to complain petulantly that they can’t see well out of their slitted white hoods? Or that Samuel L. Jackson does a roaring, bug-eyed parody of an Uncle Tom house slave in the second half? Or that the heroine of the movie, a female slave, is called Broomhilda von Shaft? Could Mel Brooks have done any better? (“Lili von Shtupp,” I suppose, is slightly better.) Yes, we are told that Broomhilda’s German mistress gave her the name and taught her German, but Tarantino is never more improbable than when he supplies explanations for his most bizarre fancies. Some of his characters spring from old genre movies, some spring full-blown from the master’s head. None have much basis in life, or in any social reality to speak of. (Remember the Jews who killed Nazis with baseball bats?) Yes, of course, there were killers in the Old West and cruel slave masters in the South—central characters in the movie—but Tarantino juices everything into gaudy pop fantasy. I enjoyed parts of “Django Unchained” very much, but I’m surprised that anyone can take it as anything more than an enormous put-on.
Much has already been written about the movie, but I would like to add a few notes of appreciation and complaint (don’t read past the middle of this post if you haven’t seen the movie).
1. Tarantino the Rhetorician
Tarantino loves elaborate rhetoric—the extremes of politeness, the exquisitely beautiful word, the lengthy, ridiculous argument that becomes funny precisely because it’s so entirely beside the point. Remember the stiff formalities among the criminals in “Reservoir Dogs”? Or the early conversation between John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson in “Pulp Fiction”? The two men are about to kill some punks who owe drug money to their boss. They stop to chat. The topic at hand: a man massaged the feet of the boss’s wife and, as punishment, was tossed out of a window. Is massaging a woman’s feet an offense worthy of death, like adultery? The thugs have quite a dispute about the matter; they could be bishops at the Council of Trent arguing the fine points of Church liturgy. Then they go ahead and blow the punks away. That’s the essential Tarantino joke—discourse and mayhem, punctilio and murder, linked together.
“Django” is set in 1858 and thereafter. A German bounty hunter, King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), poses as a dentist and spins around Texas, speaking perfect English. King Schultz is a mannerly scoundrel. When he encounters some white men transporting slaves through the dark woods, he says, “Among your company, I’m led to believe, there is a specimen I hope to acquire.” After shooting one of the white men, who howls in pain, he says, “If you could keep your caterwauling down to a minimum, I would like to speak to young Django.” Just as he did in “Inglourious Basterds,” in which Waltz was a polite S.S. killer, Tarantino writes fancy talk for this self-amused, highly elocutionary Austrian actor. The added comedy here is that the foreigner is so much more articulate than the tobacco-stained, scraggly-assed, lunkhead Americans he meets everywhere. He’s the Old World instructing the New in the fine points of etiquette and speech while enjoying the savage opportunities of the Wild West.
King Schultz teams up with Django, a slave he liberates, played by the growling Jamie Foxx (who doesn’t always seem to be in on the joke). The two travel around the West, killing wanted men for money. Schultz flimflams everybody, and in some cases shoots the person he’s teasing, popping him in the chest with a tiny pistol. Up until the middle of the movie, Tarantino comes close to moral realism: the cold-hearted Schultz is a complete cynic; he does what he does for money. We can accept that as some sort of truth. But then Schultz risks his life to help Django find his slave wife, who has been sold to a plantation owner in Mississippi, and the movie becomes nonsensical. The vicious comic cynicism of the first half gives way to vicious unbelievable sentiment in the second half. The murderous bounty hunter has a heart of gold.
In Mississippi, Schultz finds his rhetorical equal in Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), an elegant plantation grandee who wears his hair long and his beard finely clipped, and who speaks in even lengthier sentences than Schultz. DiCaprio plays this burlesque version of power-mad dominance with overwhelming relish, stroking his locks and beard like a Victorian stage villain; he even delivers a detailed lecture on phrenology (a pseudo-science beloved by racists in the nineteenth century) with thundering passion. Candie, like Schultz, is a verbally enabled sadist; the two duel at interminable length in scenes that go on so long you wonder if Tarantino hasn’t lost the feeling for pace that seemed so instinctive in “Pulp Fiction.” The timing of the plantation scenes is slack—Tarantino turns what should be sharp into an overexplicit wheeze. So here’s the downside of his boisterous skills as a writer: when a director is in love with his own words, his judgment goes south.
2. Tarantino the Racist Anti-Racist
Tarantino uses the n-word—a hundred and ten times, apparently—in a way that whites normally can’t use it. The word is all over hip-hop and street talk, of course, but the taboo against it is the most powerful of all taboos in journalism and public discourse. Tarantino must be amused by how those who like his work, and those who don’t, can’t operate with his freedom—the freedom, he claims, an artist must have. But freedom to do what? He tosses the word around again and again. Whites say it, blacks say it. They use it functionally, as a descriptive term, and contemptuously, in order to degrade. Samuel L. Jackson, as the unctuous and tyrannical Stephen, uses the word with especial vigor as a way of keeping down all the other blacks and ensuring his own predominance. When Tarantino was criticized for this n-wording by Spike Lee, he responded that that’s the way people spoke in 1858. Well, sure it is, but how much of that talk does Tarantino need to make his point? There’s something gleeful and opportunistic about his slinging around a word that now offends all but the congenital racists. How much of this n-wording is faithful reporting of the way people talked in 1858, or necessary dramatic emphasis, and how much of it is there to titillate and razz the audience? I’m with Spike Lee on this. By the end of the movie, the n-word loses its didactic value as a sign of racism. It seems like a word that Tarantino is very comfortable with—it was all over “Pulp Fiction,” too. In his own way, Tarantino has restored “nigger” to common usage in the movies.
3. Tarantino the Genre Filmmaker
Schooled in the lively swamps of a California video store, Tarantino has always delighted people with his encyclopedic knowledge of B-movies, his delving into disreputable genres and trolling through the bottom drawers of schlock. Just a few obvious things from “Django”: The red titles and florid opening song seem like something out of a clichéd American Western from the late fifties or early sixties. The long vistas alternating with super-tight closeups and snap zoom shots render homage to the visual tropes of the Spaghetti Westerns. The black slave—Django—who revolts and kills nasty white people is a throwback to the ex-football-player-turned-actor Fred Williamson, who appeared in such films as “The Legend of N----- Charley,” and its two sequels, in the blaxploitation heyday of the seventies.
But what is there to say about any of this referencing except that nodding to old movies is no particular virtue in itself? What matters is what you do with the movie past. In “Pulp Fiction,” Tarantino transformed trash into something scintillating. In the two “Kill Bill” movies, he seemed stuck in a lunatic overelaboration of figures from martial-arts films, repeating himself endlessly. In this movie, he’s as much imprisoned by junk stereotype as liberated by it. Django turns into a strutting modern dispenser of violence—a Fred Williamson who delivers frolicsome quips before dispensing each victim. Tarantino’s nature condemns him to always go over the top. Panache above all. The comic hyping of each speech, each emotion, each act becomes wearisome (for me at least). Look at the sombrely impressive violence in something like “Zero Dark Thirty” and you’ll realize how cheap the mayhem in “Django” is.
4. Tarantino the Lover of Revenge
The basic mechanism of exploitation is this: some bad person commits repeated atrocities against the innocent. This sets the grounds for retaliation, because the good persons and their allies have reasons to take revenge. Their violence is justified. They have been provoked and abused, haven’t they? The greater the initial assault, the more deserved the punishment. That way the audience can feel happy and morally assured in the display of violence—after all, the victims had it coming. Let the blood flow in all righteousness.
In “Django Unchained,” the following is done to black people: Slave women are horsewhipped, and one is branded on her face and thrown into a closed “hot box” in the Southern heat. A male slave is torn apart by dogs (there are repeated flashbacks to this). Django himself is hung upside down naked, his genitals menaced by a white plantation thug holding a red-hot knife. Two black slaves—”Mandingo fighters”—are shown fighting to the death in a gentleman’s club. The gentlemen, in beautiful frock coats, smoke cigars and drink rum cocktails and make bets. The inclusion of all the former atrocities can be justified, since slavery depended on constant coercion (no argument there), but the Mandingo fighting—central to the plot—is a fake. There was no such thing in the slave south. As Aisha Harris reports in Slate:

While slaves could be called upon to perform for their owners with other forms of entertainment, such as singing and dancing, no slavery historian we spoke with had ever come across anything that closely resembled this human version of cock fighting. As David Blight, the director of Yale’s center for the study of slavery, told me: One reason slave owners wouldn’t have pitted their slaves against each other in such a way is strictly economic. Slavery was built upon money, and the fortune to be made for owners was in buying, selling, and working them, not in sending them out to fight at the risk of death.

Slaves from different plantations were thrown by their masters into bare-knuckle fights, which were certainly brutal, but the men did not fight to the death. As for “Mandingo,” it’s probably derived (as Harris reminds us) from a popular junk novel of the same name, by Kyle Onsett, which was published in 1961 and then made into a movie in 1975, also called “Mandingo,” which featured much inter-racial raping—it is one Tarantino’s favorite movies (as he has said), a voluptuous piece of erotic and violent trash. In other words, his love of junk has led him to mix nonsense with the actual brutalities of slavery. The Mandingo scene in “Django” ends with DiCaprio’s plantation owner giving the victorious man a hammer to finish off the loser. You hear the skull being smashed. In “Django,” all the atrocities against blacks are staged as viscerally as possible, with lip-smacking emphasis. I wouldn’t call the scenes sorrowful. Is Tarantino telling us much about slavery that we don’t know, or is he turning us on with cruelties that set up an even bloodier vengeance?
Tarantino has used this basic mechanism of exploitation in the past. There was Uma Thurman slicing her way to vengeance in the “Kill Bill” movies; the Jews performing a counter-Holocaust, incinerating the Nazi leadership in a Paris movie theatre in “Inglorious Basterds” (thanks, Quentin); the women taking care of Kurt Russell’s nasty stuntman in “Death Proof.” Tarantino is so bent on revenge that he imposes it retroactively, and counterfactually, on history. He’s indignant over the submissiveness of history’s victims, so he gives them a second shot, as it were, to eliminate their masters. As Candie gives his phrenology lecture, he holds the skull of Old Ben, a former slave who shaved Candie’s father every morning with a straight razor. “Why don’t they kill us?” he muses, and he points to bumps in the skull which indicate, to his eyes, inborn traits of passivity. Well, Tarantino gives him an answer.
In the end, Django takes his revenge, killing dozens of white men and women, and the blood explodes off the bodies in little bursts of red. We’re meant to understand that the violence isn’t “real,” that it’s hyperbolic. There’s even grisly little joke about it. One of the bad guys is used as a shield by Django, and the sap gets shot again and again, and he howls. It’s funny, in a sick way. But how many jokes can you appreciate before you begin to feel a little rotten? “Django Unchained” isn’t a guilty pleasure; it’s a squalid pleasure.

 

LENOVO : FOR THOSE WHO DO.

You must be wandering what this is all about. Well this is about the Lenovo . I used to think Lenovo is new at it's business and can' beat the old schoolers like HP and Dell. But I was shocked by the way Lenovo delivers service at your fingertips with nothing in return. In this post, I will be talking about the different pre-installed benefits Lenovo users get.

NUMBER 1> Lenovo EE Boot Optimizer :-


 This is a real help to your laptop. It optimizes the time taken by your laptop to boot. First of all it measures the standard time required by your laptop to boot. Then it gives you ways as to how you can Improve Boot time and how you can get better performance.

Pros:- Gives you systematic graph showing you your real-time acivities.
          Improves Booting Time.

Cons:- First time Optimizing requires a lot of time.

NUMBER 2> Lenovo Power DVD 10 :- This is actually a life-saver. If by chance your O.S. is Linux and you dont have any sort of player this is going to save the day.

Pros:- Lots of playback options.
          Supports many video types.
          Interesting designs.

Cons:- No match against Windows Media Player or VLC.
           Screen Size is small.

NUMBER 3> Power ISO:- Real help. Full version is given and no need of serial key. Helps you make and store AND use virtual image files of CDs for playing games or running stuff without the CD.

Pros:- Saves your life if you dont have/uninstalled MS Office.
          Runs ISO files as smooth as butter.
          Virus free.

Cons:- ISO files are large in size.
           Not a Lenovo Classic.

NUMBER 4> Lenovo Ready Comm 5:-  Helps in data sharing and receiving. Detects Wi-Fi networks not detected normally.Ease of access.

Pros:- Faster sharing and recieving than normal BlueTooth.
          Easier detection of Wi-Fi.

Cons:- ABSOLUTELY NO CONS!

Review : Sleeping Dogs

The Good

• Savage melee combat

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• Alluring atmosphere

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• Fun driving and gunplay 

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• Varied missions 

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• Numerous collectibles to hunt down and other enjoyable diversions.

The Bad

• Unattractive character models and environmental textures.

What does it take to survive as an undercover cop who infiltrates one of Hong Kong's most ruthless criminal organizations? If Sleeping Dogs is any indication, it takes martial arts prowess, good marksmanship, driving skill, a reckless willingness to leap from one speeding vehicle to another, and the confidence to sing karaoke. None of the individual elements in Sleeping Dogs are best-in-class, but they're all thoroughly enjoyable, and the structured story missions have you switching from one type of action to another frequently enough that you're never tired of what you're doing at any given moment. Additionally, the fictionalized version of Hong Kong where Sleeping Dogs takes place is an exotic and atmospheric setting for this tale of conflicting loyalties; you probably wouldn't want to live amid the ruthless criminals who populate the game's cast, but this world sure is a nice place to visit.

You play as Wei Shen, a Hong Kong native who has returned after spending some time in the States. Driven by a desire to avenge his sister's death, he accepts a dangerous assignment to infiltrate the Sun On Yee triad and help take them down from the inside. Starting out on the lowest rungs of the criminal ladder, he rapidly climbs up through the ranks, behaving in ways that sometimes make his triad cohorts suspect he's a cop and sometimes make his police superiors think he's getting too attached to his brothers incrime. It's a typical tale of an undercover cop possibly getting in too deep, and the story doesn't have any surprises in store for you. But solid voice acting and writing that convincingly blends English and Cantonese make it a narrative that's more than capable of supporting the gameplay, providing context for many a dramatic mission and building up to a cathartic climax that's bloody enough to be taken right out of one of John Woo's Hong Kong action films.

Sleeping Dogs is an open-world game, but it doesn't start out by setting you free. The opening chapters keep you on a tight leash as they introduce you to the basics of movement and melee combat, which is good, since that combat plays a huge role in the game as a whole. Taking its cues from the standard-setting brawling of Batman: Arkham Asylum and its sequel, this combat has you unleashing combos and using timed button presses to counter enemy attacks. Wei's attacks look and feel powerful, and the bone-breaking animations may often make you squirm and make your enemies flinch.

You weren't planning on using your face for anything, were you?

But what sets Sleeping Dogs' combat apart from games with similar systems is the emphasis on environmental attacks. In most places where you find yourself needing to clobber some fools, you can drag enemies to certain objects around you and use these things to finish them off. These environmental finishers range from the relatively restrained old standby of tossing a thug into a dumpster, to the much more original and brutal attack that has Wei impaling an enemy on a swordfish head. There's a good assortment of these attack opportunities throughout the game, and a number of chances for you to make your own fun with the environment, too. Tossing an enemy from the upper level of a swanky club to the level down below isn't, strictly speaking, one of the game's contextual environmental attacks, but don't let that stop you from doing it. It's empowering and effective.

The early stages also introduce you to some of the atmospheric pleasures of this fictional Hong Kong. People believably appear to go about their business; cooks fry things up in restaurants, merchants hock their wares at the marketplace, and dancers perform at a street festival. What's absent from the behavior of non-player characters is almost as important as what's present. Strangers can sometimes be overheard discussing story events, but they don't constantly call out to you as if their existences revolved around you. (They do, of course, but it shouldn't seem like they do.) Unfortunately, close inspection can shatter the illusion. Character models look like plastic dolls when viewed up close, and some gestures characters make are rigid and unnatural.

You can purchase food and drinks for temporary benefits.

But Sleeping Dogs is more about wide-angle, big-picture atmosphere than about close-ups. The skyline gleams with towering skyscrapers. Neon signs hang from every available outcropping on busy streets, crowding the air above you with glowing Chinese characters. This city may not be accurately modeled on the real Hong Kong, but it nonetheless has a powerful identity, and while you're playing, you feel transported to this dangerous land. Collectibles scattered across the island make exploring it worthwhile as well as enjoyable; finding health shrines increases your maximum health, while blue lockboxes hidden all over the place reward you with cash and sometimes with new items of clothing.

Once you complete the first few missions, you're free to explore the island as you see fit. But Sleeping Dogs is an open-world game in which you're sure to enjoy the structured missions more than the opportunities for free-form mayhem. It's fun for a while to run around jump-kicking people to death, or fatally tossing them off of three-foot-high railings. However, unlike other games in the genre like Just Cause 2 and Saints Row: The Third, which reveled in giving you ways to wreak incredible havoc on your own, Sleeping Dogs is at its best when you're playing through the story. Missions typically string together a number of activities, switching from one type of action to another frequently enough to keep you on your toes and ensure that you never get tired of what you're doing.

Driving in Sleeping Dogs is great. The arcade-style handling makes it easy to hop into any vehicle and start drifting your way around turns in no time, and the physics-defying sideways shunt you can do to damage enemy vehicles or ram them off the road brings with it a satisfying sense of impact. Just as exciting as the many races and car chases that take place throughout Sleeping Dogs are the vehicular shoot-outs that start cropping up a bit later in the game. Taking aim at the tires of pursuing cars and disabling them isn't particularly challenging, but it's still thrilling to send your pursuers flying end over end as you speed along unscathed. Wei also has the ability to perform action hijacks, leaping from one vehicle to another and forcibly taking the driver's place. It's an outrageous move that lends Sleeping Dogs a bit more of that Hong Kong action movie feel.

Whether you're escaping from a big drug deal or just driving your gangster pal's fiancee on an errand, the music emanating from your car radio always makes for fitting accompaniment to your activities. The eclectic soundtrack includes hip-hop, sappy Chinese love songs, throbbing techno numbers, tunes by some of the greats of British rock-and-roll, and more. And of course, if you don't like the tune the game has lined up for your current situation, you can always change the station.

Guns aren't a constant in Sleeping Dogs as they are in many other open-world crime games--the story explains at one point that guns are something of a rarity in Hong Kong--but there's no shortage of gunplay on hand. Gun combat makes use of a standard cover system, and though it doesn't quite measure up to the bone-crunching impact of the melee combat, a few dramatic touches lend it some flair. While vaulting over tables or other objects, you can slip into a slow-motion aiming mode, taking enemies out as you speed forward. And melee combat and gunplay sometimes blend together, as when you use a learned technique to quickly disarm a thug and use his gun to take out others. One shoot-out takes place in a hospital and memorably evokes the climactic sequence from the film Hard Boiled. Another gives you a gun equipped with a grenade launcher, which makes taking out the cars your enemies are crouching behind an enjoyably pyrotechnic process.

But it's not all fast rides and big guns in the life of Wei Shen. Sometimes you need to do a bit of police work by calibrating bugs, hacking cameras, cracking safes, or tracking cell phone signals. These minigames are pleasant little diversions from the core action--particularly the hacking game, which involves code-breaking a la the board game Mastermind. Missions also occasionally find you hitting the clubs to sing some karaoke. This takes the form of an uninvolving minigame that has you moving an arrow up and down as green bars scroll along a track. Still, these rare sequences are good for a laugh; the way your character stands looking straight at the karaoke machine and ignoring his audience is amusing, and it's particularly funny if Wei Shen is singing while all bruised and bloody from some brawling or shooting he's just been involved in.

Those who take the time to explore Hong Kong will find many rewards.

You can seek out karaoke at any time if you want to hear Wei Shen try tobelt out a stirring rendition of "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" or one of the numerous other recognizable hits on offer. Singing karaoke is one way to increase your face level, which brings with it passive upgrades like increased bonuses from the food and drinks you can purchase from vendors and machines, or from the massages you can purchase in back-alley parlors. Raising your face level is also necessary before you can purchase some of the nicer clothes and more powerful vehicles available in the game.

Thankfully, singing karaoke isn't the only way to go about raising your face level. You can also do favors for people around town. These optional activities usually aren't very interesting, though. Many of them have Wei closely inspecting something just so a thief can run up behind him and make off with some of his money, starting a foot chase that ends with you fighting the thief. Other, more enjoyable favors find Wei playing the part of a getaway driver, or leading a criminal pursuer into a police trap.

Wei also earns cop experience and triad experience throughout the game by completing missions and by keeping property damage and innocent casualties to a minimum, with each type of experience opening up selections on limited skill trees. The triad skills primarily improve Wei's melee abilities, while the cop skills improve his prowess with guns and cars. Additionally, statues you find throughout your adventure can be returned to a martial arts school to learn new moves. All of this brings a pleasant sense of growth to Wei as you advance through the game.

The right combination of clothes can make a better man.

There are other minor attractions throughout the Hong Kong of Sleeping Dogs. You can bet on cockfights, for instance, or sail out to a gambling barge for a bit of poker mahjong. And a social hub ranks you against your friends on mission performance as well as a host of other challenges, like longest bike jump and most cash earned by running down parking meters in rapid succession. Goofing around and pursuing high marks on these leaderboards is fun, but it's the atmospheric city and the varied story missions that make Sleeping Dogs an alluring adventure. It may have more violence than you'd want in a typical vacation, but this is still a fun-filled Hong Kong getaway that will leave you with many happy memories.

Review : Need For Speed Most Wanted 2

The Good

• Terrific handling makes driving a pleasure   
• Police chases are usually intense and enjoyable   
• Billboards make for satisfying asynchronous competition   
• Online multiplayer races are fast and exciting   
• Beautiful and varied city.

The Bad

• In slower cars, police chases can be a frustrating ordeal   
• Repetitive police chatter  
• Lacks any sense of narrative motivation   
• Building up a car collection is unfulfilling   
• Inconsistent, sometimes dull online challenges.

Vehicles glide along invisible roads in the sky. Cars are borne out of twitchy, twisty clouds of darkness. Groups of police cruisers perform coordinated donuts, twirling about like dancers in a Busby Berkeley musical. In the creative and unusual pre-race sequences throughout Need for Speed: Most Wanted, you get the sense that the city of Fairhaven is a surreal land with dreamlike logic that might allow anything to happen at any moment. It's striking, then, that the actual game here is so typical and unsurprising, and that although it delivers plenty of the hard-hitting, white-knuckle racing Criterion is known for, it doesn't do so quite as well as some of the studio's earlier games.

The first game Need for Speed: Most Wanted may make you think of isn't a Criterion game at all; it's Need for Speed Most Wanted, the 2005 game with almost the same name. But while both games take place in open-world cities and involve plenty of police chases, the similarities aren't as significant as you might expect. One of the earlier game's most memorable elements was its hilariously over-the-top tale, told using some cheesy cutscenes, of a newcomer to the city of Rockport who has a personal vendetta against local street racer Razor Callahan. The premise gave you a terrific motivation for rising through the ranks of Rockport's street racing scene and taking Razor down.

Here, you also have the goal of defeating a number of street racers, but there's no narrative to back it up. The 10 racers on your list are identified only by their cars--they don't have names or faces or personalities--and without a personal investment in defeating them, doing so isn't nearly as satisfying here as it was in the 2005 game. It is merely a structural hoop to jump through; you do it simply because the game tells you that this is what you are supposed to do.

Well, that and the fact that driving, racing, and eluding the police are really enjoyable, for the most part. If you've played Criterion's earlier Need for Speed game, 2010's Hot Pursuit, the handling here will feel immediately familiar. Despite the stable of real-world cars, the driving isn't realistic. Cars have a great sense of weight and momentum to them, while still being extremely responsive, and as you'd expect from a Criterion racer, judicious use of the brakes and a bit of practice will have you blissfully drifting through corners at high speed.

It's time to prove you're not just another bolt-on wonderboy lookin' to get smoked.

Unexpectedly, cars don't start out with boost, but fear not; boosting is a big part of racing in Most Wanted. Each vehicle has five events associated with it, and by taking first place in the easiest of these, you unlock the burn nitrous mod for that car. This enables you to boost after you build up your nitrous bar by doing things like drifting, taking down cops and rivals, and driving in oncoming traffic. Victory in each of a vehicle's events nets you speed points, which you need to earn a set number of before you can challenge each of the most wanted racers. Winning events also gives you access to other mods, including chassis that make you more resistant to impacts, gears that increase your acceleration or top speed, and tires that reinflate if popped by spike strips.

Winning events and making a good car better is rewarding; curiously unrewarding is the process of building up your car collection. In Most Wanted, you don't buy cars, and with the exception of the 10 cars driven by the 10 most wanted racers, you don't earn cars by winning events or doing anything else of significance to advance through the game. You simply find them all over Fairhaven. They're easily spotted thanks to the illuminated headlights and the manufacturer logos that hover in the air above them; you just pull up to a drivable vehicle, and it's instantly added to your collection. After that, you can warp to its spawn point and get behind the wheel, no matter where you are. The fact that you can and will so easily find yourself with a sizable stable of cars simply by cruising around Fairhaven, without having to do anything to earn some of the game's fastest rides, means that car collecting in Most Wanted lacks the sense of accomplishment so many racing games instill by letting you gradually gain access to better vehicles.

The upside of having cars waiting at set points (called jack spots) across Fairhaven is that if you get the cops on your tail as you're roaming about the city, you can pull up on a car's jack spot and, provided that you've got a bit of distance between you and your police pursuers, hop into the other car, reducing your heat level a bit. Your heat level determines just how much effort the police are putting into bringing you down. At the lowest level, you might have a few cop cruisers on your tail. As it increases, the police start setting up roadblocks in your path, and more and better law enforcement vehicles join the fray. Heavy SUVs might try to ram you head-on, and Corvette Interceptors speed along in front of you, deploying spike strips that, if hit, can seriously diminish your car's handling.

Welcome to the future! Here's your flying car.

All is not lost, however; repair shops are all over the city, and driving through one instantly fixes up your car and gives you a fresh coat of paint to boot. Like using jack spots, speeding through these repair shops reduces your heat level. Your heat level increases automatically as a pursuit goes on, and taking down police cars with a satisfying shunt into oncoming traffic, a swift T-bone collision, or whatever aggressive, effective option presents itself, makes it go up significantly faster. If you get enough distance between you and your pursuers, you enter cooldown, during which your heat level declines. Stay in cooldown long enough, and the police call off the pursuit.

You earn speed points during police pursuits, but you get to keep them only if you eventually escape; if you get busted, you earn nothing, so the stakes can get quite high. Escape from the cops, and you feel great; see the speed points you earned over the course of several risky minutes disappear as you get busted, and you may be crestfallen. It's a good risk-vs.-reward system that leads to some extremely tense moments. Unfortunately, shaking off your pursuers can often feel as much a matter of luck as of skill. Police are tenacious in their pursuit of you--maybe a little too tenacious, because it sometimes seems as if no amount of changing direction, catching big air, going off-road, or anything else is enough to lose the cops. In the game's faster cars, speed can often be your savior, but in the more everyday models, it often feels like you don't have a fighting chance.

Additionally, some parts of the city don't have many areas that are off the beaten path; you might enter cooldown but find yourself with nowhere to hide from patrolling police who soon spot you and reinitiate the pursuit. The balance between making it very possible for you to be spotted again during cooldown and giving you good options for eluding the police was better handled in 2005's Most Wanted, which provided you with more spots that cops on the hunt for you might or might not investigate. That earlier game also did a better job with police chatter; here, the police are irritatingly repetitive. Several times during the same pursuit, you might hear cops, awed by your driving prowess, come to the realization that they're "not dealing with joyriders."

Now this is more like it.

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The available events for each car come in a few varieties. There are standard checkpoint races against other cars, which sometimes attract the attention of the police. In speed runs, you try to maintain the highest possible average speed on a course. And ambushes start with you surrounded by cops; your goal is to lose them in as little time as possible. Though fun in faster cars, ambushes can be maddening in the game's more ordinary autos.

And then there are the 10 one-on-one showdowns against the most wanted. These races always involve the police, and always follow great routes that have you speeding on numerous surfaces through varied parts of the city. In addition to racing on the road, you might find yourself speeding across dirt, gravel, or rickety beach boardwalks. Your opponents are skilled but fallible, and you never quite know what's going to happen. You might be approaching the finish in first place, only to have victory snagged from your grasp as a police car takes you down, but conversely, you might be trailing behind your opponent when a police car does you the favor of taking him out, leaving you home free. These elements of luck don't diminish the sense of accomplishment that comes with winning; they just add some unpredictability to these races. You must still drive skillfully if you're to have any hope of winning.

Winning the race against a most wanted driver isn't the end of the struggle, though. You must then do a takedown on the car to add it to your collection. This sounds like a satisfying way to cement your victory, but it usually doesn't play out that way. As soon as you've won a race against a most wanted car, it starts driving incredibly poorly, often wrecking itself in head-on collisions in its attempts to stay away from you. As a result, what should have been a tense game of cat and mouse frequently turns into you waiting for your suicidal quarry to respawn after a wreck and then hoping that this time you can destroy it before it destroys itself yet again.

If you see your own gamerpic on a billboard, all of your friends who have smashed that billboard will see it too.

Some of the most fun you can have in Fairhaven happens not during events, but just when you're cruising around town. Cameras all over the city track the highest speed at which you zoom past them and show you how your top speed measures up to your friends' top speeds, but these are too inconspicuous and ubiquitous to make dominating any one of them, or all of them, worth caring about. The smashable billboards all over town, however, you will almost certainly care about. Fairhaven is filled with billboards that have the names of EA game studios on them, at least until you drive through them. After that, they become notices about one of the city's most wanted drivers.

If you get more air when crashing through a billboard than any of your friends have gotten, you can take pride in seeing your own gamerpic or avatar gracing the sign. However, if one of your friends has soared farther than you when destroying that billboard, it will be him or her you see displayed, and few things are more motivating than the prospect of smashing your friends' faces and their records, and claiming those little pieces of Fairhaven as your own. If you crave more competition, you can always easily access Autolog recommendations, which keep you apprised of events that friends have bested you at, or that you haven't tried yet, so opportunities for friendly competition are never in short supply.

You can also hop online with friends or strangers for traditional, simultaneous multiplayer competition, but this is frustratingly uneven. Of course, it's fun to host or join a game with friends and just roam around the city, smashing billboards and taking each other down. You can participate in races, team races, speed tests, and challenges, though you can't just start one of these events as a one-off. Oddly, you must do events in groups of five, which are called speedlists. In public games, speedlists are initiated automatically; in friends games, the host can use premade Criterion speedlists, or build his or her own. Particularly in public games with players who are more interested in messing around than completing objectives, a single five-event playlist can drag on for 45 minutes.

Take down another player online and they'll see your personalized license plate.

Traditional races are great, though the absence of police in online play feels like a missed opportunity, since dodging spike strips, finding the gaps in roadblocks, and taking out cops are defining aspects of the single-player experience. Challenges leave a lot to be desired, however. Though they were great fun in Burnout Paradise, here, their design often makes them a chore. You might head to a specific location only to find that your goal is nothing more interesting than speeding off a cliff a certain number of times, and vague instructions sometimes result in your spending a few minutes just trying to figure out exactly what it is you're supposed to do. Of course, some challenges make coordinating with friends to pull off a strange feat (20 near misses on a bizarre, loopy art installation, for instance) enjoyable, but like the proverbial box of chocolates, until you try one, you never know what you're gonna get.

Despite its inconsistencies and disappointments, there's a lot to like about Need for Speed: Most Wanted. Fairhaven is a lovely and varied city that looks gorgeous no matter how fast or slow you're going. Police chases provide plenty of reckless, high-speed thrills, and seeing friends dominate the billboards in your city fans the flames of friendly competition in an innovative and very effective way. Need for Speed: Most Wanted isn't quite a return to the racing paradise of some earlier Criterion games, but it's a mostly exciting ride nonetheless.