Halloween Horror Nights 2 @ Universal Singapore

Hello everyone, HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

In my 4 years in US, I went to some of the best campus Halloween parties around, because in US, everyone throws a party; there must therefore be a party out there somewhere for you!  As a science/engineering major, my personal favorite was the Techhouse party, practically a mini Comic Con, with everyone dressed in their best sci-fi/anime attire, lots of cookies and baked goods to go around, and strictly NO ALCOHOL.  Alcohol is seriously overrated.  I like remembering my outings with perfect lucidity thank you very much.

Anyway, this is about the Universal Studios Singapore's Halloween Horror Nights 2!  I missed all the previous Horror Nights because I was never in the country, but my mum dragged me along to this year's to partake in the festivities :).  This was the first year I'd really celebrated Halloween in the presence of real scarily-decked zombies / evil dolls / mummies etc. instead of the cheesy stuff you find at party shops, so the professionalism was refreshing.

The entrance to Universal was filled with blinky light accessories being sold at pushcarts around every corner, and a creepy bell-like tune blasted over the PA system to half of Resort World Sentosa.   There was even a face-painting booth under this arch, but because I got there pretty late, they weren't taking anymore customers :(.  

For safety reasons USS doesn't allow guests to attend in costume, so it was really weird for me going to a Halloween function not dressed up.  It took away some of the fun, but the awesome actors and decoration in the park more than made up for it.

The entrance to USS is turned into a House of Dolls! (x_x)"

 The whole street leading into the park was turned into a "House of Dolls" alley.  For anyone who had watched "Chucky (Child's Play)" as a kid, you'll know that this is creepy as hell.  Even though this was a 1980s movie, a sequel called the "Curse of Chucky" is slated to be released next year (2013).  BEWARE.

Sadly I'm not quite the right stature to pose as a doll.  And sitting doesn't have the same effect.

Creepy guy covered in blood strapped to a chair.  He was great fun to pose with, and kind of cute when he decided to go out of character and grin during shift-change.  Yes, they all change shift pretty often because I imagine being an actor for this event will leave you with heat stroke, even at night.

The next section was called "Total Lockdown", simulating something of a cross between a holocaust and a zombie apocalypse.  ZOMBIES.  BRAAAAAIIIIIINSSSSS.  I would offer up photos of aforementioned awesome zombies and holocaust soldiers, but I have serious issues with taking photos in low light conditions because I insist on a point-and-shoot.  No chunky DSLRs for me.  If anyone has great low-light point-and-shoot cameras to recommend, please let me know!  I use a Panasonic Lumix, which is superior in every way in daylight but doesn't do well at night.

A city in smoke, aptly set in the "New York" section of Universal.  Because we all know that the aliens and zombies only ever strike in Manhattan.

Death, destruction and smoke.  Sometimes I was a bit wary that the apparent dummies would come to life and jump at me, but thankfully that didn't happen all night.

Eerie fog emerges from a NYC subway station.  Nothing compared to what hurricane Sandy is doing to the real subway stations right now though.

Hey kids, who wants to get a picture of being hanged by a creepy clown?  You get to wait in a half-hour line for it!

Moving on to Egypt-land (I have no clue what the actual name of this section of the theme park is, but it's my second favorite after Dino-land), we have the Bizarre Bazaar!  Mummies, snakes, the Undead, and crows on stilts galore!  The street running through Egypt-land was lined with what look like gypsy stalls, which included fortune tellers, leopard people, sarcophagi, snakes etc.  

Sorry for the paucity of pictures, it was one of the most crowded bits of the park so it was hard to get any good non-blur ones.

Sarcophagi!

This stall was later occupied by leopard-people, but when I first passed by it, it was empty.  One should never pass up an opportunity to sit as though one is on a throne.  Just sayin'.  Even more so when one is surrounded by skulls.  

Crow guy on stilts!  Despite being so large, he was incredibly fast.  Every time I tried to take a picture with him he'd stalk away :(.

These were the only 3 areas of walk-through decoration - the rest of the scares were confined to 3 haunted houses: Dungeon of Damnation, Insanitarium and Death Alley.  I didn't go for any of them because the lines were 75 minutes long each, and because it's a temporarily thrill, the queues were not designed with any sort of queuing psychology in mind (read: hot, humid, tiring).  My younger brother and cousin were game enough to stand in line for more than a total of 2 hours though, and they enjoyed the haunted houses well enough, but I think Universal needs to rethink their crowd control.

VERDICT:  The decorations and atmosphere of USS Halloween Horror Nights are certainly superior, and the walk-through areas are entertaining enough without having to go into any of the haunted houses.  I'm not sure if you think it's worth the $68, but I didn't really think so.  If you do go, and want to see the haunted houses, you should definitely pay for the Express ticket at $40.  Not because I think it's particularly worth it, but because you don't want your night to be spoiled by waiting in infuriating and stuffy lines for hours on end.  It can really detract from your enjoyment of the rest of the park by making you tired and irritable.  If you were already going to pay $68 to go for the thing, you might as well just top it up to guarantee a fuss-free evening.

I'm sure this will continue running for more years to come, so I'm willing to give it another shot next year.  I will, however, be more prepared for the heat and lines by purchasing an Express ticket, and bringing a large water bottle and electric fan.

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Budget!

Early Bird Admission - $60

Basic Admission - $68
Express Ticket - $40 (on top of admission price)

Extras
Face-paint (because it really helps to get in the mood!) - $10 (1/4 face), $20 (1/2 face)

Defence Science Revealed

Friday was the grand opening of Defence Science Revealed (DSR), an exhibition at the Science Centre Singapore showcasing all the technology used in the modern military!  It was co-organized by DSO National Laboratories, Singapore's research institute for defence science, to celebrate its 40th anniversary.

"40 Years of Serious Fun"

                                          - DSO 40th anniversary slogan

I couldn't exactly escape from work on Friday to go see this, so I made a trip down on Sunday instead, to find SCS surprisingly empty!  Weird.  I've been told the primary school kids are still having exams, and the secondary school / JC kids probably think they're too cool for the Science Centre.  Anyway that meant more space for me to poke around so it's all good.

DSR covered 3 main areas of military technology - Stealth & Surveillance, Aircraft & Bombs, and Armour.  

As part of the Stealth & Surveillance exhibit, there was a spot-the-tank game!  It gave you the option of looking at a scene using visible light, a thermal camera, and a hyperspectral camera to try and spot enemy tanks and howitzers etc.  I clearly have not played video games in far too long because I was beaten by a 6-year-old kid and could only spot 5 out of 12 enemy machines -_-".

Anyway this is cool because a hyperspectral camera is special!  Instead of just seeing in Red, Green and Blue like our eyes or normal digital cameras, it sees in many more wavelengths, including UV, near infrared, thermal infrared etc.  For example, if you try to camouflage a tank by painting it green so that our eyes cannot see it, it may still emit different amounts of UV compared to the trees around it.  So if you look at it with a UV camera, you will be able to see the tank clearly!  By combining many different types of 'cameras' together to form a hyperspectral image, it becomes very difficult to hide a tank.

We can see this very clearly in the next exhibit, where they try to hide a fake plant among real plants:

These all look like plants right?  There's no way to tell which one is fake from so far away... or so you think.

Using a hyperspectral camera, the plant in the bottom left looks obviously different!

In order to discover these hidden and camouflaged equipment from space, Singapore needs to launch a hyperspectral camera into space.  BUT, until last year, 2011, we had never built and launched a satellite into space before!  Our very first home-built satellite, called X-Sat, was jointly built by DSO and NTU, and houses a regular camera that can be used to monitor the weather, but isn't powerful enough to spot tanks in a jungle yet.  Hopefully we'll get there soon :).

Now you see me, and now you still see me, but the camera doesn't.

Here we have yet another example of camera technology: the screen shows an image taken by a thermal camera, the kind they used to scan people for fever during SARS.  In the picture on the left, the 'windows' are blank, giving the camera a clear view of me.  In the picture on the right, I closed a sliding glass window, and suddenly my top half disappears from view in the thermal camera, even though my digicam can see me just fine!  

This is because a thermal camera measures thermal infrared light.  Glass is transparent in visible light, but opaque in thermal infrared light.  It absorbs all the thermal infrared light and prevents my thermal signature from going through and getting picked up by the camera, rendering me 'invisible'.  Spiffy!

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The next part of the Stealth and Surveillance section was Radar.  In case y'all thought radar is a word, it's actually an acronym: RAdio Detection And Ranging.  As anyone who's watched a war / action movie will know, you use radar to tell the location and speed of vessels like aircraft and ships.  But how?

Here's a demonstration on Doppler shift, which also tests your ability to throw balls far, fast and accurate.  All of which my companion and I failed spectacularly at.  Basically you throw the ball, and the camera on top can detect how fast it's moving by emitting one frequency of sound (or I'm guessing it's sound since we can't really throw balls fast enough for light), and measuring the frequency of the reflected sound.  As the ball moves quickly away from the camera, the reflected sound waves get "stretched out", resulting in a lower frequency / pitch.  If the ball were moving toward the camera, then the frequency of the reflected sound gets higher, as you can see in the simplified diagram:

This works the same way for radar, except that it uses radio waves instead of sound waves.  There was even a nice little animation showing how the radio waves reflect off aircraft in the sky, and how the signal changes depending on how many aircraft there are, how close they are, and what algorithm you use to interpret the signal.  You should head down to Science Centre to check it out!

We see it's really hard to identify two separate echos, but with some math magic, it can be done!

Of course, knowing all these ways to find hidden things means we have to learn to hide them better.  Enter the camouflage/stealth materials!  Using a range of materials with different shapes, electronic and magnetic properties, it's possible to reduce the reflection of radio waves, and be a little more 'invisible' to enemies.

 

Modifying the shapes and materials of vehicles can help evade detection by radar, but they must also be compatible with camouflage in other wavelengths of light!

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So all this defence science was getting a bit tiring by afternoon, so at 3pm, we stepped out to watch the daily Fire Tornado show!  It's a visually stunning performance, but honestly not very much science.  Basically if you light a fire under a spinning column of air, the fire will get 'sucked up' the column to make it look like the tornado is really on fire.

You can see a real life example of this when a tornado swept over an Australian bushfire:

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The second section of DSR was "The Science of Flight", which I prefer to think of as Planes & Bombs, but I kind of skipped over it because it was mostly about aerodynamics and very little about defence.  There's a nice activity room in the back that lets kids fold their own paper planes and shoot Styrofoam cups with airzooka guns though!

The third section was about Armour, which you can imagine would be pretty cool if one could actually demonstrate their ability to avoid destruction when faced with all kinds of artillery and bombs.  But alas most of the exhibits were either posters or replicas, with few interactive activities.  

They explain why the fronts of tanks are sloped and why some have cages, and they show animations of all the newfangled artillery which explode and deform in creative ways to maximize penetration through the steel and armour.  Generally not a very happy thought if you were actually in the battlefield, but very cool in theory.

A model tank which housed the video presentation about different armours used in vehicles in combat.

Scale replicas of projectiles designed to pierce through more than a meter of steel.

Bulletproof glass!  Really thick and made up of many layers, like a seashell.

I liked looking at the bulletproof glass because it's very similar to the demonstration teachers often do in high school to show why sea shells are so strong despite being so thin.  If you can find a nice spot of floor at home that won't crack when whacked with a hammer, you can try this at home:

Simulating regular glass:

1. Take a large block of ice roughly tissue-box sized, but half the thickness.
2. Whack it with a hammer.
3. Watch it fracture into smithereens.

Simulating bullet-proof glass:

1. Take the same tray and freeze a ~1cm layer of ice.
2. Lay tissue on top of the frozen layer, then pour another ~1cm of water on top and freeze.
3. Repeat until same thickness as original block used above.
4. Whack it with a hammer.
5. Keep trying.

It's a fun experiment to play with, and a good way to taunt boys when you let a girl hit the first block and a boy hit the second.  Even though both ice and tissue are fragile, the block is incredibly strong, because the layers of tissue prevent the crack from going all the way through and breaking the block.  You thus have to hit the block as many times are there are layers in order to crack through the whole thing, and even then, you may not succeed.

DID YOU KNOW that sapphire is far more useful than as a piece of shiny jewelry?

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There was a good deal more at DSR that I didn't upload, because if I did, you wouldn't have to go see it then, would you?  

The exhibition runs till Feb 2013, so you have plenty of time, but you would want to either go real early or real late to avoid the school holiday crowd.

Join us for some Serious Fun.

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Budget!

Sci. Ctr. + DSR + Candy Unwrapped - $12 (adult), $8 (child up to 12)

Sci. Ctr. + DSR + Candy Unwrapped + Omnimax - $17 (adult), $11 (child up to 12)

Sci. Ctr. + DSR + Candy Unwrapped + Snow City - $20 (adult), $18 (child up to 12)

Notes:  

*If you are a Science Centre member, you still need to pay for a ticket to DSR ($8).

*If you are an NSman with an 11B card, you get into DSR for $2.

*You should get an Omnimax package because Ring of Fire and To the Arctic are awesome.

Combat Skirmish: Laser Tag

It was Yuxin's birthday on Saturday, so we celebrated by going for a round of Laser Tag at Fort Siloso!  Indoor laser tag is a pretty common form of entertainment in the US where we studied, but a vast majority of companies in Singapore, with the exception of Combat Skirmish and Laser Quest, don't have their own premises that people can just walk into and play a game.  Instead, they usually cater to corporate functions or birthday parties, so they require booking and are quite expensive.

Here we pose with our weapons of choice!  

Pistols and Shotguns are available, and the backpack-esque straps carry sensors which detect when you've been shot.

The Bunker of Introductions.

The Maze of Ambush.

The Mission begins with a briefing in a little bunker, which introduces the maze, a.k.a. the fighting arena, and the mechanics of the game, such as how to reload your gun, and how to respawn yourself when you die.  Yes, RESPAWN, bwahahaha.

The game only lasts 15 minutes, though you can have the option of playing a 30-minute game.  However, for sedate computer-potatoes like us, 15 minutes left us all winded and soaking in sweat, despite the maze being air-conditioned...  Obviously, I was too busy shooting and getting killed (I have the honor of being the most-killed person in the game >_<") to take any pictures, but at the end we re-assembled and took a shot at with our friendly guide and explainer, Daniel!

On the way out, we walked through the set-up for Spooktacular Sentosa, a ghoulish extravaganza to scare and delight this Halloween!!  It was broad daylight so the props weren't exactly scary, in fact most were downright humorous, but it looks like it'll be quite a Halloween Bash at Sentosa this year, with Spooktacular, as well as the Universal Studios Halloween party =D.

Fort Siloso, soon to be a Haunted Trail.

Drinks, anyone?  Holy water for only $2.00!

Yuxian and Deanna pose with the skeletons 8-D.

I probably won't be going for the actual Spooktacular because I'll be making a trip to Kusu Island in 2 weeks' time, so stay tuned for some sun and sand!!  (Assuming it doesn't rain -.-")

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Budget!

Public rates:

Indoor Maze - 15-minute game: $18/pax; 30-minute game: $35/pax (max 12 pax)
Tunnel Battle - 30-minute game: $35/pax
Laser Clay Shooting - 30 minutes: $35/pax
Mad Rush (Laser Tag in the Fort setting) - 15-minute game: $18/pax

Corporate rates: (dependent on group size)

Corporate fun games: ~$70/pax
Team Building + Laser Tag: ~$90/pax

Real Escape Game Singapore (Vol 3)

The Crazy Last Will of Dr. MAD

Apparently I've been missing out on some real fun puzzle-solving in Singapore while gallivanting around studying in the US!  This is the 3rd Real Escape Game held in Singapore, and it was hosted at St James Power Station's Power House.  There were several sessions from Friday till Sunday, so I didn't want to leak anything by posting this earlier.

Poster for REG in Singapore Vol. 3

For those who have never heard of this before, the Real Escape Game originated from Japan, and is basically a Puzzle Challenge - you're given a couple of puzzles to start you off, with more puzzles scattered around the venue treasure hunt style.  As you solve each puzzle, the answers will be clues to further puzzles, until you reach the answer to the Final Puzzle.  

In Dr. MAD's case, the Question was about the Secret to Longevity, and the Answer was hidden in a little treasure box placed on everyone's tables.  So clearly all the puzzles must eventually lead to the combination for the lock on the box.

The box.

It was my first time in St James (yes, I'm a geek), so the idea of solving puzzles in a club was kind of weird, but the quirky layout and lighting of Power House made for a great ambiance and a good place to hide clues.    My group had 5 people, but a team for the game was supposed to be 7, so two more guys joined us and it was fun to work with new people.

St James Power Station turned geek for a night.

We were really slow at the start!  There were some locations you could only get to after solving certain puzzles, and by the time we got through them, more than half the teams had already been there.  But things sped up as we got the hang of the game and we opened the treasure box 30 seconds before time was up!!  Sadly that was not quite the end of it so we didn't finish in time anyway... (Only 1 team was ahead of us and actually solved the puzzle though, so I don't feel as bad.)

Yay team 6!

I can't reveal any more of the game than that or it'll probably take the fun away from future Real Escape Game sessions if people got to dissect and analyze questions online, so suffice to say that this is a great way to spend a weekend!  

The puzzles are challenging but not too hard.  If you've had a tiny bit of practice it probably gets easier, but they are perfectly timed to take almost exactly an hour.  So, you get to spend an hour focusing your mental energies more intensely than you have ever done in your life (unless you have taken PhD qualifying exams, in which case you deserve a medal).  It may sound a bit masochistic, but it's crazy fun.  Really.

The World's Most Infuriating Box.
Well, not really... I've seen much more infuriating puzzle boxes.  But almost.

Also, the best announcement of the night was for the next REG:  ESCAPE FROM THE GHOST SHIP.  To happen early next year!  I CAN'T WAIT.  (Follow their facebook page for updates)

Japanese version poster for the next REG in Singapore Vol. 4!
(It's already happened in Fukuoka, Japan, so we get the translated version)

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Budget!

Early Bird - $22

Online - $27 

Door - $35