Destiny- you are a fun game but a pure regression and a major step backwards in online RPGs. So far it has seemed with every update Bungie has made since launch has been absolutely horrible. From Queen’s Wrath event nerfing of ascendant shards to Iron Banner not granting any rewards worth the effort (plus it was ruined by overpowered weapons from raids). Destiny really does have a super fun foundation though. Great guns, movement, etc.
However, it is hounded by tons of flaws no doubt due to being rushed for Christmas release.
Resource farming is an absolute chore. Bungie has been slow to respond to alleviate the intense repitition
Everything the player does requires grinding XP. Armor requires XP. Weapons require XP. Taking off your Armor makes you lose several levels. Just bad game design decisions all around. The only good thing is the ability to grind up an alt and hand them your armor.
The disparity between a Light 30 and Light 29 player is pretty massive in the end game raid content
Bungie was supposed to rollout the new Iron Banner which rewards new Light 30 equipment. Of course they are dragging their feet
Bungie decided to severly alter the raid after it was released with “random teleporting”. This is a highly punishing and frustrating tactic and helps to further drive home this developer is very new to online RPGs and do not know how to cater to their community
Raids, like everything else, is driven by a Random number generator (RNG) system that delivers loot in mysterious ways. My Titan now has 4 raid chest pieces. FOUR.
Has a very fun basic multiplayer system but is severely lacking in many basic features. Random teammates cannot talk to each other at all. This is beyond silly. And lack of map voting is also sorely needed here. There is no point in adding new Crucible maps in the DLC that your players cannot even vote on
Beyond silly how the raid only grants 1 set of armor. All the Light 30 players all look the same. This is just LAZY and uninspired
Only 3 character slots. What the-? You should want for your players to be busy grinding up alts. HELLO Bungie??
I predict Activation/Bungie is in for a bit of a shock this Christmas when it comes to DLC sales. I do not think it will fare too well. Average review scores and word of mouth from frustrated gamers tired of RNG not granting them their hard earned rewards from raids. There is so many promising titles on the horizon- Dragon’s age Inquisition, Far Cry 4, etc. The only way to communicate to stubborn developers like this is by not giving them money and show strong support for other new titles instead.
Okay latest shows I’ve finished up:
Accel World – 7.5/10. This show was pretty good. Fans of video games (MMOs especially) may get an extra kick out of this show. Didn’t really like the main character very much though. He’s in elementary school apparently and we spend a lot of time there. He’s the ultimate nerd, designed to appeal to what the makers of the show wants to target (super geeks). So yeah… His low esteem wore me down. The fan service in this show was a bit much for elementary aged children. I was really confused. These are not even high school girls and we have a bathroom scene that felt out of place more than once. Pretty cool action though
World Is Still Beautiful – 8/10. This is a feel good romance show. The “Sun King” is a little kid that is to be married to a slightly older princess from a far away country. It was fairly entertaining to watch
Aldonah Zero Season 1 – 7.5/10. Nonsensical writing prevents this show from being epic. Doubtful I will return for the upcoming second cour. It made little sense for this story to take place in present day but I felt like the creators of this show really wanted to grab the high school badly so here we are. Present day with ‘Martian’ men / women attempting to invade the Earth. If you can get past the story along with predictable one-sided villains this might feel like an epic show. The budget really shows. Worth watching at least. It seems to be very popular easily earning itself a second cour. Had a great finale. Might return just to see where it goes for an episode or two. Wasn’t for me but with better writing it could really improve
JoJo’s Stardust crusaders (Season 3) – 8/10. The first 2 seasons are really good but this new season is just monster of the week. Blah. I enjoy the main characters so much though! And the situations are quite clever. Another plus is we’re not in high school. Yay! Will be back for the next cour
Hunter X Hunter 10/10. Yeah this show was pure awesome. 148 episodes of pure bliss. Sigh. All good things must come to an end it seems because this run is now over.
Tokyo ESP 6.5/10. What did I watch!? I loved the X-men vibes but this adaption was so poorly done. Ugh. Art was decent, not amazing. Would recommend Tiger & Bunny over this to satisfy anime-superhero cravings.
Been seeing a bit of buzz about a new sandbox MMO called ArcheAge. Unfortunately, it appears gamers are having some issues with queues. This game looks very cool though from actual player housing (non-instanced), naval battles, and the ability to freely construct your avatar out of multiple skill sets.
Wow I am really impressed by Props Animations. I purchased this asset from the Unity Asset Store a couple months ago and it is still being actively maintained. The author claims there are over 620 animations in this pack! Amazing…
All the animations are created by requests.
So…. Some devs like to ask questions similar this and I’ve seen a lot of good potential applicants miss it. Which is okay! We all understand people might suffer the jitters and all that during an interview. But when you’re applying for a game industry job you can probably expect at least one good math question.
Okay so the key to solving to many warm-up interview questions is to ask yourself can you come up with a solution using Dot Product? Cross Product? A lot of interviews just want to make sure you understand how these things can be used rather than just seeing how good your memory is.
If I were asked this question. I’d probably clarify this is a rotation matrix. Right there, you know a rotation matrix is supposed to contain 3 orthogonal vectors (Up, Right, Forward). Any two of these vectors should be perpendicular to each other. So, taking the dot product between them should be 90 degrees (or rather, dot product of orthogonal vectors equals 1). If it isn’t, then the matrix is not orthogonal. There are other properties of an orthogonal matrix too. Such as taking the Transpose of this matrix will give you the Inverse.
And remember, you probably don’t want to rely on pure memory but rather you’d want to practice this. Take the dot product of two unit vectors like (1,0,0) and (0,1,0) a couple times on paper.
UnityVS purchased by Microsoft and Released for Free for use with Unity apparently. Didn’t see this one coming.
Epic Games just released 4.3 version of the engine complete with Spline support, new rendering features, and countless of other goodies. I currently been playing around with Unity making a simple game. After that project is complete I will hop back to Unreal and see how it is improved. But I was already impressed by version 4.2. Blueprints were very easy to write and very flexible. C++ code comments actually get sucked into the editor and displayed in the Blueprint tool. Very impressive stuff!
So this season is really looking promising. So far Tokyo ESP and Tokyo Ghoul are really keeping my attention.
In this episode our main character, Rinka, gets a background story. Yes! This episode is a lot stronger than Episode 1 by a wide margin. Now we get a lot more information bout ‘White Girl’ and her actual abilities. We are also introduced to her friend, Akuma, which has the ability to teleport and her father, which looks like Wolverine from X-Men, has the ability to attract metallic objects (yay- Magneto!). This was a fun episode and it helped show the viewers what type of show Tokyo ESP is striving to become. This episode was definitely worth two thumbs up!
This summer season just might be looking very good. The spring season didn’t bring much new shows that appealed too me beyond “No Game No Life”, “Black Bullet”, and “The World Is Still Beautiful”. Sadly, I only finished “No Game No Life” and “Black Bullet”. Both were fairly okay (I actually would actually recommend ‘No Game No Life’ if you can overlook the typical Otaku pevert overtones and occasional nudity)
Hopefully this season will bring some new treats. I’ve already watched Sword Art Online II and Tokyo ESP. Both seem very promising.
Tokyo ESP is trying to setup the environment and characters in its’ first episode. We didn’t get much story at all. Just the beginning of a plot. A nice treat- we see some characters from Gai Rei: Zero anime popup in this one. The story didn’t follow a particular character but I think going forward it will follow “White Girl”.
So… What has the 1st episode established? Well, we are in a modern day Tokyo that is overrun by ‘ESPers’. Like in X-men, the ESPers do not appear to be trusted and with good reason, the bad espers are taking control of the government. The citizens of the city are all trying to escape the city in vain. For some reason, our terrorists appear to block everyone in. We didn’t get any character development on our villain. So far he seems like your typical ruthless bad guy. I am hoping for more detailed character development going forward. Maybe it will pickup later on like “Darker Than Black” did. Will be watching the series for now
Just finished watching Outbreak Company which was covered very well at the randomc.net blog. I thought this was a fairly well done anime. They did find a way to integrate a school into the show but at least it wasn’t a typical high school setting which is so common amongst Anime. The main character is your typical anime main character in which has no idea how to talk to girls (a trait common to 90% of anime) and is a geek that stays in his room and reads manga and watches anime all day. However, the stories are very well written if you can overlook some of the light perverse overtones. Overall, I’d probably give this anime an 8/10. Great comedy but taking off points for a typical male main character with the traditional setup that all the women seem interested in him.
