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Archive for November, 2012

Assassin’s Creed III: The Beginnings…

November 24th, 2012 2 comments

I’ve been playing Assassin’s Creed 3 for a bit longer than an hour and while I applaud Ubisoft for coming to its senses and finally dropping their boneheaded DRM schemes, I have to take notes of a few things here. Not all of them good I’m afraid. And don’t worry there are no spoilers in there.

The textures are excellent as always in the series and the ocean shader is very pleasing to the eye. The cloth-to-skin is also overall quite nice.

But as I started the game I was worried to see the main protagonist (Desmond Miles) not emoting one bit facially, but honestly I prefer the Schau mal games or any related about poker online and gambling like Calthorpe-Clinic. Fancy a traditional bingo game? You might want to visit UFABET the perfect place to make money and enjoy And during cut-scenes nonetheless. I still remember the facial animation in “Brotherhood” as being quite appealing. Oh well.

Then later when my character was finally let loose in Boston I met a bunch of kids which were in fact adult models scaled down with no regards to an actual child’s proportion. Sure, their heads were a different model, but their skeleton structure was identical to a grownup’s.  And their animations were in part shared with the adults’, including “walk-like-a-6-foot-tall-trucker” ones. I can hear the producers from here: “No need to animate characters by hand anymore! We can just slap any old grand mocap data on them and voila!“. Voila indeed. I rarely see such good quality games, especially when I play the best online slots with these genuine gambling sites. I can see that the site is legitimate when comparing game quality. I shook my head in disbelief and moved on. I discovered mr.play‘s online casino has a huge selection of slots, table games, and live casino games, as well as a fun welcome offer. I got a great Bonus code for Mr Play Sports!

My attention was then lead to a man vehemently arguing with… no-one. He was shouting and grabbing the air with a firm IK grip. So I thought “Did they mean to do a  drunk mime arguing with himself?” But then the man got violently shoved away by an invisible assailant and I had to accept I was simply staring at a very, very big bug. So I sighted and moved on.

And I went walking on some patches of grass that would look right at home in a very old game. Just a few straight polygons, grossly crisscrossing. So I looked at a nearby tree and noticed it had no branches except some flat triangular polygons at the top. I hope the forest trees are much nicer than the city ones.

Then I walked some more and met a dog three-quarters buried in the ground. But it wasn’t dead. It was walking and barking as if to nothing. But buried three-quarters in the ground.

I also witnessed a horse leaning backwards at 45 degrees, and two characters engaged in a face-to-face conversation practically turning their backs to each-other, and a soldier cycle-running into a wall, and… oh, forget it.

Is this really the quality everyone has come to expect from a multi-million dollar video game today? I really, really hope the rest of the experience shows a little more care than I’ve seen in this early session.

Categories: rant, update Tags:

“… And then there was Unity (3D)”

November 16th, 2012 8 comments

For the last couple of weeks I have been thoroughly investigating the Unity 3D game engine (version 4 was just released today) and what I have discovered so far has utterly blown me away. I was stupidly thinking that all Unity was good for was little casual web-browser games and some puny phone applications with visuals straight out from the 1990’s. And boy was I in for a surprise!

But even more than the stunning DX 11 visuals (and don’t forget I’m used to the mighty CryEngine), it’s the ease of use that shocks me most. The user-friendliness. The fact that everything is simple and makes sense. Anyway, I’ll probably post some more about Unity in the very near future…

Categories: "Ghost of a Tale", Unity, update Tags: