Just played hrough the first part of the Destiny beta....wow this game is awesome!

It looks great, especially the use of extra lighting and effects that you can't get on 360/PS3. It runs butter smooth and controls just like you would expect from a Halo title. Enemy AI is killer and they react with the same kind of intelligence as those in Halo. But the game has its own vibe...it doesn't feel like Halo even though all the hallmarks are there. And it reminds me of where they wanted to take Halo in the first place....taking it back to crazy random battles and with the whole online integration of the experience which is what Bungie wanted to do way back on Combat Evolved.

Its like Borderlands meets Halo meets the movie Oblivion.

The leveling up system is great and you gain new abilities each time you level. Just got the ability to use fire grenades. Rare weapons and things to collect  from what I can tell throughout the game. Great shit, I love it. I'm kind of surprised Microsoft let Bungie leave to make this multi-platform in the first place....Xbox One could really use this as an exclusive obviously.

Ravenprose said:

You must've hit me at random then. I was following you when you threw a boomerang behind you, hitting me, and then you hit me again. I'll see if I still have the replay.

EDIT: I found the replay, and you definitely hit me twice in the match. Unfortunately, Nintendo and/or Youtube won't let me upload it. I'll try again later.

Oh well it wasn't intentional. Sometimes I fling the boomerang backwards without even knowing if anyone is behind me. Just because there is no one within distance of hitting in front.

aspro said:

I love that reference. I once beat both of those games in one weekend, back to back. And Im not even a gaming "personality" on Twitch.

I enjoyed my Halo 4 session last night a bit more. Once you accept that it's just more of the same, it gets more enjoyable (like Arkham City). Ammo seems a bit sparse though, even though the game isn't hard.

edgecrusher said:

Most of those layoffs are coming from the recently acquired Nokia, which Microsoft picked up for $7.2 billion just earlier this year. The Nokia division will account for roughly 12,500 of the planned layoffs.

---

What is the point in buying a company if you can't afford to pay all the people whose jobs you just basically bought? Same with what Crytek is doing with Free Radical. We're going to buy you and then lay you off....the fuck is the point?

They're strip mining it, taking what they want, discarding the rest. It's pretty common but I'm not condoning it.

Bayonetta 2 blog

Hello, my name is Hiroki Onishi. I was the lead environmental artist for Bayonetta 2.



A large section of Bayonetta 2 takes place in Noatun, a city filled with waterways and rivers. In order to design Noatun, we traveled to Italy and Belgium to see cities that fit this aesthetic up close. The trip ended up being more rewarding than we could’ve imagined.





Our journey began with a 12-hour flight from Kansai to Brussels. We planned on visiting Bruges and the Cathedral of Our Lady first, but when we arrived, we heard the Royal Palace was currently open to the public, so we rearranged our schedule to make that our first stop.







The Royal Palace was perfect for helping us figure out the some of the game’s grander architecture. A lot of the places we visited prohibited photography, so we were thrilled that the palace allowed cameras as long as the flash was off. It was a great start to the trip. The building we created for Bayonetta 2 ended up being a little more stylized than we originally planned, but I’m happy with how it turned out. I think its impact on the player is stronger than before. Look forward to seeing it in the game.





Church of Our Lady



Can you see the color reflected on the floor from the stained glass in the picture above? These kinds of antique glass have a high transparency that clearly reflects color onto walls and floors when hit with sunlight. This photo was taken in the Church of Our Lady in Bruges. If the sunlight is too strong, only white will be reflected, but if it’s too weak, the colors will blur and be indiscernible. If you don’t have the correct amount of light, the phenomenon won’t occur. We saw several cathedrals on our trip, but this was the only time we were able to catch light reflecting on the floor. I saw this and thought… I really want to recreate how beautiful this is in a game. It ended up being everyone at Platinum’s favorite location inside the cathedral in Bayonetta 2. It’s nice to be able to just turn on a game and see it any time I like.

















Santa Margherita Ligure



Venice



I saw something interesting when I was in Venice. Can you see the picture below, and how the knobs are close to the middle of the door? When I asked why, I was told it was because older locks were made separately from handles, and it was hard to fit both in the same place. The picture below wasn’t the exception; a lot of doors in Venice looked like this. They seemed like they’d be tricky to open.











I think the most challenging thing we faced after our trip was conveying how important water was to the everyday lives of the city’s inhabitants. In Venice, there were no roads for cars to run on, because there were no cars—everything was handled by boats. There were no gates in the rivers to make sure travel was simple. Even refrigerators and laundry machines were carried to houses on small boats before being loaded up on push carts. We had to carry all our equipment on a boat to our hotel, and then drag everything along bumpy stone paths. It was a new experience for all of us, and it gave us some slight culture shock. Yet I think it was things like these that gave Venice a unique artistic quality that was interesting to express in the game. If anyone from Venice were to play the game and actually relate with our depiction of the citizen’s daily lives, I’d be honored.

VENICE IN GAME SCREEN HERE - SCROLL TO END


Going abroad provides new experiences, information, and teaches you to view things in a broader, different way than before. Even outside of work, I still make an effort to travel abroad every year. If anything, just because I learn so much from it. I actually still haven’t traveled anywhere in Asia outside of Japan, but I hope I’ll eventually have the chance to. Thanks for reading all the way to the end!

Ravenprose said:

Well, that strategy works very well!

I've found it's the guys behind you, you have to worry about, not the ones in front. So anything to slow those guys down means I'm safer up top. I even started using this in 2nd or 3rd. Instead of using my green shell to nail the no. 1 guy a few feet in front, I used it as a shield and it paid off. A red shell crashed into it 100 metres from the finish line.

'We Have Just Shot Down a Plane': Haunting Audio From the Crash Scene

"It's smoking."

The voice reportedly belongs to Igor Bezler, a commander of the separatist rebels in Ukraine, speaking to Russian officers. It is the first of three chilling phone calls intercepted by Ukraine, which purportedly shows separatist rebels bragging about shooting down a transport plane, only to gradually discover that it was carrying civilians. The recordings were first published at the New York Times website.

In the second call, a man at the scene of the crash describes the rubble, where bodies are lying between sundered internal brackets and seats. "Any weapons?" someone asks him. "Absolutely nothing," he responds. "Civilian items, medical stuff, towels, toilet paper."

"Are there documents?"

"Yes," he says, "of one Indonesian student, from a university in Thompson."

In the third call, it seems the separatists' mistake has become obvious. The military transport plane they had targeted is emblazoned with Malaysian Airline signs. The crash site is littered, not with weapons, but with "lots of corpses of women and children."

"They were carrying spies," one says. "Fuck them. They shouldn't be fucking flying. There's a war going on."

"Got it," the other responds.

We've now learned that one third of the 298 people killed in crash were heading to Australia, for a global AIDS conference.

Fucking Russia.

gamingeek said:

Bayonetta 2 blog

Hello, my name is Hiroki Onishi. I was the lead environmental artist for Bayonetta 2.

He WAS the lead artist.....does this mean the game is done already?

My advice, close that machine up and enjoy the beach!  I might be a touch jealous.

Rest up, man.  Later.

Hey you made it! Feel good bro!