Tag Archives: programming

Bioshock, Archos tablet overview, Thoughts, Articles, Links

Bioshock Infinite
Just finished playing Bioshock Infinite. It’s a good game, but not as good as reviewers say. There’s reason why I will list here:
1) Low quality textures – There’s some textures that are really low quality. Most parts of the game is fine, but on some small details like doors or small objects it is noticeable on my PS3.
2) Inaccurate voice casting – The main guy is supposed to be from New York in 1912. People from NY in 1912 did not talk with a modern day California accent, they spoke with a distinct New York accent (see: Franklin Roosevelt).
3) CPUs other than Elizabeth are not exciting. Irrational Games was good with the Elizabeth CPU – its cool that she doesn’t need to be told what to do, and she’s actively looking around in her environment. But what would take this further is having all the cpus in the game be like that. For example, when I steal a drink or food from the cart, I expect people to react. When I listen in on a conversation about a guy buying hot dogs, I expect him to eventually buy and eat it, not just standing around being scripted. That part needs some work. Fallout for example, does this quite well. I can easily interact with any NPC, and all my actions have consequences. Irrational should learn a bit from Bethesda in the NPC department. (but can you imagine them doing a game together? would be awesome).

Overall the game is pretty good, but once we have all the CPUs function exactly like humans do – randomly then thats the future of gaming I think.
4) The game is short, like 12 hours, with little replay value. Thats a general trend of modern games, and one I don’t like. What happened to games like Ultima or Prince of Persia where you could play for like 100 hours? But nope, these days companies are just shipping incomplete games and gouging customers on DLC or expansions instead (you hear that Blizzard? Starcraft 1 had all the campaigns in ONE game, and people weren’t forced to buy expansions to beat the game). Yeah.. and multiplayer is often half assed. Good old 90s dedicated multiplayer games like Quake III and Unreal tournament are way better than the tack on multiplayer you find on most games these days (COD and Halo are exceptions).

Companies using programming tests and self ratings to gauge candidates
I think I wrote before about this, but let me re-iterate this, companies who use programming tests to gauge candidates are crap. It tells you nothing about the candidate, how much knowledge they actually have, how he/she would function in an actual dev environment, etc. It’s one specific problem usually, its biased based on interviewer, and there’s no hard guideline or heuristics. What is this, SAT’s? Are they evaluated based on some arbitrary score? Another thing I dislike – when people ask ‘rate yourself on a scale of 1-10 on [blah]‘. What does that accomplish? An arrogant person may rate himself a 10 but is really a 5 and a modest programmer may rate himself a 5 but is really a 9. Its completely arbitrary and doesn’t tell you anything. Big companies are notorious for this.

As an interviewer, I would rather evaluate them based on white-boarding exercises (seeing the candidate do recursion in front of you is better than giving them a recursion exercise and having them google something), broad knowledge based questions (event bubbling vs event capturing), and having their number of years of experience using the language rather than a ‘rating’ of 1-10.

Archos tablet overview

I did an overview of the Archos 7 Tablet… I like this tablet mainly because it has alot of storage room, and it can record DVR videos from any A/V input source, something that tablets these days can’t do. Do check out my little PS3 demo.