Recent reviews by Barbecue Bob

Tried to play this game after awhile but the game will now not launch because of the 2k Launcher. Thanks for all the memories.

I view the game less as a game but more of a demo for Godot Engine. A lot of people will say Godot can't do 3D or networking, but here's a good example that shows that it can. Feels good for arena FPS. Download it and see what Godot can do!

Too bad I can't buy a loot case that will give me a 1000 hours of my life back.

The other people will tell you not to use Blender. They will say "hey, 3DS Max is free and Blender's interface sucks."

These people are wrong. Blender's great. Learning any 3D software is like drinking water through a fork, so just man/woman up and do it. Its interface isn't any more difficult than any of the Autodesk stuff, and hotkeys make it faster.

Choose freedom. Choose Blender. (Also choose not to pay 200 bucks a month for an overpriced Maya license.)

From the "I hope you didn't waste 60 bucks on this" department.

I really like Wolfenstein. I played the hell out of RtCW, which had perhaps the greatest multiplayer component ever. Wolfenstein 2009 was so-so, but bearable. But this one is just bad.

Why? Sure it's a beautiful game with some nice combat and good visuals, but it utterly fails in the "tone" department. The New Order has no idea what kind of game it is. Is it a balls to the wall action thriller with comedic levels of Serious Sam style violence? Yes. However, combined with this is a over the top, maudlin sort of story that is supposed to somehow convey to the audience the horrors of war through the medium of said comedic violence. The result is a mish-mash that is almost insulting to the actual victims of Nazi brutality. You can't go from killing robotic dogs on a Nazi space station, glorying in the absurdity of the whole thing to a contrived concentration camp scene where you kill a mass murderer in the midst of a tearful flashback. It's like it's a game that's throwing a rubber chicken at you and saying "waka waka" yet expecting you to feel like it's your poor little sister's pet hen that you should've saved from the slaughterhouse.

I feel like The New Order is just adolescent. Still glorying in violence and guns and bombs, and yet because everyone else expects something adult, it has to throw in some Private Ryan style emotional overlay because without it it wouldn't get into AP english or something.

This is what I've been waiting for. I've got a largish library of materials for a game project I'm working on that need to be updated to the new shading model for UE4. I authored a lot of my environmental tiling textures in the original Bitmap2Material and using this new build I'm able to move my texture library to PBR a lot easier than doing it by hand, which is a major feature because I don't have an army of texture artists. Also, with this new version of B2M it's easy to remove lighting/AO from source textures and make a passably correct PBR textures in a few mouse clicks. As a solo indie developer this is a godsend in a lot of ways. Prototyping should be much faster now.

I've been experimenting with CryEngine for about a year and a half. CryEngine is someting that I keep coming back to every two or three months, hoping there are substantive changes, but there never really are. There is a good engine here, but it is hampered by a poor art pipeline and a dubious license. I say poor art pipeline because unless you use 3DS Max and Photoshop (and marginally Maya) you cannot get assets into the engine. Blender support is non-existent. FBX support is only for static geometry. The sad thing is that there is/was a cadre of developers developing a Blender exporter who needed basic support from CryTek and never received it. Basically CryTek has a long habit of completely disregarding Indie developers.

The license is dubious because the minute your subscription lapses you lose access to your game. Contrast this to the UE4 license which grants you access to the version of the Engine you downloaded in perpetuity.

In short, this version of the CryEngine SDK is a shoddy attempt to compete with UE4, and lacks considerable foresight. In contrast to CryTek, Epic is a company that values and respects its Indie developers. The choice should be obvious.

A fully functional DAW for around 20 bucks? (When it's on sale) Works well for a home studio, has enough tracks to manage big projects. Well worth the investment if you're interested.