Tighten Up Those Graphics

tighten_up_those_graphicsI’d like to take a few moments to discuss “The Tester”, this new reality show being put out by Sony and the good folks behind Flavor of Love. By way of establishing my bona fides to comment on this issue, I’ll reveal that I’ve been working in software quality assurance (i.e. testing), mostly for video games, since May of 2005. I’ve worked at publishers and developers both in America and abroad, and I’ve worked with literally hundreds of game testers. I think I can speak with some authority when I say that holding a talent contest to select a game tester is meaningless, deceptive, and foolish on a level that’s usually reserved for political talk show commentaries.

Come with me now to press release-land, and I’ll point out a few interesting landmarks:

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PAX 2009 -The Grinder

Fyre and I have been here since Friday morning, gaming away, staying up late nights for concerts, and generally running around having fun in a concentrated quantity that I can’t remember experiencing since, say, summer camp.

My body is not in shape for this amount of… doing stuff. I’ve noticed a corresponding effect on the quality of my gameplay. I got warmed up on Friday, really hti my stride on Saturday, and some time around last night the machinery began breaking down and I started losing control of my fingers, tongue and brain.

Fyre bought herself a copy of TF2, so we’ve been playing that. It has a certain mindless, twitchy quality that goes well with my current mindset of “Buh? Guhhhh… Gah!”

-ssr

PAX 2009 – Genius!

Kudos to the marketing Svengali who got No More Heroes 2 characters printed on the toilet paper in the PAX bathrooms. Nothing predisposes a demographic of self-congratulatory snark-tards (i.e. gamers, game bloggers, nerds gerneally) to like your product better than literally allowing them to wipe their asses with it.

I detect the guiding hand of game developer/free-roaming psychopath Suda51 here.

-ssr

PAX 2009 – In Which All Nerds Turn Their Backs on Lucas

Awesome PAX moment while Fyre and I were in the lineup to watch Gabe and Tycho make a strip in a giant theater setting. As we all stood together, winding through the waiting arena – I shit you not, the arena next to the real arena – a bunch of guys in Jedi costumes arrived and stood there while a really, really annoyingly chipper man attempted to hype us for the new Star Wars MMO. It was bad enough that he attempted to hype a bunch of prequel-weary hardcore dorks merely by asking us “Hey, do you like Star Wars?” Then he asked if we’d all seen the trailer for the Old Republic MMO. When treated with a massive chorus of “Yeah”, this man had the gall to ask, “You wanna see it again?”

As one, the nerds rose up and howled “NOOOOOOO!”

He didn’t care; he couldn’t, I suppose. Too bad, he said, and the trailer played again, projected two stories tall on the wall of the room and loud as a bomb going off.

We were a captive audience, and Lucas had his way with our eyes and our ears, but nobody can pretend that we liked it.

-ssr

PAX 2009 – Savory

Overheard last night at PAX, an attendee was telling friends over teamspeak that the event is “a total sausage fest”. I don’t know what sort of gaming events she’s been attending, but this is one of the most female-heavy nerd events I’ve ever been to. The male-female ratio is probably somewhere between 3-1 and 4-1, which is phenomenal in my experience. I suppose it deopends on what you compare it to; relative to, say, a yaoi convention, sure, this is probably a bit more guy-heavy.

-ssr