1P Start

Oh boy, it’s Friday already. Man, I’ve accomplished almost nothing. Well, I did do some toy related things, but I don’t think you care about those. I haven’t played many games this week, although I’ve been hitting Advanced Wars: Days of Ruin ultra hard. Hot damn, does this game appeal to my inner turned based geek. Anyway, I’ve put together some links of interest. Enjoy!

Item: EA has confirmed Mirror’s Edge 2 is in the works. Yawn. Did anyone really like the first game? The idea of running around on buildings didn’t really appeal to me. I gave the demo a shot and it just wasn’t for me.

Item: Spinal Tap is coming to Rock Band. It’s nice getting Spinal Tap DLC and I love the movie just like anyone else, but I don’t ever need to hear the music much less play it in the form of a game outside of the film. I can see the appeal of pretending to be Spinal Tap, though.

Item: Plants vs. Zombies. Huh, I never knew such a game existed. Thanks to my friends at Binge Gamer, now I do!

Item: Call of Duty MMO? No thanks. Really, that’s just retarded. For one thing there hasn’t ever been a succesful shooter MMO like beast and secondly I don’t get that involved with the game. Shoot for awhile, start a new match. It’s beautiful the way it is already.

So I think I can say freely here that about a month ago I was a game tester for a short period. Actually, I was only a games tester for a month. For me it was a temp job until my wife got accepted into a law school and we had to move out of the San Francisco Bay area.

I’m writing this short article because you might be wondering what game testing is like. Well, it’s a lot like work. In fact it is work! It sure as hell beats stocking shelves, but at the same time it’s not exactly as fun as sitting home and playing games at home. The first thing you have to realize is that you’re really not supposed to “play” the games. You’re supposed to try to break them. In my case, we only did tests on lots of different games. Most of the time the tests for an hour or two. It wasn’t much time to play the game and you couldn’t save your progress, so when you got the game again you have to start over from the beginning. This was particularly annoying when you were testing a long winded Japanese RPG.

The second thing that you have to keep in mind when considering a game testing career is that most of the testers are temps. It seems like it’s kind of tough to get hired on full time, otherwise you’re stuck going from contract to contract. If that’s fine with you, then go for it. As someone who needs a bit more security in my job choices, it wasn’t that hot of a proposition.

Overall game testing beat a lot of other things, but as a low paying temp position it wasn’t what I’d want to do for the rest of my life unless I could make something else out of it.

Telltale Games, the company behind the awesome Sam and Max games, Wallace and Gromit, and even the Strongbad game are celebrating their five year anniversary. Good job, guys! May your game creation continue for many years to come!

More after the break:

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Guess who is lazy today? Yep, it’s me! In order to make sure that I don’t over strain myself today we’re going to have a news round up of some gaming related items that I found interesting, complete with my patented useless commentary.

There will be a Playboy MMO: And hopefully it will be awesome. If you register here, you could win a ton of Playboys. Do it now!

Gamestop Offering Overlord Minions: I almost never pre-order games, but Game Stop’s Overlord II minions have me thinking I may have to give them five dollars for these guys. They are so awesome! And evil!

Pinball!: Zen Pinball’s pinball game on the Playstation 3 has a free demo. I’ve already purchased Pinball FX on the 360, but hot damn if I don’t love pinball enough to essentially buy it again for different tables on the PS3.

Beatles Rock Band: I’m seriously getting excited for the game, but who is dumb enough to buy the uber expensive box set with replica pretend guitars that the Beatles used? Oh yeah, baby boomers.

Use a Normal Remote on the PS3: Logitech has an easy solution to use a normal remote on the PS3. The only catch is that you have to use a Logitech remote.

Still Need Star Trek?: Did you see Star Trek and wish you could read more about it? Well Binge Gamer has a neat review about Star Trek: Elite Force 2. Makes me wish I could play it!

Sometimes I run across neat game related videos that don’t warrant their own posts, so I’ve decided to occasionally throw a few together for you with some patented commentary by me. First up, here’s some video from the unreleased Duke Nukem Forever game. As big of joke as the game became, the demo looks fairly impressive and makes me wish I could play more. I like the pig dudes (I’m sure there’s a name for them, but I never played the original game) and the overall look of the game was fairly interesting. There seemed to be an effort to make the enemy AI fairly intelligent what with the way the pig dudes are moving. I also really enjoyed the part where he jumps on the enemy and pulls pieces off of him. Plus there would have been boobs and boobs are always cool.

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The question that I’m asking today is just where the heck is my EGM? Okay, I know the magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly or commonly referred to as EGM went under when they were sold by their parent company Ziff Davis Publications. I get that, it happens. My problem is that I no longer have an EGM coming in my mailbox every month. I know that this is what happens when a magazine folds, but even worse is that I have no magazines at all coming into my mailbox and my subscription was good through 2013.

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So out of the many, many jobs that have been cut in the last few months mine was included in those numbers. My employer gave me a 30 day notice a few weeks ago. Once that’s up, I’m out the door.

As someone who enjoys gaming, it’s pretty tough to consider the fact that I won’t be able to purchase anything new for fear of not making rent or having money for food. I’ve formulated a plan to get me through these tough times, at least until I get a new job:

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If you can’t wait for more Halo action and the upcoming Halo RTS Halo Wars isn’t enough for you, well how about some more details for the upcoming Halo third person shooter, Halo 3: ODST.

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No, I didn’t spend a time writing up a really awesome list of all the games that have features the Aliens from the Alien movie franchise (AVP). That would require something called effort. Nope, I am linking to a really awesome guide to all of the Aliens related games out there.

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According to Kotaku, there were some mass firings today for the staff of 1up.com. The network was sold to Hearst by Ziff Davis and instead of keeping the staff many, many of them were let go. Good luck to any of you who might be reading this.

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I haven’t played Rock Band 2 in awhile and I feel pretty guilty about it, because I was so obsessed with the first game. I think if I make some time with it and get some new songs I may just fall in love with Rock Band again. I don’t think something like the Rock Band Stage Kit will do a whole lot to make me want to spark my near obsession the game once had over me. It doesn’t look like it does a whole lot for these guys:

It’s cool that the machine is in sync with the song via whatever demon magicks that fuel it, but yeah this is nothing that anyone really needs to add to their gaming experience. To be fair though, having the fog machine on the couch doesn’t really add to any kind of rocking experience. I think if the singer and guitarists were standing that it might help just a smidgen.

Thanks to College Humor (via Gaming Today)

While other responsible video game related bloggers were all reporting on the Spike TV Video Game Awards this last weekend you didn’t see a peep on here. Why? Well, I’ll tell you why. I didn’t watch the Spike TV video games awards, because I’m smart.

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Wired recently published their list of the top ten most disappointing games of ‘08. There weren’t many surprises on the list, except for maybe Dead Space. I wouldn’t say it was disappointing so much as it didn’t really end up living up to the horror aspect. There’s also the atrocious lack of Wii Music, but maybe they hadn’t anticipated that one as much as the other games on the list.

Here’s the list in full, but you have to go to the site to read their reasoning behind their picks:

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News broke that a Seaman spin-off game might possibly make it’s way onto iPhones in the U.S. Personally, I hail any kind of Seaman news as good news, but it’s still not enough. I demand a Seaman sequel, maybe call it something like, “Seaman 2: More Seaman in Your Face” or “Seaman 2: Seaman Unleashed” to appeal to the younger crowd who enjoy things being extreme and unleashed.

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This last weekend I finally broke down and purchased the XBox Live game Pinball FX. The combination of not enough sleep and the love of pinball caused me to purchase the downloadable title. I also picked up the Rocky and Bullwinkle and Street Fighter II Turbo tables at the same time.

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