No, that was covered in the "Everyone's trying to produce an average seller. Licenses sell titles to the uninformed, and game review websites are bought for the price of a few free games and banner ads."
People DO buy these games, but the game companies really DON'T care to try and work hard enough to produce a game that is fun, unique, and profitable.
"For your argument to work either most people are idiots who purchase really bad games, and you have the luck to not be one of them (in which case you're getting screwed by the majority of game purchasers) or you, in fact, are purchasing said games."
Not quite. People don't make the mistake of buying really bad games all that often. People did not buy Daikatana in droves. (You'll notice, as evidence of my previous post, that John Romero is somehow still employed.) It's the really, really average game that sucks up the money and suckers the consumer.
Consider Enter the Matrix...which sold 1 million copies in a weekend. The game isn't really all that bad. Maybe about a 60-65. (Gamerankings.com has the aggregate rating for the PC Version at 61.8%) The game WILL have a sequel now, though. There will also inevitably be 3 or 4 games that try and take advantage of some of the unique things the game did and do a "look and feel" copy. These games will generally suck.
In addition, Enter the Matrix borrows heavily from games that have come before it. It's very reminiscent of Oni and Max Payne in terms of gameplay elements.
On the other end of the spectrum you have StarScape. I'm sure they did fairly well, but nowhere near 1 million games sold. The game is getting pretty positive reviews.
It doesn't have a license to borrow from, it's far more unique, having you try and battle alien ships to rebuild your crashed vessel. Kind of reminiscent of Star Control II a game whose likeness hasn't been seen since 1995.
When the number crunchers go to decide what game their huge conglomerate is going to decide to publish, they're going to see that licensed games are selling well, and offer them a nice return on their investment. On the other hand, the original game gets nice reviews, but doesn't pay out quite so good.
You are more likely to see a game based of off the TV show CHiPs before you will see a really original game.
Even the limited innovation that game companies could do with their licenses, they choose not to. Take the Naruto games for example. The anime series is about a bunch of kids growing up, and harnesing their various different ninja abilities.
Instead of dveloping an RPG, or even better, a Strategy RPG which would allow for the gamer to utilize all the different abilities of the show's characters, the made one game for the GBA which is basically Final Fight, and another for the GC which is every other fighting game you've ever seen. The percentage of movie/anime based games that aren't shooters or fighting games is somewhere in the tenths of a percentage.
In general, a fun game is a fun game is a fun game. Whether it be racing, RPGs, or puzzle, a good game attracts players from everywhere.
However, there are a HUGE amount of mediocre, boring games that really don't need to be made. There are also more hideous games than there are great ones. But most of them are just soundly average, and not worthy of $50.
Did you see it at E3? It's slow, the art looked horrible, and it was one of the least fun things I saw on the show floor. Hell, it isn't even that original...it just looks different.
"but if someone came up with a really catchy idea, I think game execs would sign on."
I was working for a game review website a couple years back, and my boss said something during a "lack of originality" conversation that sticks with me to this day.
"Nobody ever gets fired for making the same game."
However, you DO get fired for making a stupid original game. *cough* Viewtiful Joe *cough* So what do people do? Make crappy remakes.
Here's the other reason why no catchy ideas get made into games. The game industry is the biggest "incestuous" industry out there. By this I mean that if you have a job in the industy doing something, you getting fired, only means you work somewhere else doing the same job within 3 weeks.
Look at the requirements for Game Designers. *ALL* of them require 3-5 titles shipped. Nobody cares that they sucked, they think the experience is more valuable than the talent. Every one who's ever picked up a controller thinks they can design the Next Big Thing(TM).
The problem is that there are several people in design positions now who couldn't design the Next Big Thing(TM) unless it involved them taking a photocopier and someone else's design of The Next Big Thing(TM).
Since they're in the industry now, they'll be there forever, or until they get tired of it. Where complaining about the lack of creativity MAY not get results, it's been fairly obvious these past few years that sitting there and doing nothing DEFINITELY won't get results.
Everyone's trying to produce an average seller. Licenses sell titles to the uninformed, and game review websites are bought for the price of a few free games and banner ads. Truth is, there aren't enough people left in the industry who actually care about making a good game anymore.
If you don't believe me, walk into a store and try and count the number of games that you wouldn't be personally embarrassed of. Ask any tester you know how many games they tested that tehy wouldn't play again to save their lives. The industry is stagnant...sitting on your ass and letting them try and figure that out isn't going to solve crap.
The way they ended up with his face is ended up amalgamated the "best" features from a bunch of different men...dumped it into a computer...ended up with a guy that looked like Ben Affleck. Everyone was kinda freaked out.
"Final Fantasy. Hiring Ben Afleck was their first mistake..."
I'm all for chiding people for their mistakes. But how about, oh say, doing it for mistakes they actually made. Ben Affleck is not in Final Fantasy anywhere. The main character's voiced by Alec Baldwin. Whom, I heard from the guys who worked on the movie, was a real dick during the voicing process.
Almost as much as that article did. Wow, someone took like 10 minutes to compile stuff from Coming Attractions or Imdb. Yay Journalism!
As far as the Tekken movie goes, they already made it...only, much like Soul Calibur, Sammo's never going to get the rights, make the movie anyway, and just rename it to something else...because in Hong Kong, "kinda legal" doesn't mean that you definitely get sued, unlike the fabulous US of A.
(For the record, the Tekken movie was extremely bad. The only characters in it are Jack, Kazuya, Jun, Lei, and some other people that don't make sense. And the plot's totally different.)
Half the stuff in that article is like, "Oh, someone said this would be a good game to make a movie about."
Must be a slow week for IGN. Grasping at straws to have something to justify their jobs in the deathly silence that leads up to E3.
See, I agree here. Especially, since having looked at the stupid thing when the sanitation guys were running tests you notice there's a little lip on the underside of the cover, so any shape manhole cover would not fall in.
I've been asking myself that. There's one in our local onerously charging ubermall, and I swear, I've never seen anyway walk out of the store buying anything. My friends went in there looking for dice, and they didn't even have any.
There's always people in there, being polite and feigning interest as the over-excited salesperson tries to explain to the two girls who accidentally wandered into the store how to play WarHammer.
Oh yeah, THAT happens a lot. The people from Medieval: Total War asked how I could critize their engine and give it the score I did, then they said they'd send me out another copy to review, in case I had a bad one and never did.
At the SAME TIME they had GameRankings.com devalue all our reviews by constantly hammering the site owner with complaints about us. It's much easier to buy good reviews.
I've been writing game reviews on and off for 5 years now. I try to be as fair as I can, and I tell you for sure that freebies don't really influence my review.
I used to work for the now defunct Gameplayer.com, and I reviewed a title from Take 2 Entertainment called "Reah". I gave it a -3 on a scale of 1 to 10. It was Myst/Riven clone, only it was exceedingly lame with weak graphics, and the controls very nearly made me vomit.
I called up by Take 2, who complained about it. I didn't give a crap. I kept the score at -3. The other two times I got called were for slamming Titus' 1-button fighting game, "Evil Zone", and for ripping on Medieval: Total War, because I gave it the lowest score of all reviewers on Gamerankings.com.
If you're going to pick up a game, do this first. Go to GameRankings.com, a site which will give you an instant look at all the main reviews/scores for a particular product, as well as their user's rating for the game. Read a couple of the reviews from there. Then make your decision.
I'm honestly shocked at these people who are saying they were all up on some company's nuts just for a free game. Do you realize how much it costs them to send you a copy of the game? 50 cents for the disc and packaging and $4.50 for shipping. I appreciate not having to buy or rent your game, but if your game sucks, I probably wasn't going to buy it anyway.
I'm not selling my soul for $5, so I can get some poor kid in high school or college, who probably doesn't have so much disposable income, to dump $50 on a game I honestly think is mediocre just so I can get more mediocre games for free.
There are some people who praise game because they like the free stuff. There are others who rip games because they think it's fun or a power trip.
Then there are others, like me, who remember what it was like to finally have scrounged up $40 and walking into Fry's to see that there 10 new games that sounded interesting and knowing they could only buy one. We've been burned more than enough times by companies who release software that doesn't work without a patch, promises to have features that got stripped out just before launch, or just simply sucks. I don't want a company getting rich off of misleading the customer. If that sounds good to you...check out our site as one of the two or three you use to get an idea of what a game's all about. And, as always...rent before buying if you have your doubts. When you do buy, use Ebay. The testers on the game are always trying to unload their free copies.
Yeah, we had a guy try to do this once. Said he worked over at Westwood. Just so happened our boss' brother and uncle were ex-bigwigs over at Virgin/Mastertronic, which Interplay had a stake in, so he knew the QA Manager over at Westwood, too. (Remember when Interplay had its fingers in every pie?) Started asking him questions about Westwood. Guy didn't get the job. Key words in the above post..."small" and "defunct".
Like the above comment says, anime's best when you watch it because it's good. If you're watching stuff because it has to have some deeper meaning, then you're the type of person that convinces themselves that shitty artsy movies are good just because they aren't well liked, or that popular movies suck just because other people do like them.
Think of it as entertainment...it has styles. People like different styles, and this happens to be one that people here seem to like.
However, I don't see why the Bebop movie's generating so much hype. The plot borrows so heavily from Stephenson's The Diamond Age that I knew what was going to happen 15-20 minutes into the movie. I'd rate this movie as being weaker than the good episodes of the series, and since it takes place before the end of the series, it doesn't resolve any of the questions at the end of the series.
Did it say anywhere in that rant that I was still holding this job? I am out! The job isn't ALL bad though. I was just trying to emphasize that's playing games for a living is not all fun and games, because some of the Slashdot pole smokers had decided that they knew everything there was to know about being a tester witout being anywhere near the job.
When you DO manage to ship a game mainly bug free, it feels pretty good. But, it just drains you...too repetitive...no real thinking invovled. I needed to get out, needed to do something where I'd use my brain for something other than proofreading screen by screen.
But you are right about one thing. People here in America work far too many hours! More vacation!
Yeah, garbage men do get paid more than I did. They get hazard pay. I was referring to the game tester position I used to have, and how I had the highest pay of all the testers...not the entire company...maybe that should be clearer. Hell, I know people who still get paid less than $40K/yr who work in Marketing, Localization and other areas. $40K for a tester's a lot. Cost of Living must suck up north.
If you're at an average company for less than a year, you will never go past that. On top of that, I'm going to say about 1/2 the companies here don't develop in-house, so, the highest position you can get at those companies is Asst. Producer.
But guess what? That guy never leaves. So, if you're extremely lucky, you get a chance to bail on that path, and get to take a Marketing/Merchandising position. Otherwise, you have to hope you can ply your services to another company and jump to AP there. (There's a strange phenomena in business where they're much more likely to bring in some new guy to put over everyon else, then promote a guy within the ranks who has the same or better qualifications.)
And, also on the low end of the job totem pole: Tech Support.
You ever try playing through your least favorite section of game 20 times in a row? Just for simplicity's sake imagine you're responsible for testing on 2 different machines different with 10 different video cards.
You're in a section of the game where you can't save. And in the middle of this cutscene, where it has to load a connecting cutscene...say, every 3rd time it crashes. So, you've got to sit through 60 * 20 minutes. 20 hours of the aboslute worst part of the game.
Better yet, you get a version out of the in-house dev team every 3-4 days. Say you're putting in overtime and doing 10 hour days. If you're working every single minute possible, this takes up 2 full days of your time, and you have to re-do this process EVERY OTHER BLOCK of 2 days.
So, you suck it up, put in the overtime, make sure the game's clean. You've got a few bugs left that you really want to fix. But Marketing decides they're going to ship anyway, against you and the development team's protests.
3 days later, game ships, and your company's message board is flooded with people bitching about one of the bugs you wanted to get fixed. People start returning the software, and upper management comes over demanding to know why you didn't catch this bug that you have thoroughly documented.
People all over the net start complaining about how they have monkeys doing your job, and idiots like you are going on Slashdot and talking about how easy your job is to do.
And then, on top of that, you step outside of your section of the office space (usually sequestered from the rest of the employees, not containing the game rooms and ping-pong tables and couches that you're thinking about.) to find that the rest of the company, including the TEMP RECEPTIONIST are wearing these swell leather jackets for the product you just spent back-to-back 100 hour weeks on when they go 9 to 5, and make 3 times your salary.
"Where's my jacket?", you ask, only to find they "didn't have enough money to make jackets for the whole company", just to everyone who isn't in your department.
Then Christmas rolls around, and you're staring at your "sweet" $100 Christmas bonus...of which the US "gift tax" takes $41, so you end up seeing a $59 bonus. Meanwhile, people in other departments are moaning about how they got more than $300 taken our of their bonus in taxes...which is about 6 times what your take home is.
It's even more fun when you work for a company that has the dev office overseas, so you have to constantly wait for the time delay. So shit hits the fan while you're asleep and you leave working thinking everything's cool, only to get back to find out that your ass is now officially in a sling.
There are a handful of good companies, usually the small ones, that actually treat QA like human beings. The rest of them view you as easily replaceable doing a routine job that they could care less about. The cushy jobs that you are thinking about are in Marketing/Merchandising, where you get to play games all day if you want (they don't even havve to be from YOUR company, you can call it "Market Research"!) you spend your day talking on the phone to people who want to stock your product, and you go around having important business lunches/dinners/after-work events.
That 100+ hour "record" the guy talks about. Weak. A friend did some code work for one of our games to help out the dev team while we were in QA. 124 hours that week...at $10/hr. If you haven't put in a 100+ hour week and you are in QA, you haven't been there during a deadline.
Don't ever dog on a job you haven't done, unless they're making millions. If a guy's getting paid a crap wage, chances are you aren't going to know jack shit about what he's going through.
ARC System created the Guilty Gear series, not Sammy. Sammy is only the publisher. Guilty Gear XX is also the third (full) game in the series, following Guilty Gear, and Guilty Gear X.
"he looks a lot like jigan, but more cool"
He's got no hat, no gun, he's a vampire, and he has a girl that appears every once in a while. Het's just got similar hair and a beard. If you're looking for anime characters to compare him to, Slayer is much more similar to Shocking Alberto (In terms of attacks and attitude, though he looks a bit like Cho-Katsu Komei, as well.) from Giant Robo.
Second, if you're a fan of the Rurouni Kenshin saga, almost nobody refers to it as Samurai X. In fact, if you went ot Anime Expo and said that, you'd likely get slapped by someone...probably some overweight guy in a Sailor Moon outfit.
Samurai X is the name they gave to the 2 prequels they did to the series in the US. The licensed series is still referred to as Ruroni Kenshin, I guess the difference in whoever licensed the movie and the TV series.
Lupin (pronounced Loo-PAN/PON. The syllablization cuts after the "lu" and depending on who's pronouncing it, it'll sound like Lu-PON or Lu-PAN. If you watch the dubbed anime in the US, they often refer to him as Ru-pan but that's not quite right.) is pretty much like described above, but in addition, will never take the same punch twice. This is why in certain cases you'll see him absorb a tremendous amount of damage...he's studying the foe's moves for the next time they meet.
Also, Lupin will be smitten by whichever single female the writers put in the plot for that day. He's not really obsessed with Fujiko...she just happens to be in range more often than other women. Lupin has his heart swiped as often as he swipes stuff.
Jigen Daisuke is Lupin's main sidekick. Looks exactly like Abe Lincoln, and is vicious with his gun...as long as he has his hat.
Goemon has a love/hate relationship with Lupin and Jigen. Sometime it seems like the group is begrudging friends, other times it seems like Goemon's only there to get paid. His katana cuts through anything. (In the intro to the PS2 game, he cuts a suspension bridge in half.)
Fujiko is a female character from Lupin's past who hangs around his present to get her share of the loot. It's implied that they had something going on before the comic started but it's never really revealed if this is only in Lupin's mind, or if Fujiko actually agrees upon this. She's a tease and uses her...ample skills to fulfill her role and is basically in it for the money, though if it comes down to it, she'll begrudgingly choose saving the guys over getting away with the loot.
Zenigata is an inspector that runs around trying to catch Lupin. If he does, it's never for more than a couple minutes, kinda like the A-Team. Zenigata will declare various little truces with Lupin, especially in the movies, because he sees that Lupin's trying to stop a greater evil. (usually for money/the girl.) This allows for Zenigata to look like he's still doing work, instead of just chasing Lupin all the time.
Castle of Cagliostro is the Lupin film most fans will recommend you watch. It's good stuff. I also enjoyed "The Legend of Harimao's Treasure" and "The Fuma Conspiracy".
Slashdot Mirror
No, that was covered in the "Everyone's trying to produce an average seller. Licenses sell titles to the uninformed, and game review websites are bought for the price of a few free games and banner ads."
People DO buy these games, but the game companies really DON'T care to try and work hard enough to produce a game that is fun, unique, and profitable.
"For your argument to work either most people are idiots who purchase really bad games, and you have the luck to not be one of them (in which case you're getting screwed by the majority of game purchasers) or you, in fact, are purchasing said games."
Not quite. People don't make the mistake of buying really bad games all that often. People did not buy Daikatana in droves. (You'll notice, as evidence of my previous post, that John Romero is somehow still employed.) It's the really, really average game that sucks up the money and suckers the consumer.
Consider Enter the Matrix...which sold 1 million copies in a weekend. The game isn't really all that bad. Maybe about a 60-65. (Gamerankings.com has the aggregate rating for the PC Version at 61.8%) The game WILL have a sequel now, though. There will also inevitably be 3 or 4 games that try and take advantage of some of the unique things the game did and do a "look and feel" copy. These games will generally suck.
In addition, Enter the Matrix borrows heavily from games that have come before it. It's very reminiscent of Oni and Max Payne in terms of gameplay elements.
On the other end of the spectrum you have StarScape. I'm sure they did fairly well, but nowhere near 1 million games sold. The game is getting pretty positive reviews.
It doesn't have a license to borrow from, it's far more unique, having you try and battle alien ships to rebuild your crashed vessel. Kind of reminiscent of Star Control II a game whose likeness hasn't been seen since 1995.
When the number crunchers go to decide what game their huge conglomerate is going to decide to publish, they're going to see that licensed games are selling well, and offer them a nice return on their investment. On the other hand, the original game gets nice reviews, but doesn't pay out quite so good.
You are more likely to see a game based of off the TV show CHiPs before you will see a really original game.
Even the limited innovation that game companies could do with their licenses, they choose not to. Take the Naruto games for example. The anime series is about a bunch of kids growing up, and harnesing their various different ninja abilities.
Instead of dveloping an RPG, or even better, a Strategy RPG which would allow for the gamer to utilize all the different abilities of the show's characters, the made one game for the GBA which is basically Final Fight, and another for the GC which is every other fighting game you've ever seen. The percentage of movie/anime based games that aren't shooters or fighting games is somewhere in the tenths of a percentage.
In general, a fun game is a fun game is a fun game. Whether it be racing, RPGs, or puzzle, a good game attracts players from everywhere.
However, there are a HUGE amount of mediocre, boring games that really don't need to be made. There are also more hideous games than there are great ones. But most of them are just soundly average, and not worthy of $50.
Did you see it at E3? It's slow, the art looked horrible, and it was one of the least fun things I saw on the show floor. Hell, it isn't even that original...it just looks different.
Gay Metal Slug is basically how to sum that up.
Wrong.
"but if someone came up with a really catchy idea, I think game execs would sign on."
I was working for a game review website a couple years back, and my boss said something during a "lack of originality" conversation that sticks with me to this day.
"Nobody ever gets fired for making the same game."
However, you DO get fired for making a stupid original game. *cough* Viewtiful Joe *cough* So what do people do? Make crappy remakes.
Here's the other reason why no catchy ideas get made into games. The game industry is the biggest "incestuous" industry out there. By this I mean that if you have a job in the industy doing something, you getting fired, only means you work somewhere else doing the same job within 3 weeks.
Look at the requirements for Game Designers. *ALL* of them require 3-5 titles shipped. Nobody cares that they sucked, they think the experience is more valuable than the talent. Every one who's ever picked up a controller thinks they can design the Next Big Thing(TM).
The problem is that there are several people in design positions now who couldn't design the Next Big Thing(TM) unless it involved them taking a photocopier and someone else's design of The Next Big Thing(TM).
Since they're in the industry now, they'll be there forever, or until they get tired of it. Where complaining about the lack of creativity MAY not get results, it's been fairly obvious these past few years that sitting there and doing nothing DEFINITELY won't get results.
Everyone's trying to produce an average seller. Licenses sell titles to the uninformed, and game review websites are bought for the price of a few free games and banner ads. Truth is, there aren't enough people left in the industry who actually care about making a good game anymore.
If you don't believe me, walk into a store and try and count the number of games that you wouldn't be personally embarrassed of. Ask any tester you know how many games they tested that tehy wouldn't play again to save their lives. The industry is stagnant...sitting on your ass and letting them try and figure that out isn't going to solve crap.
Check out Netjak's coverage here. Never hurts to have more coverage.
The way they ended up with his face is ended up amalgamated the "best" features from a bunch of different men...dumped it into a computer...ended up with a guy that looked like Ben Affleck. Everyone was kinda freaked out.
"Final Fantasy. Hiring Ben Afleck was their first mistake..."
I'm all for chiding people for their mistakes. But how about, oh say, doing it for mistakes they actually made. Ben Affleck is not in Final Fantasy anywhere. The main character's voiced by Alec Baldwin. Whom, I heard from the guys who worked on the movie, was a real dick during the voicing process.
Almost as much as that article did. Wow, someone took like 10 minutes to compile stuff from Coming Attractions or Imdb. Yay Journalism!
As far as the Tekken movie goes, they already made it...only, much like Soul Calibur, Sammo's never going to get the rights, make the movie anyway, and just rename it to something else...because in Hong Kong, "kinda legal" doesn't mean that you definitely get sued, unlike the fabulous US of A.
(For the record, the Tekken movie was extremely bad. The only characters in it are Jack, Kazuya, Jun, Lei, and some other people that don't make sense. And the plot's totally different.)
Half the stuff in that article is like, "Oh, someone said this would be a good game to make a movie about."
Must be a slow week for IGN. Grasping at straws to have something to justify their jobs in the deathly silence that leads up to E3.
The answer given was, "so they won't fall in" and not, "so people don't tip them on their sides and drop the manhole cover".
See, I agree here. Especially, since having looked at the stupid thing when the sanitation guys were running tests you notice there's a little lip on the underside of the cover, so any shape manhole cover would not fall in.
I've been asking myself that. There's one in our local onerously charging ubermall, and I swear, I've never seen anyway walk out of the store buying anything. My friends went in there looking for dice, and they didn't even have any.
There's always people in there, being polite and feigning interest as the over-excited salesperson tries to explain to the two girls who accidentally wandered into the store how to play WarHammer.
Oh yeah, THAT happens a lot. The people from Medieval: Total War asked how I could critize their engine and give it the score I did, then they said they'd send me out another copy to review, in case I had a bad one and never did.
At the SAME TIME they had GameRankings.com devalue all our reviews by constantly hammering the site owner with complaints about us. It's much easier to buy good reviews.
We have a feedback/comments section at the bottom of every review at . We do get a lot of trolls (hence the comment of the week/weak that gets added.) some people don't understand that when we give out an 8.2 it means we think it's good...it's not like when GamePro gives out an 8.2 and it's way lower than their average score.
I've been writing game reviews on and off for 5 years now. I try to be as fair as I can, and I tell you for sure that freebies don't really influence my review.
I used to work for the now defunct Gameplayer.com, and I reviewed a title from Take 2 Entertainment called "Reah". I gave it a -3 on a scale of 1 to 10. It was Myst/Riven clone, only it was exceedingly lame with weak graphics, and the controls very nearly made me vomit.
I called up by Take 2, who complained about it. I didn't give a crap. I kept the score at -3. The other two times I got called were for slamming Titus' 1-button fighting game, "Evil Zone", and for ripping on Medieval: Total War, because I gave it the lowest score of all reviewers on Gamerankings.com.
If you're going to pick up a game, do this first. Go to GameRankings.com, a site which will give you an instant look at all the main reviews/scores for a particular product, as well as their user's rating for the game. Read a couple of the reviews from there. Then make your decision.
I'm honestly shocked at these people who are saying they were all up on some company's nuts just for a free game. Do you realize how much it costs them to send you a copy of the game? 50 cents for the disc and packaging and $4.50 for shipping. I appreciate not having to buy or rent your game, but if your game sucks, I probably wasn't going to buy it anyway.
I'm not selling my soul for $5, so I can get some poor kid in high school or college, who probably doesn't have so much disposable income, to dump $50 on a game I honestly think is mediocre just so I can get more mediocre games for free.
There are some people who praise game because they like the free stuff. There are others who rip games because they think it's fun or a power trip.
Then there are others, like me, who remember what it was like to finally have scrounged up $40 and walking into Fry's to see that there 10 new games that sounded interesting and knowing they could only buy one. We've been burned more than enough times by companies who release software that doesn't work without a patch, promises to have features that got stripped out just before launch, or just simply sucks. I don't want a company getting rich off of misleading the customer. If that sounds good to you...check out our site as one of the two or three you use to get an idea of what a game's all about. And, as always...rent before buying if you have your doubts. When you do buy, use Ebay. The testers on the game are always trying to unload their free copies.
Yeah, we had a guy try to do this once. Said he worked over at Westwood. Just so happened our boss' brother and uncle were ex-bigwigs over at Virgin/Mastertronic, which Interplay had a stake in, so he knew the QA Manager over at Westwood, too. (Remember when Interplay had its fingers in every pie?) Started asking him questions about Westwood. Guy didn't get the job. Key words in the above post..."small" and "defunct".
Like the above comment says, anime's best when you watch it because it's good. If you're watching stuff because it has to have some deeper meaning, then you're the type of person that convinces themselves that shitty artsy movies are good just because they aren't well liked, or that popular movies suck just because other people do like them.
Think of it as entertainment...it has styles. People like different styles, and this happens to be one that people here seem to like.
However, I don't see why the Bebop movie's generating so much hype. The plot borrows so heavily from Stephenson's The Diamond Age that I knew what was going to happen 15-20 minutes into the movie. I'd rate this movie as being weaker than the good episodes of the series, and since it takes place before the end of the series, it doesn't resolve any of the questions at the end of the series.
Did it say anywhere in that rant that I was still holding this job? I am out! The job isn't ALL bad though. I was just trying to emphasize that's playing games for a living is not all fun and games, because some of the Slashdot pole smokers had decided that they knew everything there was to know about being a tester witout being anywhere near the job.
When you DO manage to ship a game mainly bug free, it feels pretty good. But, it just drains you...too repetitive...no real thinking invovled. I needed to get out, needed to do something where I'd use my brain for something other than proofreading screen by screen.
But you are right about one thing. People here in America work far too many hours! More vacation!
Yeah, garbage men do get paid more than I did. They get hazard pay. I was referring to the game tester position I used to have, and how I had the highest pay of all the testers...not the entire company...maybe that should be clearer. Hell, I know people who still get paid less than $40K/yr who work in Marketing, Localization and other areas. $40K for a tester's a lot. Cost of Living must suck up north.
First off the path is more like:
Tester.
If you're at an average company for less than a year, you will never go past that. On top of that, I'm going to say about 1/2 the companies here don't develop in-house, so, the highest position you can get at those companies is Asst. Producer.
But guess what? That guy never leaves. So, if you're extremely lucky, you get a chance to bail on that path, and get to take a Marketing/Merchandising position. Otherwise, you have to hope you can ply your services to another company and jump to AP there. (There's a strange phenomena in business where they're much more likely to bring in some new guy to put over everyon else, then promote a guy within the ranks who has the same or better qualifications.)
And, also on the low end of the job totem pole: Tech Support.
Dude...I was the highest paid for a while at my company...I topped out at $26,800 for the year...this is in Orange County.
You ever try playing through your least favorite section of game 20 times in a row? Just for simplicity's sake imagine you're responsible for testing on 2 different machines different with 10 different video cards.
You're in a section of the game where you can't save. And in the middle of this cutscene, where it has to load a connecting cutscene...say, every 3rd time it crashes. So, you've got to sit through 60 * 20 minutes. 20 hours of the aboslute worst part of the game.
Better yet, you get a version out of the in-house dev team every 3-4 days. Say you're putting in overtime and doing 10 hour days. If you're working every single minute possible, this takes up 2 full days of your time, and you have to re-do this process EVERY OTHER BLOCK of 2 days.
So, you suck it up, put in the overtime, make sure the game's clean. You've got a few bugs left that you really want to fix. But Marketing decides they're going to ship anyway, against you and the development team's protests.
3 days later, game ships, and your company's message board is flooded with people bitching about one of the bugs you wanted to get fixed. People start returning the software, and upper management comes over demanding to know why you didn't catch this bug that you have thoroughly documented.
People all over the net start complaining about how they have monkeys doing your job, and idiots like you are going on Slashdot and talking about how easy your job is to do.
And then, on top of that, you step outside of your section of the office space (usually sequestered from the rest of the employees, not containing the game rooms and ping-pong tables and couches that you're thinking about.) to find that the rest of the company, including the TEMP RECEPTIONIST are wearing these swell leather jackets for the product you just spent back-to-back 100 hour weeks on when they go 9 to 5, and make 3 times your salary.
"Where's my jacket?", you ask, only to find they "didn't have enough money to make jackets for the whole company", just to everyone who isn't in your department.
Then Christmas rolls around, and you're staring at your "sweet" $100 Christmas bonus...of which the US "gift tax" takes $41, so you end up seeing a $59 bonus. Meanwhile, people in other departments are moaning about how they got more than $300 taken our of their bonus in taxes...which is about 6 times what your take home is.
It's even more fun when you work for a company that has the dev office overseas, so you have to constantly wait for the time delay. So shit hits the fan while you're asleep and you leave working thinking everything's cool, only to get back to find out that your ass is now officially in a sling.
There are a handful of good companies, usually the small ones, that actually treat QA like human beings. The rest of them view you as easily replaceable doing a routine job that they could care less about. The cushy jobs that you are thinking about are in Marketing/Merchandising, where you get to play games all day if you want (they don't even havve to be from YOUR company, you can call it "Market Research"!) you spend your day talking on the phone to people who want to stock your product, and you go around having important business lunches/dinners/after-work events.
That 100+ hour "record" the guy talks about. Weak. A friend did some code work for one of our games to help out the dev team while we were in QA. 124 hours that week...at $10/hr. If you haven't put in a 100+ hour week and you are in QA, you haven't been there during a deadline.
Don't ever dog on a job you haven't done, unless they're making millions. If a guy's getting paid a crap wage, chances are you aren't going to know jack shit about what he's going through.
"maybe the people at Sammy, the creators of GGXX"
ARC System created the Guilty Gear series, not Sammy. Sammy is only the publisher. Guilty Gear XX is also the third (full) game in the series, following Guilty Gear, and Guilty Gear X.
"he looks a lot like jigan, but more cool"
He's got no hat, no gun, he's a vampire, and he has a girl that appears every once in a while. Het's just got similar hair and a beard. If you're looking for anime characters to compare him to, Slayer is much more similar to Shocking Alberto (In terms of attacks and attitude, though he looks a bit like Cho-Katsu Komei, as well.) from Giant Robo.
Second, if you're a fan of the Rurouni Kenshin saga, almost nobody refers to it as Samurai X. In fact, if you went ot Anime Expo and said that, you'd likely get slapped by someone...probably some overweight guy in a Sailor Moon outfit.
Samurai X is the name they gave to the 2 prequels they did to the series in the US. The licensed series is still referred to as Ruroni Kenshin, I guess the difference in whoever licensed the movie and the TV series.
Right, right. I forgot about the konnyaku.
Lupin (pronounced Loo-PAN/PON. The syllablization cuts after the "lu" and depending on who's pronouncing it, it'll sound like Lu-PON or Lu-PAN. If you watch the dubbed anime in the US, they often refer to him as Ru-pan but that's not quite right.) is pretty much like described above, but in addition, will never take the same punch twice. This is why in certain cases you'll see him absorb a tremendous amount of damage...he's studying the foe's moves for the next time they meet.
Also, Lupin will be smitten by whichever single female the writers put in the plot for that day. He's not really obsessed with Fujiko...she just happens to be in range more often than other women. Lupin has his heart swiped as often as he swipes stuff.
Jigen Daisuke is Lupin's main sidekick. Looks exactly like Abe Lincoln, and is vicious with his gun...as long as he has his hat.
Goemon has a love/hate relationship with Lupin and Jigen. Sometime it seems like the group is begrudging friends, other times it seems like Goemon's only there to get paid. His katana cuts through anything. (In the intro to the PS2 game, he cuts a suspension bridge in half.)
Fujiko is a female character from Lupin's past who hangs around his present to get her share of the loot. It's implied that they had something going on before the comic started but it's never really revealed if this is only in Lupin's mind, or if Fujiko actually agrees upon this. She's a tease and uses her...ample skills to fulfill her role and is basically in it for the money, though if it comes down to it, she'll begrudgingly choose saving the guys over getting away with the loot.
Zenigata is an inspector that runs around trying to catch Lupin. If he does, it's never for more than a couple minutes, kinda like the A-Team. Zenigata will declare various little truces with Lupin, especially in the movies, because he sees that Lupin's trying to stop a greater evil. (usually for money/the girl.) This allows for Zenigata to look like he's still doing work, instead of just chasing Lupin all the time.
Castle of Cagliostro is the Lupin film most fans will recommend you watch. It's good stuff. I also enjoyed "The Legend of Harimao's Treasure" and "The Fuma Conspiracy".
What's really sad is that Wil probably posted as AC himself...just like that time he sent out the April Fool's story about himself.