I read over the weekend that Rockstar Games employees are badly overworked in an open letter from their wives.  This is the same development studio that made Grand Theft Auto into a $1 billion franchise.  They apparently have no extra cash to change the work environment for the employees working in the trenches by giving them raises, hiring more employees to reduce grueling work hours and letting them have vacations.  The situation is so bad that employees are exhibiting suicidal tendencies, their marriages are on the rocks, and the future of the studio is in jeopardy.  (Working for a drug-addled rock band would be easier in comparison.)  The executive management team, of course, blew off the open letter as "the opinions of a few anonymous posters on message boards[.]"

If you're familiar with the video game industry, this won't surprise you at all.  The trend over the last ten years is for the executive management team to emulate the Wall Street corporate model: squeezing the blood out of the workers in the trenches, boosting the short-term profits to keep the markets happy, and kicking the money upstairs as bonuses.  (This model replaced the Hollywood "content is king" strategy that failed miseribly after most of the development studios relocated to Southern California.)  Employees are "resources" to be used, abused and fired at will.  If this process ruins the lives of employees and destroys the studio, the executive management team can always bail out to find another studio to ruin.

The video game industry has become the sweatshop of the 21^st century.

What did surprise me was that the Sony Playstation Network has a reality game show, The Tester, where the contestants compete for a video game testing position.  That's pure fantasy.  The sofas are long gone to put in more cubicles in any studio that has embraced Wall Street.  Contrary to public perceptions about working in the video game industry, being a tester stops being fun and games after the first six weeks and becomes pure hell when crunch time is all the time.  The recent Penny Arcade webcomic reveals the stark reality for the potential winner: long hours of being in the same dim cube for days on end, testing an unplayable video game that no one likes, and eating a "nutrient-rich sludge" every eight hours (i.e., the roach coach or Taco Bell).

After having spent six years as a tester and lead tester at Accolade/Infogrames/Atari (same company, different owners, multiple identity crises) that went from a family-owned company to a corporate hellhole, I'm using that experience as the basis for my first novel to reveal the truth about the video game industry and convey all the funny stories that I have witnessed, heard about or been involved in.  (More romans à clef than kiss and tell.)  The only major difference with reality is that my novel has a pissed off ghost with homicidal tendencies.  Considering some of the things that I went through, a homicidal ghost would've been a blessing.

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User Friendly had a recent strip where a caller calls Greg the Tech Support Guy about a financial problem: either pay the mortgage or buy a new video game system. I can relate to that problem since this month has an extra paycheck. That's an extra thousand smackaroos outside of my usual budget. What to do with it?

Since I'm writing my first novel based on my six years as a video game tester at Accolade/Infogrames/Atari (same company, two different owners), I been browsing the video game magazines for what's coming out in the next few months. Most of the new games I got my eyes on are for the Microsoft Xbox 360. I wanted to get a Nintendo Wii but they're hard to find on the store shelves. (No, I will not ask a sale clerk get me one from the backroom like a bottle of hooch in a brown paper bag when they should be out on the floor like everything else I can get my hands on.) The Sony PS3 — with Blu-Ray player! — is still pricey. The Xbox 360 Pro Holiday Bundle that includes the 60GB console and two video games, "Lego Indiana Jones" and "Kung Fu Panda," just came out for $299 USD. I just might have enough smackaroos to get that. Heck, I might be able to write it off as a business expense (e.g., "research") on my tax return next year.

Except the responsible adult throttled the irresponsible slacker before this scheme got too far.

When I became a lead game tester in 2003, I decided to specialize on the Nintendo GameBoy Advance/GameCube titles since all the other lead testers wanted to work on the Microsoft Xbox and/or Sony Playstation 2 titles. The Xbox and PS2 were cool. The GameBoy Advance and GameCube was not. One of the things that I learned in my working life is the need to specialize and excel in the areas that no one else wanted to become the hero in the department. I became one of several Nintendo gurus who handled most of the Nintendo-related titles. Since I got free copies of the games I worked on, my console of choice at home was the Nintendo GameCube.

How much had I played the GameCube since I got it? Not much.

My friend and I recently started playing "Lego Star Wars: The Original Trilogy" on the GameCube again. The last time we played was nearly two years ago. The reason we stopped playing the game back then was some of the puzzles are downright confusing for two players to figure out even with a cheat sheet in hand. Co-op play is supposed to be fun. We have completed only Level 11 out of 99 levels (each level takes an hour). If the remaining 88 levels are more of the same, I'm not sure if we will continue playing. We both want to play "Lego Batman" on a new console one of these days, and hope that the co-op puzzles will be much better (the reviews suggest otherwise).

I also stopped playing "Resident Evil 4" about the same time. After completing the first major area, you have to avoid a boulder rolling downhill by smashing the buttons. No matter how many times I tried, I couldn't get through that one area and gave up. Button smashing is where you have to press multiple buttons at the same time as fast as possible, which isn't allowed under Nintendo standards since it wears out the controllers. I hate button smashing since I grew up on the Atari 2600 joystick that had only one big red button. (I once explained to a very young game tester that video games existed before the Sony Playstation, and then freaked him out by introducing him to a coworker who tested boardgames before home video games existed.) Giving RE4 a fresh look after two years, I realized what my mistake was: I wasn't paying attention to the onscreen prompts that appeared briefly. (I would tag this as a bug but the prompt probably satisfied the Nintendo standards and young developers are often quick to dismiss the concerns of an old fart who played video games before they were born.) You press the A Button very fast as your character "sprint" downhill, and then you press both the L Button and R Button at the same time when prompted to have your character dodge out of the way. Bingo! I got pass that area. Then I figured out how to spot the save points on the map when entering a new area. I was able to enjoy the next several areas being confident that I could finish each one to move to the next area. You would think as a retired professional video game tester, I would've figured this out sooner.

Beyond that, I don't have the time. Being a writer has become a second full time job for me these days. Which is ironic considering that I'm writing a novel about video game testers. When I do play a video game, it's often for 15 minutes at a time. When a video game does capture my attention, I'll spend a month on it until something else comes along. If I did get a brand video game console like an Xbox 360, I'll probably won't play it that much unless a friend comes over.

If it's not time, then it's money.

Have you seen the prices for video games on the new consoles? Sixty smackaroos! That's twice as expensive as most Blu-Ray movies. Even if there was a dozen hot new games I wanted to play, I wouldn't have that much money to spend after getting the console (which is why the Xbox 360 holiday bundle is a great deal). There's the $7,000 USD I spent on dental work over the last six months, including $3,600 USD on my last visit two weeks ago. A model railroad I'm building as my newest expensive hobby. (Okay, I did splurge a hundred smackaroos on that but that was budgeted.) Now is real good time to be buying more stocks — actually, an index ETF — in my retirement accounts, which even Warren Buffett says so. Plus I got three or four unfinished video games on my tricked out Windows Vista machine. Since I stopped using my credit cards and my savings is at near empty, spending smackaroos on a video game console can't be justified. All that extra smackaroos got spread around to various credit cards, savings and retirement accounts

If the U.S. economy goes down the crapper because I stopped being an irresponsible consumer, so be it.  Maybe someone will get me a new video game console for Christmas (hint, hint) and save the economy.

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The newest trend in monster movies is where the video cam plays a larger role than the no-name stars or even the monsters.  Two recent movies in the past month illustrated this trend, Cloverfield and George A. Romero's Diary of The Dead.  Only one will be become an instant cult classic, and both will be imitated by home amateurs, college students at film schools, and professional filmmakers looking to ride the newest trend.  The horror comes not from the current movies, but from the new movies that will appear in the next several years.

Cloverfield is a retelling of the classic monster-trashing-the-big-city formula from the perspective of a single video cam that previously recorded a dating relationship getting hot from the month before that gets recorded over during a going away party where the dating relationship had gone cold.   If the sound system at the theater I went to was set to normal instead of extra loud, I might've slept through the soap opera that unfolded.  No one really cares about the poor smuck who got ditched and then decides to rescue the girl who ditched him.  When the monster and baby monsters are finally shown, we don't see them for long as the movie is about the horrors of lost love instead of the destruction of a city by a seemingly unstoppable monster.

The highlights includes the head of the Statue of Liberty rolling down the street like a bowling ball, and the harden citizens of New York City whipping out their cell phone to take pictures; a collapsed building that causes a 9/11-inspired wall of dust to funnel down the concrete canyons of the cityscape; and a subway station being shaken by the monster fighting the military on the streets above.  Since there was only one video cam that recorded everything, the ending lacks the context to tie the story into the real world and the viewers are left struggling to find meaning in what they saw.  If that wasn't bad enough, there's an excellent sound track played during the credits that should've been saved for another movie.

George A. Romero's Diary of The Dead will become a cult classic for flawlessly executing the making of an internet movie called The Death of Death that documents the zombie outbreak as recorded by a group of film making students with two video cams, and edited to include video from other video cams, wireless surveillance cameras, cell phone cameras, and stuff downloaded the from the internet to provide a larger context to tie the story into the real world (some of the video was stock footage taken during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans).

The highlights includes an actress questioning the conventional horror movie formula of a scream queen running in her high heels in the middle of nowhere to have the monster grab her nightgown to show off her breasts (which does happen to her later on with a zombie when the main cameraman forgets he's making a documentary instead of a horror movie); exploding eyeballs when a pair of defibrillator paddles are applied to a zombie's head in a hospital; and an old Amish man who commits suicide by ramming his scythe into his head and the head of the zombie behind him.  I think Romero expects this movie to be widely intimated since he's holding a contest for the best three-minute short video to win an appearance on the DVD release.

Speaking of zombies, I picked up the March 2008 issue of PC Gamer for the cover story on a flood of zombie games that are coming out in the next year. Left 4 Dead and Resident Evil 5 look like the best of the lot, and I might get both.  I'm also looking forward to Lego Indiana Jones, Lego Batman, and Soul Calibur 4 when they come out.  Since I'll be writing a novel based on my six years as a video game tester, I need all the research material I can get my hands on.

Website Update: Since the current versions of MyBlog and Jom Comment are now compatible with Joomla! 1.5, blogging and commenting are now enabled. I'm still tweaking things to get them the way I want them to be and figuring out the minor annoyances that pops up.   I may need to shut down the website for 15 or 30 minutes at a time to make some adjustments.  Comments will be available for recent articles and moderated for now to filter out the "wow ur fat" crowd from Slashdot.

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This past Black Friday was a Wii-less one.  Granted that I initially went into work to find out that I wasn't needed after, and my friend and I didn't start prowling the stores until noon.  If any Nintendo Wii consoles were available, they were long gone after 5:00AM.

First stop was Circuit City where we picked up "From The Earth to The Moon" DVD box set for $15 USD (normally $60 USD).  No Wii was to be found there.  We told one guy in line that we were searching for the mythical Wii-beast, and he mentioned that he got his months ago — through a friend at EA.  Uh, huh.  When I was a lead tester at Accolade/Infogrames/Atari (same company, two different owners, multiple identity crisises), I won a Playstation 2 shortly after they came out at the company Christmas party, and sold that to a friend unopened for $200 USD since she wanted one really bad.  I didn't want one since I was the Nintendo guru at the time.  That's how video game company connections usually work.

The parking lot at Fry's Electronics in San Jose was more interesting with three idiots for every open parking spot in front, and no one trying to park out in back.  Go figure.  Inside we were greeted with with a sign in the video game department: "Wii Sold Out" We didn't buy anything since the line to the cash register was two hours long.  The sign at Best Buy at Santana Row wasn't any better: "Wii No Longer Available" The mythical Wii-beast of Black Friday eluded us among the many boxes of the Playstation 3 and XBox 360 that no one seem to want.

I would like to buy a Wii on Amazon so I can get triple points on my Amazon credit card, where 2,500 points will get me a $25 gift certificate for Amazon.  (Most of my book and video game shopping is done through Amazon, so a $25 gift certificate every now and then is a sweet moment to buy an overpriced tech book.)  I been checking their site frequently during the holiday weekend to see if the Wii was available.  I'd heard rumors that were available in small lots that quickly disappeared if you weren't looking at the right time.  Still no luck there.  I don't need a Wii badly enough that I'll pay $600 USD to a third-party seller.

Since I told all my relatives that I was looking for a Wii, maybe the mythical Wii-beast will make an appearance for Christmas.

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I became a zombie game fan when I started blasting them in Quake with grenades and rockets ten years ago, and a hardcore zombie movie fan after the Resident Evil movies came out.  For whatever reason, I was knee deep in the zombie dead this weekend.  I guess Halloween—like daylight savings time—was a few weeks late.

The zombie fest started out with installing Hellgate: London on my game machine.  When I tried the demo out a few weeks ago, I hated it since I thought the game play was tedious, no ending to wrap up the game play, and the game seem too much like a Diablo clone.  Turned out that the game is made by the same people who created Diablo II.  After readjusting my thinking from first person shooter to hack and slash (never mind that my marksmen character was using guns instead of swords), I started enjoying the demo and pre-ordered the game.

My current character is Level 7 marksmen with some tricked out armor and modified guns.  My main weapon is a RPG/flame thrower good for clearing out small groups of zombies, and the machine gun for larger and bigger-sized groups of zombies.  The game had several memorable moments.  I blew off the top half of a zombie only to see the lower half do a twitch dance before falling over.  Came roaring around a corner after throwing a grenade where I expected to find a half-dozen zombies and found 20 zombies swarming out at me.  After falling down to the bottom of a three-story staircase, all the zombies from the upper floors came banging downstairs while all the nearby zombies became aware of me, and took all my ammo to get out of that mess.  This game should keep me busy until Unreal Tournament 3 comes out in two weeks.

The zombie war on Megatokyo has been postponed for the Real World birth of baby Jack Obadiah Gallagher.  Father and mother are doing fine even though the baby came sooner than expected.

I went to Borders at Santana Row on Saturday night to locate Flight of the Living Dead DVD, otherwise known as "Zombies on A Plane" to zombie fans.  The woman behind the information counter gave me a weird look when I asked about the title, almost as if I was a zombie.  Her co-worker standing beside her said, "Sweet!"

No luck.  So I got Black Sheep DVD instead.

If you thought zombie crows in Resident Evil: Extinction was weird, try zombie sheep.  When two animal rights activists in New Zealand—where 40 million sheep outnumber four million people—steal research material being disposed of at a sheep farm, they get more than bargain for when the canister cracks open to release a zombie lamb.  If that wasn't weird enough, people who are bitten but not killed turn into were-sheep!  All the traditional elements of a zombie film are here: the New Age animal rights activist airhead playing the dismal in distress, one guy being stretched out to have his guts ripped out be a pair of sheep, and the usual genetic research versus mother nature debate.  Plus the standard red neck farm jokes about inbred family and horny sheep.  This movie is so hilariously wrong on so many levels.

If that wasn't enough, yesterday I was watching an Star Trek: Enterprise episode called "Impulse" that was about... Vulcan zombies!

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