While playing this demo I noticed a few things:

• All NBA games appear to involve rap music, most of the demos which include it appear to include no option to disable said music. I like some rap music, but this pop stuff isn’t it. I assume this is some kind of attempt to pander to the audience of 18-24 year olds who love pop rap.
• The players are lit unrealistically, and the shadows you see when players jump belie the limited shadowing available (it is a very blurry squared low-poly shadow figure) when you’re rendering an otherwise fantastic stadium and many other players.
• Along with terrible sprite trees, which speedtree only partially negates in games that use it, my other big gripe with a lot of games are a sprite based audience. I’m incredibly happy to hopefully never see that again, and although the audience doesn’t have a lot of polys, it has enough to partially fool me during motion.
• The sideline announcers are static polygon models, ugh. Please fix this in the release build.
• The cloth physics are nice, but they’re completely disconnected from “reality” when you engage the replay mode’s vcr controls, snapping around and reacting differently each time. This probably isn’t solvable, or worth solving at the moment.
• Also in replay mode you’ll notice players clipping through solid objects. This image from the gamespot review is a good example.
• Similarly, in replay mode, they’re at least smart enough to zap the player model if the camera moves anywhere near enough to clip the camera through the model, seeing the inside.
• The game is ridiculously pretty in motion, most of my graphical issues with the game aren’t noticeable when I’m playing. Which brings me to my next point:
• I don’t feel the uncanny valley whilst NBA 07 game is in motion.
• The uncanny valley ruined my experience with Madden on the 360, at various points the animations of players on the field, the most valuable and observed asset in the game, would cease animating while at the line waiting for the QB to start the play.
• I wish there were a 3D NBA Jam with this level of engine and quality.

So, at every interview I’ve ever done for the game industry (and even some outside of it) I’ve been asked about what games I’m playing; what my favorites are. On testing job interviews they’ve also always asked about what bugs I’ve seen in games. The most amusing interview I had was with Monolith, turned me down, but that is fine since I enjoyed the interview anyway.
I thought their style wasn’t so great, with a 10 interviewer to 1 candidate ratio. The questions were still funny though and I met some people that I’d read about, which is always interesting.

Getting back to my main point, knowing about as many games as possible so you can relate to your interviewer is a great thing. Obviously playing them isn’t unfun either. For a long time I was lacking in knowledge of MMORPGs. I’d played a few for a little bit, Anarchy Online in particular. People were routinely asking about them at interviews so before I went to go interview for Monolith to work with them on one of their MMORPGs I bought Star Wars Galaxies and played it on and off for about a week to make my knowledge current.

Yeah, I know why that was a bad choice now, but at the time I thought it might be the MMORPG for me since it is science-fiction-y. Later I would get into World of Warcraft for a few months. At the time though, SWG was terrible. Buggy as heck and I would go off to do a mission and end up fighting a well defended… Flag……

Yeah. Awesome. I’ll keep killing creatures and …flags. What fun.

Worst $50 ever.

So you might make some mistakes if you try to pick games without researching the current state of them in the case of MMORPGs. Unfortunately the 800 pound gorrilla hanging off of my back has always been Madden. For a long time this has been the easiest game to guess that an interviewee might own and then discuss. Which is one of the reasons why I bought it. Yeah it turned out to not be terrible like SWG, however, it is also fun to see the Eagles win games.

And finally that 800 pound gorilla can get off of my back during the next interview. I’ll tell them about Madden. I’ll tell them about how the framerate isn’t consistent in the 360 version, and that the players sometimes seem stuck in funny positions on the line waiting for the snap.

Most importantly, you have to know these games too, especially ones that the company is worked on that you’re interviewing for. Check out the reviews online first, though. They’re going to help you pick out which ones are worth it. I should have done it with Star Wars Galaxies.

You slide it lovingly into your Xbox 360, awaiting the awesome extreme legume action like you’ve never seen it before, complete with the special collector edition marketing manager interview and then the game breaks. Maybe the legume eaters are
breaking the rules of the tournament and web forum trolls are up in arms about this. Maybe John Madden himself demanded the game change the rules, but most likely it was an error in the testing stage of development. Any statements to the contrary from the publisher are baloney, of course.

If you’re lucky the publisher and developer will either patch the game or recall it, If you’re not lucky they’ll say this is as it was intended and encourage you to buy the version released next year.

Why is Perfect Madden Zero broken? Who failed you?

Most likely, we’re seeing a combination of failure here. On the part of several testing teams, and possibly a developer. Plus some lower testing standards. I think to some extent all parties involved have lowered their standards, deliberately or not, with the lower quality of their testing teams. Which isn’t to say the testers themselves are entirely to blame. I think it has something to do with how they are treated, how much they are paid, what their expectations are coming into the job, and how long they work at whatever particular testing facility.

I’m going to address these issues in order, since I don’t think I’ve done so coherently in the past. Once again I’m going to prefix this with the warning that most of what I’m saying only applies to larger companies, smaller developers/studios can have better testing procedures
and treat their staff better.

Tester Treatment
As I’ve alluded to in the past, most testing facilities at larger companies consist of large rooms
full of consoles and televisions piled high on cheap desks (sometimes even folding tables). Developers I know describe seeing their publisher’s testing facilities as scary darkened
halls of smelly masses. This sounds like an exaggeration but it really isn’t that far from the truth. Windows are often covered – when I worked in the northwest United States I would often get to work before the sun rose and leave work without having seen it all day – to prevent glare. Free drinks are provided, and your coworkers are usually friendly.

I know some people will think I’m silly for even mentioning this, though I feel I must. For whatever reason, due to cheapness perhaps, the toilet paper in the facilities is very often the coarsest sandpaper available. I hope this is not indicative of misguided attempts to improve tester efficiency.

Pay
Most beginning game testers are paid around nine to thirteen dollars an hour. I don’t think anyone can properly live off of this kind of pay, especially if they are on-call, especially if they live in the areas around these facilities (expensive burbs), or if they don’t live around them, they have to commute and own a car with the required costs involved. Bussing in to Microsoft each day from Seattle would require waking at 4AM. Naturally if the tester ops for health care (which everyone should, this isn’t a very relaxing job), their pay will be further reduced.

Job Expectations
One of the few things Major Nelson says that I agree with is that games are like sausage, you don’t really want to find out how they’re made, you just want to enjoy the end result. Most people interview for these jobs thinking they will be cake, you go in for work, you play some games, you go home happy. If you are a mole man and can live without the Sun’s rays for a few months at a time, please do go work in the northwest at one of the testing facilities there.

In reality the testing is fun if you are like me and enjoy making sure that what somebody buys is a finished product. I do not believe all of my past-coworkers have shared this love of bug hunting, and that the end-product may have suffered as a result. Even crap like Sims: Urbz in the City needs good QA. Somebody enjoys the Urbz, for the sake of their happyness, you have to pretend that you like it as well.

Length of Job
As I’ve mentioned in the past, at some companies you might notice your coworkers magically disappearing one day. Turnover rates are ridiculously high in many larger facilities. Sometimes this is good, sometimes they’re throwing out good experience in favor of cheapness. I have seen some excellent coworkers disappear one day, never to return, with no explanation from management. Others clued me in, these folks were fired when there “weren’t enough games to test”. Which really means “we’re all entirely disposable.”

I believe that this policy of replaceable tester units contributes to the lack of quality in many games. If you throw out the accumulated experience of these testers, don’t let them know up-front what to expect, treat them like dirt, and pay them as such, you will have a lower quality product in the end.