So my girlfriend is sitting here playing Joust, earning achievements and bolstering my gamerscore. Before this she was playing Robotron 2040 doing the same thing. Looking through the list of achievements just to find out what needs to be done to unlock them.

This kind of rewarding gameplay is really interesting, she also plays Advance Wars DS for the S-rank medals she gets there.

Obviously not all games have such obvious rewards. A cool gun is rewarding in the way that it kills bad guys, and an unlocked character is rewarding to see a change of style. Solid Snake with a crocodile hat is also another amusing reward if you’ve spent the time to get the hat.

Along the same lines, also in Metal Gear Solid 3 is the ability to get an invisibility cloak if you happen to go through each area shooting the available frogs hidden throughout.

So all these rewards have to mean something. The high-score in a game in my house never meant much. The high score among my friends on Xbox Live is appealing.

I’ll keep catching the frogs in Metal Gear Solid 3, but I keep wishing I got a fruit salad like in Battlefield 2 for catching them all in addition to the satisfacton of enhanced sneaking. My girlfriend will keep playing Astropop now that she has gotten all of the interesting achievements in Joust.

Somewhere there is a tester sitting in his cave, living in partner net making sure that each of these achievements is activated by the right trigger in the game. Another makes sure that the toast pops up with the right message when the achievements are activated.

The focus on achievement satisfaction and other pretty end-user elements of the 360 UI shows us exactly what kind of testing the console gets. The 360 routinely locked up for a short period twice during the path from system turning on to Robotron. This isn’t an uncommon occurence So with the focus on end-user happyness you break…end user happyness!

Test everything equally and treat your testers like useful people instead of a disposable value proposition and maybe you’ll have better testing. Metal Gear Solid 3 hasn’t locked up on me once, neither has my Playstation 2. I realize that other people have had these problems, however I know far more people who have had problems with their 360.

Anyway, I’ll keep looking for little tiny frogs…

Anyway, today the USB sound box in a tasty plastic shell started shutting off randomly during use so I made use of the Fry’s return plan, visited my local Comp USA which is liquidating their entire stock, and picked up the M-Audio Fast Track USB. Which definitely works fine.

Just serving out the warning from buying PPA, intl’s pacific rim dollar store trash.

I should explain that console manufacturers certify games (certification testing) before they allow them to be released. So what this means is not that the game is any fun at all – believe me, many games you will test are horrible, wretched titles that need to go back to the swamp in new jersey from which they arose – just that the game starts at the title screen when you press the start button. There are a number of other requirements for certification, these make up the Technical Certification Requirements (TCR/TRC, both are the same). Separately, the game is also certified for assurance that the game is functional, which is known as (can you guess?) functionality testing. Functionality testing often pays less, and is more demanding. Though you’re more likely to play the game with functionality testing than you are with certification testing.

So, you’ll see certification testing at console manufacturers, like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. However, studios/developers that make games often also check the game before it gets to the console manufacturer. It costs developers/publishers money to send the games through certification testing at the console manufacturers, so the developer and publisher will test it beforehand.

This is all relative of course, I am treated very well at my current QA position. Mostly due to the fact that I have managed to get work with a smaller developer. Besides being the most charming Quality Assurance Engineer on the planet, there are other good skills for interviewing for this kind of position too. Ahem, ordered paragraph list, please!

1. Know some games you like, beyond just “Metal Gear Solid is awesome!”. Talk about how you think that perhaps Hideo Kojima should have gone a little bit easier on the story arc and made it less confusing. Or about how Halo 2 has obvious Level of Detail errors during the cutscenes. People you talk to at your prospective employer will want to hear about your real interest in games, if they don’t hear it, they will think you’re just there because you think the job is easy (regardless of you saying exactly the opposite). You must sound interested and well-prepared.
2. Along with the LoD errors in Halo 2, mention other things you’ve noticed in games that seem to be broken, like the time you fell through the world in Grand Theft Auto 3. Or how Doom 3 had a monster closet where the AI failed and the monster stood there taking fire until he died without responding. Stuff like this is real good fodder for talking during the interview.
3. You may get asked ridiculous questions. How do you test a stapler? How do you test a chair? Et cetera. This is (in my opinion) totally useless for actually finding out if you can test anything. People think that questions like this mean they’re smarter for asking them because they read about it in some fancy interviewing book. These people are morons (in my opinion). This may be useful for finding out how well you deal under the pressure of being asked a bogus question while working under pressure.
4. Don’t dress well unless you’re interviewing for a testing position on an IBM game. Jeans and a slightly fancy shirt are OK. A suit is too much. Obviously everything should be clean and have no visible stains/cat hair/stink like pot. Please also shower before the interview and put on deodorant.
5. Know what you’re getting into. QA is not easy. The lowest paying and first jobs with QA are the ones where you only test for functional crashes, this is where you will sit in a cave with 60 other sweaty testers playing Barney’s Cookie Eating Adventure for 8 hours a day until the game won’t crash anymore after it has been rejected and sent back to testing 40 times. You may get stuck with this kind of testing no matter what you do if all the other positions are fully staffed.
6. Arrive early, bring a Nintendo DS or something to play whilst you wait, especially if you get nervous around interviews. It’ll also give you something to talk about with anyone who walks by and inquires about what game you’re playing.
7. It’ll help if you’ve done some work outside of testing, especially anything else game related. I write (terrible) reviews for various games on web sites, and maintain various open-source game projects. These are also good talking fodder, and especially good for filling your resume before you have a lot of testing experience.
8. Take any water that is offered to you. Don’t drink red bull or something else that will make you edgy.
9. Have fun with your interviewers, if you can crack some jokes, do it as long as your audience is receptive.
10. You may be asked to demonstrate your testing skills in some way. I can tell you that I’ve been shown prerecorded game play of obviously unfinished games and been asked to report errors I’ve seen. Don’t worry, the errors in these are obvious. Real testing generally doesn’t have such obvious errors, especially if you are going for a publisher/TRC, TCR approval position. Developers usually iron out really big stupid errors before they get to that point unless they are under extreme pressure from their publishers to get things to certification. I’ve also been given an actual in-test game and asked to test it, this is actually easier than the video tape version in general.