How the Hell is it September Already?

In my last post I wrote how I was listening to two great progressive rock albums by Steely Dan and Supertramp. Continuing in that tradition I’m now listening to Closer to the Edge by Yes. Wikipedia says that this album is considered by many to be the high point of the prog movement. It certainly is out there. The title track is 18 minutes long, and has recordings of birds. It’s not as lame as it sounds though. Maybe by the end of this post I’ll be able to give you a full impression.

Soooooo, lets see, what’s happened since August 19th? Shit. Let me distil this into micro sound bytes:

Devil May Cry, Sins of a Solar Empire, FIFA ’08, Gears of War, Marvel Ultimate Alliance, Ghost in the Shell.

Mmmm, that was fun.

The big surprise of the last few weeks has been my quality assurance class. I thought it was going to be pretty easy, and I suppose it is, but our homework has consisted of finding bugs in games. These are existing games, not games in development. This is actually really hard. For the first assignment I was able to find five bugs in Fallout 3. I didn’t find them after the fact, I knew about them before hand. Some of them I had experienced only a couple of times and only knew about only because I had logged well over 200 hours in the game. The second assignment tasked us with finding 10 glitches in a different game. I managed to find only three in Marvel Ultimate Alliance. Regardless of what grade I get at least I was reminded of what a fun game it is. I think I’ll try to beat it this weekend.

The real cool surprise is that my teacher may be getting us “field trips” to play test real games at local game companies. Some of these will be companies you would have heard of, and games you are anxiously waiting to play. When I heard this news I kept it cool of course but inside I squealed like a girl. An excited young girl.

So here we are at the end of the post and I haven’t finished the album because my wife started watching Lost. I didn’t want to interfere with her experience, so I’ll let you know how it is next time.