Summer Has Finally Ended

Posting has been light as of late, but I'm glad to say that while Summer is officially over, so is our ridiculous summer in QA. Since, as a company, we try to submit about 90% of our titles between the months of June and September, needless to say, saying it was crazy is an understatement. But it's appears to be finally over. I helped get SmackDown Wii out the door in early August and it passed Nintendo of America first try with Wi-Fi (I don't think too many other publishers can say that). The two other projects I was working on our now out the door as well as of today. August saw us work some crazy overtime but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel and Fall should be significantly less stressful.

On the other hand summer was as usual, light on releases, so I was thankful for that. I finally crossed the 15k GamerScore threshold thanks mostly to Civilization: Revolution and Lego Indiana Jones. Civ:Rev was a lot of fun and hope to back to again soon. This is saying a lot because I absolutely loathe real-time strategy games. This game was fun and accessible and did away with a lot of micro-managing. The game was deep enough for me to feel that my decisions, for better or worse, were actually affecting my society without burying me in data and options. Lego Indiana Jones was a blast to play even though I was uninterested in the Star Wars games after playing the demo. A lot of the achievements were a grind but most were cleverly named and the humor throughout the game kept me motivated.

Xbox Live Arcade also saw a lot of releases in August. I started playing Braid and absolutely loved it until a save killing bug popped up and wiped my data. Bionic Commando was awesomely retro and brutally difficult. Castle Crashers is beautiful and humorous, but the same bug popped from Braid and I'm waiting for the patch. Needless to say, I will be returning to all of these games soon.

I just picked up Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise, mostly because the original was a guilty pleasure and they priced it at only $40, I could not pass this one up. The game was everything I hoped for: more adorable pinatas, more environments, more everything but the same addicting game play with a few new twists. However, a word of warning: watch out for Hemlock! After cultivating a healthy garden of pinatas (some of whom I had become quite attached to), I became afflicted with a massive outbreak of Hemlock. This weed spreads incredibly fast, attracts pinatas like nerds to boobs and makes them poop sour candy when they eat it. After about ten minutes my entire garden population was decimated; all of my pinatas became sick faster than I could help and when I ran out of money, Dastardos swooped in and killed them all. This was one of the few times I absolutely despised autosave.

In the end, I skipped Too Human and Force Unleashed. I'll probably borrow them from friends, but with the likes of Fable II and Fallout 3 coming out, who knows when I'll get to them.

Oh, and go buy de Blob if you own a Wii. It's awesome and I want to work on more games like this