Seeing a game in the late stages of development is always fascinating for me.  All the features & content are basically in and it's just a matter of a ruthless battle between the tide of incoming bugs and the rate at which the bugs can get fixed.  There is something exciting about just having all the rest of the game settled out and you can just focus, like the proverbial arrow shot from the bow, on squashing bugs.

I always mentally liken each bug to a detective case.  You start out basically patrolling the streets like a beat cop.  Usually the problems are highly apparent, easy to find and often to fix.  There may be a flood of them and it may sometimes be overwhelming, but when your team is cranking out hundreds a day you get a real sense of bringing order to things.

Over time though, the bad guys get a lot trickier.  Some are subtle problems, entrenched in positions of power where fixing them might break things even worse.  Most of them, though, just get harder to find.  Whether it takes a more complex simulation state, or some rare conjunction of network packets and system hardware, the percentage of bugs you know exist but just plain cannot reproduce starts to go up.  This is when I start to think feel like the real "detective work" begins.  Each bug leaves clues behind... its symptoms, how it occurs, etc.  Sometimes you can piece those clues together into a solid case and catch a really elusive bug, and that's incredibly satisfying.  The worst ones are like the serial killers of the bug world.  You know they are out there, you know they are going to strike again, but they elude every attempt to track them down. 

Another dev I know said "you never find all the bugs, you only find bugs with a frequency above a certain level".  We put many many thousands of man-hours of test into our games, but in the first week the game is out there are millions of man-hours suddenly poured into the game.  Let's just say its a very nervous time for any game developer, when it gets opened up to the wild...

Anyways, Age of Empires 3 is really in those final phases now.  Being not on the project, my contribution is more analytical for gameplay stuff, and of course helping find bugs.  One particularly amusing bug I found the other day was when I played back a specific record game I had made, after destroying an enemy trade post the event somehow replayed over and over, raising the level of my Home City over and over again.  It was quite amusing.  But the idea of the infinite Home City kind of stuck in my head... I guess I like city metaphors (see my obsession with urban crime games).  So now I think of all of us game developers as manning the precints of the infinite home city, keeping the streets safe for the civilians who play our games.

Speaking of urban crime... I'm a huge fan of the TV show "The Shield", and one of the voice actors in Age of Empires 3 is from the show.  Some of the sound guys & designers knew I was a fan and recorded me a special message from him.  That definitely made my day! 


I've renewed my determination to get at least one of my characters to 60 in World of Warcraft instead of just leveling a zillion alts.  I'd gotten a few Horde characters up into the mid-40s but now that my original guild is getting into high-end raiding I'm suddenly jealous.  There is so much content to see in the game!  I'm at 53 with my Mage now and still seeing cool looking new zones like Azshara.

On the single-player front, I've been enjoying playing both Sid Meier's Pirates! on the XBox and Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana on the PS2. 

Pirates! seems vastly more suited for console play than it ever was on the PC, and is just as addictive as it was when I played it on the C64 back in the 80s.  Plus, my 4 yr old son Xavier and I have a blast with it, shouting "yar" at each other every time we capture a ship. 

Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana is semi-traditional J-RPG fare, but there has been kind of a shortage of "normal" J-RPGs lately as opposed to (also quite enjoyable) tactical RPGs.  If you can't stand typical J-RPG plotlines and cute anime characters, definitely stay away, but I still dig that stuff.  It's all done in gorgeous 2D, which I have to say is quite a refreshing change of pace.  It is also the most crafting-oriented RPG I've played in a long time, which appeals to my programming brain.  Overall, quite enjoyable.