Age of Empires 3 crunch time continues to suck up the vast majority of my gaming time.  It's a cool time on the project, the one time when the whole company really comes together to focus on one project.  Everyone from the prototypes, the IT department, and of course the main game team are just beating on the game, playtesting, and finding bugs.

It's been interesting releasing the trial before we finish development.  Typically in the past we release the trial from final code and assets after the game has been put to gold master.  I have "fond" memories of being around the week after AOM went to mastering putting together the trial with a skeleton crew of testers.  This time around though, we decided to do it with a snapshot of the code from a few weeks ago (and we haven't hit gold master yet still). 

This has been good and bad.  On the down side, a lot of bugs and problems fixed in the final game are in the trial... ranging from problems with the game crashing at startup to units with missing or broken art.  There's no excuse for this, we should've caught those bugs, but that's life in development, especially when trying to ship the game proper at the same time.  But there's been an upside too -- getting raw, real feedback from users has been quite helpful in seeing what they think about the UI, the gameplay, the graphics, etc.  In an ideal world that would have been done in a more structured beta process, collecting the feedback in a more coherent way and giving us more time to work on it.  But even without that, it's been a useful process and I can say for certain that last minute changes in the game have been made based on feedback from the trial.

Speaking of stressful situations and clever resolutions to them, I cannot recommend enough this wacky import game:  Osu!  Tatakae!  Ouendan!.

I'm not sure how to do it justice, but it's a cool stylus-based rhythm game for the DS that involves this pep-squad of guys who go around and motivate people to overcome various hardships.  The music is catchy and fun, and the gameplay is fantastically addictive.  It plays perfectly fine on a North American DS and though the text isn't translated the comic-book style narrative is universal and the interface simple enough you can navigate it with no knowledge of Japanese.

In the game, at the start of each mission there is some beleagured person in some difficulty, and they cry out at the top of their lungs, "OUENDAN!!!" which causes the pep squad to appear and help them out.  I've decided this is an excellent tactic to absorb in my day to day life and expect to shout it out at the top of my lungs the next time I get stuck working on a difficult bug.