Jorb Get

So as of last week, I landed the job at Namco, and man.

Understand a bit where I'm coming from here. I've never had a job I genuinely looked forward to going to. Ever. I've had jobs I enjoyed (Bang & Olufsen sales associate), but there was still a sense of "Okay, this is work, and I do it to survive. This isn't who I am or anything I really personally identify myself with." The guy who came home at the end of the day wasn't necessarily the same guy who worked at the office.

At Namco, that really seems to be the case. I genuinely enjoy going in every morning, which is pretty foreign to me. I'm never in a hurry to get home. It's not a job I'll have any trouble volunteering to work overtime for, and it's a trip to be able to tell people what I do for a living and be pretty happy communicating that information.

Moral of the story, I guess, is "find a job you enjoy doing". You do that, and suddenly stuff just seems to fall into place.

It's a bit weird to say, though. I've always been sort of perpetually used to just working whatever I can while pursuing whatever pop-culture hobby had my fancy at the moment. Generally that's videogames, but I had a pretty good fling with film a while back and there's always been some solid music on the periphery. Never really bothered to even consider mixing the two, though. Always figured it was one of those perpetually out of reach things. So to get up in the morning and walk into Namco -- and get paid to do it -- is something of a dream come true.

I wish I had something negative to say about it so far, like how you think it's gonna be all roses and sunshine and it turns out to be this oppressive work environment where you're treated like shit and stuck doing something you hate, but, uh...No, it's pretty much roses and sunshine.

Don't get me wrong: You have to work. In fact, if you're not neck-deep in the culture and generally in love with it, I'm not sure how you'd be able to last there. Either this is totally your bag, or the job is hell on earth. You've got to love testing buggy stuff, doing the same thing over and over and over (and staying 12 hour days to do it), have a very high tolerance for sitting on your ass repeating the same steps over and over to replicate something, and a good grasp of the English language to top it off. Already some of the new guys are grumbling about writing "another fucking text bug", and I'm sitting there going "Jesus dude, don't even say that kind of shit near me. I'm loving every second of this. Maybe you haven't had to work some of the crap jobs I have; either way, I'll write text bugs 12 hours a day if it means I get to stay here." And I mean it.

We'll see if I'm singing the same tune 3 months in, but honestly I'm so not worried about that that I haven't even given it any real consideration. If I find myself hating this job down the road, I should probably just drive out into the desert and become a crazy homeless drifter or something, because clearly nothing will ever work out and there is something deeply miswired in my brain. If I ever start whining about this job, it's all over. I could have a job receiving blowjobs and I'd eventually start complaining about the hours or the use of teeth or something.

The only thing that'll take some getting used to is the steady hours, but at this point, the more the better, so bring on the 70 hour weeks.

Dammit

So I just got back from an interview at Namco to become a tester, and while I think I made a good impression personality and work-ethic wise, they had a lot of questions focusing on modern console experience.

All my consoles are across the country and have been for a year, so no dice there, which I had to cringe and admit. I've got my portables and tons of PC experience, but yeah. That may have shot me in the foot.

I find out tomorrow so we'll see.

Retroactivate

Like a whole bunch of people, I grew into a gamer in the 90's and was a bilingual student. You had your console goodies on the one side and then there was always that friend who had the cool dad that bought the family a badass computer. This was the era where things like sound cards and CD drives were still first-class gear, and you generally had to exit out of windows and into DOS if you wanted to play anything.

It was also a golden age for First Person Shooters, where you had Doom 1 & 2, Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem 3D, Rise of the Triad, Heretic, Hexen, Blood, Shadow Warrior, and Quake all landing within the space of 4 years (and who can forget Redneck Rampage?) The shareware scene was alive and well, there was no such thing as DRM, and the game industry hadn't quite exploded to the levels it would reach in 2001 or so, so the hobby still had some undercurrents of counterculture floating around.

Now we've kinda come full circle, and a whole stack of games from that era can be purchased via Steam, particularly from the id Super Pack. Problem is, modern day computers generally won't run these things like they should, and they haven't really aged very well besides.

So when I bought the pack, the first thing I tried to figure out was how to get these old games up to modern-ish standards without drastically changing the core gameplay. Doom and its derivatives were easy enough to pull off with zDoom, but recently I've been having a lot of fun plinking about with Quake 1 using an engine mod called Dark Places. The basic necessities are there; you can run the game in windows, it adds widescreen and high resolution support, etc. But the real fun is jacking the graphics of a 12 year old game up to absurd levels and seeing what it looks like. Check out Quake 1 with HDR Lighting! (click for full size)





More screenshots here.