Issue : People : Mission Impossible

A little while ago my lady wanted to quit her job as a chef over at one of those beach resorts. She had been wanting to do it for while, but as we are both journeymen in our respective industries, her in food, and me in games, she had to hang around her gig while I found another, as earlier I had reached the end of my time at the workplace I was at.

We have been operating as nomads for years now. We both show up at a place, learn what we need to learn, meet who we need to meet, but always comes the day where either we realize its time to move on, they realize its time for us to move on, or the environs require us to move on, because there is nothing else for us to learn there.

Sometimes when her hooptie breaks down I drop her off and pick her up there. The grounds look like the San Diego other people talk about, the people that don't live here on a day to day basis. People were smiling, on ski-doo's and shit, and in those paddle boats that are like two seater bikes on water. Sun reflecting on water, flip flops, and random badmitton games. That kind of stuff.

Which was a weird juxtaposition to see against what she told me goes on in the kitchen. The price of staying in a cabana on the resort is exclusive to the MTV Cribs and my super sweet sixteen parent crowd. So when they order something they want it fast and want it perfect, as that is how I imagine they justify paying all that money for a place to sleep at in a different city.

So my experience was totally spoiled by her, because when I looked at the people smiling in the paddle boats I saw them yelling at her about a steak they sent back that they ordered to be cooked burnt, and she against her wants for the meat burnt it for them. A hard thing for a chef to live with.

Or the people on ski doo's that loved standing at the pass while she is expediting to let her know all about how their best bud Gordon Ramsey would plate broccolli, just to let her know that although they themselves do not cook, they know everything about it, or at least more than her.

So that time came where she decided it was time to move on. The only problem was she was worried about confronting her bosses about the move, so she hatched a plan. At the end of a shift she snuck into the general managers office while he was giving a tour. Her plan was to write her resignation letter on his computer, print it out on his printer, slip it into a manila envelope she would obtain from his shelf, leave it on his desk, leave, and never come back.

She had gotten this far into the letter, "Dear sir. It is with great urgency that I must inform you" before realizing that she had not checked to see if the printer worked. So she opened another document in order to run a test print, the test doc just said "H," it printed out just fine, she sat the test page on his desk.

But just as she returned to her resignation document she heard voices making their way to the office, she bolted. When she came back the next day no one said a thing about it, and they usually gossip about everything.

When she told me about this botched sortie I said that there is a chance that her manager may think there is a disgruntled worker leaving vague threats on his computer, and signing them with "H." She said, "Good, now that I still have to work there maybe it will keep him honest."

Oh, and here are some gaming industry jobs for all the journeymen out there.

The Default Tester Mixtape V.13

Issue : Games : RAGE

I started playing PC games a long time ago. My mom bought our first PC to write her dissertation, it needed to be connected to the internet so she could send stuff back and forth to her professors. She put it in the living room, where it sat for months as a display piece when she was at work.

Back then computers represented boring stuff like typing homework or learning things, I knew games existed on this machine, I had even stuck my toe in at school by playing Oregon trail and Zork, but it wasn't something I imagined a kid like me being able to interact with all the time. It was a rich mans drug. 

Nobody knew what to do with it. It's hard to believe now, but back then computers were not even close to as big a deal as they are now, even though pretty much everything that makes the internet what it is today was in there. You needed a person in the know to show you what it could do.

The person that showed me what computers could do was my buddy "Noodles." I met him through skateboarding, and we also both happened to be obsessed with video games and comics. When he heard there was a computer in my home he brought over a shoe box full of floppy disks and CD's. I watched him install all of these games with funny names, stuff like "Kings Quest," "Hexen," and "Doom 2." 

He showed me how to launch them, I asked him how I would be able to play without a controller, he just laughed and said he was going home. I asked him why he didn't want to play a few games before he left, he said to load up "Doom 2," and don't worry, we will be playing together all night. That was the end for me.

I am almost done with Rage, and it breaks my heart. What happened? I never thought I would see the day that ID software would consider the PC version of a game an afterthought. The game looks pretty, on a console. The PC version seems to only care about character models and mad jukes. 

The UI is a mess, the video options are barely customize-able and suffer from Goldilocks complex, without the just right bed. And what story? The game has you collecting junk to sell, actual junk, not junk to assemble things, just random junk.

The modern fallout titles feel more like iD atmosphere, the modern CS/COD titles feel more like iD combat, the modern Serious Sam titles feel more like the iD spirit of fun for fun's sake. This should not be, I feel as if iD is too big to fail. But time marches, I believe in iD, they'l get it done.