The horror!

Today my friend forced me to go with him to this place he call "Outside". It's a scary place this outside. When I asked him what we would do there he reply "Get some resh air". You know, I'm all for the envoriment and all, I like recycling and stuff. I really dont mind staying here and recycling my air for a few more days. Who knows how much rain forest that would save? But beeing the persistant little bugger as he is (my friend that is), he wouldnt leave me alone until I agreed on go outside with him.

I was also running out of coffee and cigarettes, which had a big influense in me agreeing to go anywhere.

We must have passed atleast 3 grocery stores that probably sold a whole variety of coffee and cigarettes on our way. But could I go in there and buy what I wanted and then go back home again? No. He insisted that we took a longer walk for this "fresh air" thingy.

As windy as it was here today, I'm pretty sure I got an overdose of fresh air. I didnt even have to breath really, just open my mouth and the air just streamed down my lungs whether I wanted or not. Do you know how many cigarettes I have to smoke to make up for all that? Me neither, but I'm sure its atleast a full packet extra the next few days.

But I endured it all. I took comfort in the fact that later today I was having the second phase of the alpha test I'm doing for a big game company.

The alpha test started an hour ago by the way. And guess what I'm doing instead of beeing online and bumping my pixel head against a pixel wall time after time to make sure its solid? I'm sitting here and writing an online blog, that no one will probably even read. Makes sense, no?

Well, let me explain. After the first alpha test the game company had us uninstall the game and downlaod a new version of it. I downlaoded this new version 2 days ago, just to be done in time so when the test server open I can just log in and start banging my head against random stuff in game.

7.54 PM CET (central european time) I started up the game.

Started up the game...

Started up the...

Started...

!!!

What the...!?

11000 Version update failed.

It wont even let me get to where I'm supposed to put my pasword in order to log in. This is annoying, since I checked, double checked, tripple checked everying TWICE yesterday to make sure everything worked out the way it was supposed to. And it did.

So now I'm having to download it all over again and see if that makes a difference. And guess what. It will take about 6-8 hours!

What was that you say? Get a better and faster internet you say? For your information my internet have 24 mb/s download speed! However when downloading the client from Square E... umm I mean from the "Game Company" I'm only able to downlaod about 100 kb/s. Cheap bastards!

Last alpha test I was able to play around 20 minutes out of 4 hours, this time around I'll get to download the client once again, and by the time thats all done the test server is down again.

And people say "You're so lucky to be in the alpha test".

Lucky!??

Lucky is to win the lottery, lucky is to find a bag with lots of money in it that no one is missing. Lucky is the get A on your math test by just guessing all the answers. This is NOT lucky! I'd like to believe I was carefully chosen because of my superior understanding of game mechanics. And maybe because I have given my money to this game company every month for the past 6 years. And now all they are doing is wasting 12 hours of my time every week and call it "alpha test".

You know why most gaming companies dont have alpha tests? Its because they arent so damn cheap, they actually do their alpha test "in house", they hire people and pay them with something I would like to call "money", in order to do the alpha test. Then later on they have a closed beta and an open beta test that they invite certain people to (people like me). The difference between alpha and beta is that the beta version of the game is actually playable, while the alpha test is only stressing both my computer and my nerves.

The only thing good with alpha, is that my alpha account will be valid for closed and open beta as well once they get that far. So I'm seriously considering just skipping this "alpha" and wait til everyone who thinks they're so damn "lucky" to be in alpha to fix the worst bugs, and then I'll just join when the fun starts.

Jerks