Don’t worry about the Zombie just yet. It will make sense as you read.
It’s not everyone that can say they’ve been lucky enough to have a month off from work. And in relation to this post, I can say that this is “lucky”, with caveats. Time with which to reflect and learn… and play so many computer games that you start feeling like you’re living in some hybrid world between console and reality (though, thankfully no zombies got hurt in the “real” world).

The reason I bring up games is that it appears that, as a tester, I can’t help but still notice things that have not been noticed before; or have been but had nothing done about them. I suppose that’s the joys of being a tester though. You can’t help but notice the little things that just aren’t quite right.

Playing Resident Evil Revelations 2 on the Xbox One: it not only surprised me that there were spelling and grammar mistakes in the letters scattered throughout the game (that are there to pull you further into the story), but that we, my friend Nick and I, were getting achievements that, looking at the stats, only 25% of the people with the game have even got passed the 1st chapter. I’m not going to go into this any more, but it does make me wonder how much of a success it was commercially. Not to mention the playability, repeatability, platform differences and all the non-functional factors that could be looked into in depth.

Resident Evil isn’t the only game that has bugs, either. Playing Overcooked 2: Brand new (well, in the last month), there were places on the where you were unable to retrieve items from as they seemed to glitch and then just become unusable. I find it frustrating, as a tester, that things like this haven’t been picked up. Surely, when people played through the game they managed to get this glitch to happen? The fact that we managed it a number of times in one gaming session (about 2 hours), tells me that this is something that happens often enough that it’s not a one time bug and that we could easily write down the “steps to reproduce”.

Maybe both of these bugs are on some Backlog somewhere, waiting for the developers to have enough time in a sprint to get round to patching the issues; though, in the case of Resident Evil Revelations 2, I wouldn’t expect this to be fixed as it’s now so ‘out of date’.

Anyway, time to get back into the real world and stop the real-life zombies bugs.
/B