But before that I will answer Flame's question: The emblem is already given out, but the chance to get it is over. You had to participate in Scavenator back in septemeber 2007.

So yep, today I had my first day of formation, which means we didn't test any games yet. Today I basicaly got paid (yep, paid formation) to walk around the place, see where the things were and how it was and to talk and read on internet. I will explain how my day went, but without giving much details since I am in the impossibility to divulg any information concerning any projects, insides, etc. sadly for you, because I'm pretty damn excited about the little of what I saw over there.

Anyway, wednesday, I went to bed at 10:30PM. Quite a change from my usual 2AM sleep you may think, but I honestly didn't sleep at all. Almost. I slept a big 2 hours if even so. I went to bed at 10:30, at 11:30 I smoked a cig because I still couldn't sleep. At 12:30AM I finished my ongoing mission in Metal Gear Ac!d and then at 1AM I went to bed once again, finding no sleep up until around 3AM. I got up at 5:30 by the way. Now, I'm only 5 minutes away from the job by car (if it's even 5 minutes), I start at 8AM, so why did I get up at 5:30? Because I like having the time to relax, gently wake up and have a couple of coffees.

Anyway, 7AM, I start my car since I need to heat up my old ass '89 Toyota Tercel, and winter holds a grude against my car, and my car holds a grudge against me. See that: All ready, got my stuff, 7:25 I go to my car.. the engine had stoped. Of course, it had to be today. But I simply took the key out, retried and it started, had to wait a few minutes before actually leaving.

I'm on my way now, got there around 7:35 (yep, it's that close to where I live) so I get there, find a parking, and chill with the other new guys. Before entering the big two doors leading to the inside, we went in a little room where we signed alot of papers concerning a law about divulgation and leaking of information, what we couldn't bring past the two doors, etc and etc.

Anyway, finally past them doors which are secured, we walked inside. Many testing rooms awaited us, we visited only one of them as we were not allowed to the other rooms, much like we are not allowed anywhere but our assigned testing room and the gaming room/cafeteria on our breaks. I knew this stuff was highly confidential, but much more than I ever thought. I could tell you alot of things that would make you afraid to try to break into a testing center if you didn't work there, but I won't, just in case lol.

Anyway, our formation mainly consisted of having us visit the place, get to know where we could go, what we had to do, how things would get done. What I really liked is that respect is probably the biggest thing around there. Don't even try to make a not-so good joke about something that isn't really funny, cause you'll get kicked out quite rapidly. The ambiance of the people otherwise looked familiar to the movie Grandma's Boy, where everyone is overexcited and overlyfriendly lol. Which is pretty cool.

Anyway, we learned how they work over there and the specifications of our job. and we had to take yet another test which is rather easy if you ask me, but hey, that's cool with me. They even gave me a coffee mug with their logo on it. I loved seeing the coffee machines, I need them.

Overall, testing games is about 10 000 times more complicated than we all ever could think of unless you did it before, but once you know what to do it's probably quite easy. Much like any job, once you learn it, you get the hang of it. Tomorrow we're learning some more stuff and we will learn how they report the bugs and everything, therefore tomorrow is THE day where the real training will start.

Overall that's about it for now, I did see projects I never thought would be here, where I live. That's just amazing. But of course there are of every genre of games. I won't say more than this about it.

I would say so much more about it but I can't, unfortunately. If only you knew how tightly secured and confidential all of this is, you'd understand why I can't say more, even if it's about the industry itself without giving names. All I said probably is around the absolute maximum I can tell. Plus, I wouldn't want to ruin our gaming hobbie! So tell ya this, one day you'll play a game and while you don't know it, in my head I might be like "man..if you knew the number of bugs I had to report in that game" lol. I probably could talk about already released games that got tested here, but I'm still just too unsure about it. I'll get more info as it goes on and hopefully, if I'm lucky, I'll be permanent and have that job for a long time, if everything goes well and I don't suck at testing too much.