AMEN! Every game is different. I think the main testing plan should and used to be, play the game! Try to think of many different things that users might do, but most importantly, just play the thing. Play the heck out of it.

There was a time I would have faught for this more. That time was back when I thought that a single fail could knock you out of review. Since it takes more than one fail to knock you out, I am ok with it. If it crashes for you it fails. Now if you seem to fail a lot of games because of this you might check your xBox for problems ;-)

Loco: What if the crash was the result of YOUR xBos having a problem? I remember when Valcary (spelling) was being reviewed, one of the players ended up having crashes right and left during playtest. The dev tried and tried to reproduce and couldn't. No other players could repo either. It ended up that the testers xBox was screwed. Once he got ...

Meta: The Microsoft guidelines state that the user needs to be able to pick up any controller to play the game. I think in that context it means that the first controller to start the game needs to be any controller and you covered that. I do also think, however, that if you are not going to allow the 2nd, 3rd etc players control the menu you ...

I would go along with this as long as it truly is not reproducible. If it happens to you over and over again, but you just can't figure out what triggers it, then that might still be considered a fail. If it happens to more than one person, but neither can figure out when or where (think random crashes), then that is almost definately a ...

I don't think anyone has pointed this out yet: If a not-logged in controller can use the profile of a different controller (to be convenient), then Rock Band would fail! Just about every time I play rock band with my guitar, the drums take my xBox Live account. Probably because of the port it is plugged into. If I want to control the ...

Agreed. Failure should be based on properly interpreting the requirements that Microsoft has published, not on someone's opinion. There are a couple of statements in the requirements that are a little vague. One of those is that the user can't be "confused" by what the game does. This is one of those areas we have to be smart and ...

I just can't seem to get the normal maps to work right. I am sure I am just missing something. I have a cube based object mesh. In the images below keep in mind that the balconies shows are separate meshes. The mesh pictured with the material shown is a cube that I have stretched. So I have this mesh and have a texture mapped to it. ...

I have created a model and defined several clusters of polygons to try to make it easier to apply the textures the way I want them. I am having trouble getting it to work the way I want. I have applied the DX9 Phong.fx real time shader to the cluster. That worked. With the cluster still selected I click on Properties / Texture Projection / ...

Anyone who has read my posts before knows that I tend towards relaxing the tests and such rather than making them harder, but in this case I am totally on the other end of the spectrum. If it crashes it is a fail unless there is nothing the developer can do about it. I don't know of any case that the dev can't put try/catch around ...