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Death Game Quality Assurance

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Death Game Quality Assurance

By: Andrew Rowe
Narrated by: Dina Pearlman, Travis Baldree, Yoshi Amao, Andrew Call, Fiona Rene, Judy Alice Lee, Adam McArthur, Jalen Gilbert
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About this listen

Working as a quality-assurance grunt in the gaming industry sounds like fun, right? You get to play the coolest new games before anyone else. And all you have to do is to find, reproduce, and report bugs before the last pixel is locked in and the games are launched to an eager public. Sure, there’s the unpaid overtime, the office politics, and the ever-present threat of layoffs. But you get to game!

But when a small third-party testing team is assigned to work on Blade Skill Online - a highly anticipated virtual reality MMORPG - they quickly find that some bugs are more serious than others, and some truly insidious features are "working as intended".

If our intrepid QA team wants to survive the launch cycle, they're going to have to break this game. Hard.

©2021 Andrew Rowe (P)2022 Audible Originals, LLC. Fantasy
All stars
Most relevant
not listed to something like this before. Good story but various volumes so difficult ro listen at bedtime.

something different

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Writing the entire book as a chat log and having a full cast perform it is a fun idea, but the weird format combined with various over the top characters made it very hard for me to get into the story, and I dropped the book. I guess it's not my kind of humor.

The format wasn't for me

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I really liked the feeling of this one. the characters where likeable and felt like a gang of goofs. and all the references made the read so much fun! for a 2 hour story I hade a fun time

fun but no masterpiece

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Much like How to Defeat a Demon King in Ten Easy Steps, Rowe has crafted an extremely fun story that both pokes fun of and embraces the source material he is parodying. I'm a huge Sword Art Online fan despite the many problems and it's deeply fun to see them made fun of in such a way whilst still managing to tell a complete story. It's not the only series parodied here but it is clearly the major one and it's done in a great way where it never feels meanspirited, I just love the scenario of believable QA testers actually analysing some of the bizarre game design that works great in the story but realistically would never fly!

The cast are all great, and there are plenty of laugh out loud moments as well as just enjoyable conversations and dynamics between the characters. I usually don't go for sound effects in my audiobooks but they never felt too annoying here and there was one in particular toward the end that definitely got me good with how unexpected but funny it ended up being. As with Demon King this book is chock full of great references and jokes that I'm sure I'll end up catching even more of on a second listen.

Rowe really puts his background in the game industry to use with some interesting insights and detailed descriptions of what QA is actually like compared to what people think it is. I'm not that knowledgeable about the industry but I'm sure those who are will get some great enjoyment out of some of the lines. The line about someone being in QA despite knowing how to code and the requirement of multiple years experience for even basic positions definitely hit home.

It's honestly very impressive to me that despite referencing the SAO series and game industry so much you could easily enjoy this book with no knowledge of either. A lot of the bugs/features the characters mention are taken straight from SAO, but used in some original fun ways and John is a great portal into the world for newcomers.

Can't recommend this audiobook enough, especially if you're familiar with SAO. It's great that this has come out just as the Sword Art Online books have started hitting audible too. I hope Rowe continues writing great witty stories like this one alongside his other works.

Short, sweet and absolutely hilarious.

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This is quite an enjoyable little listen - the description should say it all, it's a series of log chats (but voiced, each user with its own recognisable VA) for a QA team that are testing what sounds an awful lot like Sword Art Online. And riffing off a few other things too.

It's free with an Audible subscription at time of writing, and takes up about the same length of time as a good movie - if your interest is piqued, you've got little to lose :D

Simple, Short, and Fun

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