About 3 weeks ago, we reached zero bugs in the DB. Of course a bug or 2 creped up on us and about 5 days later we hit zero bugs again. I guess you can say that it normally takes about 5 days to go from zero bugs to ZERO bugs. If you are tired and hungry, this is kind of funny. I am, so it is. At this point we declared the game a Release Candidate and submitted the game to CQC. CQC is EA's special task force that reviews the release candidate and determines if it is ready for release. These are players that have not previously tested the game so they are looking at the game with fresh eyes and will hopefully catch anything that the regular QA team missed. CQC of course immediately found 2 problems, one of which was a nasty memory leak that took almost a full week to track down! Eventually we fixed it and made a new version. Of course in the meantime we broke the VOIP system. Thank god for CQC or this would never have been caught and fixed!

In the meantime we have all of the French and German translations in place and have been testing the European build of the game. Since some of you have been asking, yes, the European version of the game is exactly like the US version. None of the blood has been removed and the guns have not been replaced with furry animals or some other PC crap. When you install the Euro version, you can choose English, French or German and if you install in German or French and later you want to play in English, you can make a quick registry change and switch it to any of the 3 languages. I know that being able to play in English is important to some of you.

In the middle of all of this, we went to Germany to host a GO tournament. 16 of Germany's best girl gamers were invited to come and play GO and compete for €500. The gamers that were invited were all members of the zockerweibchen group, which is a big girl gamer clan in Germany. Well, the ladies proved that they are just as good as the boys at FPS gaming. Not only were they good at the game, but they spanked me around for a while before I regained my senses and headed to the bar! Congratulations to KamiKätzchen who jumped from 2nd to 1st in the last round to grab the prize! If you are a pig and want to see pictures of girls playing GO, just check the thumbs.

So, in the meantime CQC continues to test. We suspect that they will approve the version of the game that they are testing now, which puts us track for a March 26 release. This is a few weeks later then originally planned, but the wait will be worth it!

The next step is that we are going to convert our private beta to a public beta test which will be a freely available download. The Beta will feature one map of the game and will be playable online only. There should not be any major issues in the beta test, but if there are we will react quickly to squash them. The feedback that we will get from having tens of thousands of players playing online will be invaluable. Hopefully this beta will be available this week, maybe as early as Wed. News about the beta will be available at the official globalops page.

Now I just need to finish the Japanese, Chinese and Korean versions!

Mike Arkin
Executive Producer
Crave Entertainment