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Classic Games (Games) PC Games (Games)

Hurricane Ivan Hits Gaming Hard 53

Posted by Zonk from the pinballs-are-people-too dept.
Hurricane Ivan's US landfall has affected gamers across the country. The World of Warcraft Beta is still down this week while the data center it's housed in is dried and brought back up. Star Wars Galaxies also experienced outage due to adverse weather conditions. And many thanks to Leon Kiriliuk for alerting us to the Pinball Association Notice that "two-hundred thirty two classic pinball machines and some rare video games were destroyed, including an extremely rare Tattoo Assassins prototype and a sit-down Omega Race!" Update: 09/21 02:33 EDT The World of Warcraft Beta is back up and running with a new patch.
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Hurricane Ivan Hits Gaming Hard More

Hurricane Ivan Hits Gaming Hard

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  • I'm glad it didn't hit as hard as many people were expecting. Many people said that New Orleans was going to be a soup bowl and Mobile Bay was going to be totally obliterated.

    I have a pdf full of pictures of destruction in Pensacola as well that I'd love to link, but I have no hosting that would stand up to /. readers clicking on a link towards the top of the discussion.

    I don't think it hit gaming too terribly hard either as xbox live was still up and running :), except of course Burnout 3 which is always

  • Why not store them in a safer location? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BoomerSooner ( 308737 ) on Tuesday September 21, 2004 @02:01PM (#10310691) Homepage Journal
    Tornadoes are small but I have a redundant backup of all my servers running at a co-loc in chicago. I also backup and put weekly disks in a safe deposit box at my companies bank. The biggest tornado to hit was in May of 1999 and it was only a mile wide (would be an F6 if they thought that wind speeds could get that high). A hurricane is different, they can be as big as Texas. Storing priceless items in the path of a possible hurricane or any other forseeable natural disaster is very short sighted in my opinion.

    The only thing I try to protect in a disaster is the lives of my family and my employees. A good backup/disaster recovery plan may never be needed but where would you be if your business burnt to the ground? Error on the side of caution.

  • another delay (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 21, 2004 @02:30PM (#10311079)
    motherfuckers will use this to delay hl2 again

  • WoW Beta (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 21, 2004 @02:31PM (#10311084)
    The servers are back up and were as of 2130 PST yesterday. From what they told us in the forums the servers had gotten wet and had to be dried out properly and then powered up and tested before allowing the Beta testing to continue.

  • You know... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nekoniku ( 183821 ) <justicek@nOspAm.infosource.info> on Tuesday September 21, 2004 @02:35PM (#10311124) Homepage
    If the worst problem you have all day is that you can't play Star Wars Galaxies, you're having a pretty darn good day.

  • They Aren't Human Casualties, But... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DLWormwood ( 154934 ) <wormwood@nOspAm.me.com> on Tuesday September 21, 2004 @02:47PM (#10311233) Homepage
    ...losing 200+ pinball machines all at once, with only some of the case art being salvagable, is a terrible, terrible thing. With the game format almost extinct, restoring these things is going to be a pain, if not impossible.

    In its own way, it's as bad as if one of the Smithsonian buildings or a Science & Industry museum was destroyed. There's a great deal of technological and popular cultural history that's been lost due to Ivan The Terrible. Ugh.

    • Restoring them would involve only trivial acts of fabrication. It's getting all the specifications that's impossible. However, if you actually understand how the systems work you can rebuild them from the water-damaged system. Pinball machines are not that complicated and they are built mostly from off the shelf parts; solenoids and such. Anything not off the shelf is really easy to build. The greatest loss, really, is the artwork, which especially for a prototype will probably be literally impossible to ge
      • Pinball machines are not that complicated and they are built mostly from off the shelf parts; solenoids and such. Anything not off the shelf is really easy to build.

        Then you disagree with most machine operators who ran these things in arcades. (I know, I've met some of them.)

        Pinball died not due to waning popularity, but operator hostility. Compared with the solid state nature and simple mechanics of even physically intensive games like DDR, pinball machines required a great deal of maintenance to fix p

        • I didn't say it was easy to profitably maintain the pinball machines. I'm just saying they'd be easy to restore, as restoration projects go. There's nothing in the machine that's hard to make yourself. Repairing a pinball machine is time-consuming but not especially difficult. There is no part of a (vintage) pinball machine that I cannot fabricate, locate, or otherwise come up with, except (as I said before) the artwork. Any plastic models that are broken would be difficult but not impossible to pull a mold

  • Quite a loss. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Firehawke ( 50498 ) on Tuesday September 21, 2004 @02:58PM (#10311362) Journal
    That's truly sad. A lot of those are lost permanently as a result-- only MAME romsets left, and MAME can't truly get the feel for such things as a sit-down cabinet for some of these.

    Even worse when some of these are incompleted prototypes that just never made it to the production stage.

  • Pictures of the Tornado (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nuxx ( 10153 ) on Tuesday September 21, 2004 @03:13PM (#10311561) Homepage
    A friend of mine works on the AOL Campus in Dulles, Virginia. On September 17th, 2004, one of his coworkers, Steve Gibson (not of grc.com) captured some images of what I believe is the tornado that caused this damage. The photos can be seen here [nuxx.net], here [nuxx.net], and here [nuxx.net], if anyone is interested.

  • Patch? (Score:4, Funny)

    by isorox ( 205688 ) on Tuesday September 21, 2004 @03:23PM (#10311704) Homepage Journal
    Update: 09/21 02:33 EDT The World of Warcraft Beta is back up and running with a new patch.

    So this patch makes it immune to hurricanes? Wow, that's some funky coding!

  • Meanwhile, in Haiti (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Haiti's president has appealed for aid to help the island in the aftermath of tropical storm Jeanne whose floods have left at least 600 dead. [bbc.co.uk]

    Pinball machine don't matter in the best of times, and they certainly don't matter now. It's going to be long storm season this year.

  • Too bad about the TA machine. I just tried it for the first time 2 weeks ago.

    1. The game is an incredibly blatant Mortal Kombat ripoff. The most trivial details of MK seemed to be copied over.

    2. There's an anachronistic "INSERT COIN" font that sticks out. it's the same font used on the TI-99/4A. Looks horribly out of place compared to the rest of the GUI.

    3. The characters do ridiculous things. One, a Native American seems to do some sort of rain dance each time he wins.

    Too bad I can't get to the boss c
  • I love pinball, and it saddens me that most of the gaming companies that manufactured the games are giving up on it. It's a great mix of fun and skill on a phsical level. I can't believe the pinall market is going the way of the dinosaur. Oh well, at least it's not people that died. :(

  • SWG Galaxies data center picture (Score:3, Informative)

    by RotJ ( 771744 ) on Tuesday September 21, 2004 @07:56PM (#10314498) Journal
    Here's a high-res picture [worldofwarcraft.com] of the SWG data center that was hit by a tornado, as seen in those two cell-phone camera photos on the SWG site. I don't know why it's posted on the WoW site, though.
  • If you are going to put up a datacenter for something that's to run 24/7/365.25 why would you put them somewhere like Florida or in a Tornado Alley?

    Why not in Utah or Minnesota or Sioux Falls South Dakota where the violent storms or floods are less likely?

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