

Fear and Loathing in the Mess Hall Complex 147
Flynnhustler writes: "Our upstart videogame culture site, Robot Street Gang, has just posted a new story by seasoned videogame writer Peter Olafson. The story, Stuck, is a
first person account of Olafson's tortuous attempts to beat the PSOne game Alien Resurrection.
If you've ever read his Game Theory columns in the New York Times or his oft linked San Jose Mercury-News piece about gaming after Sept. 11, you
know that Olafson takes a very personal approach to the exeperience of gaming."
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Slashdotted already! (Score:2, Offtopic)
F-bacher
Re:Slashdotted already! (Score:1, Informative)
mysql can more than handle a
Re:Slashdotted already! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Slashdotted already! (Score:1, Redundant)
Best Distributed Denial of Service in the business... :)
Too bad we can't solve social ills, kill the DMCA and make Microsoft surrender to the DOJ simply by slashdotting.
Re:Slashdotted already! (Score:2, Troll)
So solve world hunger, dammit! (Score:1)
Re:Slashdotted already! (Score:2)
Anyway, we have seen some great thrashings in the past on websites that were asking for it. But most of the time the webserver and bandwidth solution wasn't set up for taking a large number of request in offpeak hours. But, I remember a CISCO presentation I was at once and they used the slashdot effect as an example for tuning routers for short high capisity loads, only S&M fans enjoy with those beatings.
Sure gaming is personal (Score:3, Interesting)
Gaming plays a major part of peoples recreation these days, cant expect it not to affect some people
Re:Sure gaming is personal (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Sure gaming is personal (Score:3, Funny)
It almost becomes part of your soul (Score:5, Funny)
And think of the life lessons! I know now that if I kill a young girls mother and destroy her town, she'll trust me if I promise to protect her (valuable lesson from FF2).
F-bacher
Re:It almost becomes part of your soul (Score:1)
Jaysyn
Re:It almost becomes part of your soul (Score:1)
Allrighty then, I'll just be moseying down to the next town, if you don't mind.....
(RUN!)
Re:Sure gaming is personal (Score:1)
Re:Sure gaming is personal (Score:1)
Re:Sure gaming is personal (Score:2, Informative)
(another of the many useless pieces of knowledge I have obtained in my travels)
Re:Sure gaming is personal (Score:4, Funny)
Italics.. (Score:2, Offtopic)
Are you sure? (Score:1)
Interesting, I Guess (Score:1)
Server upgrade? (Score:4, Funny)
Ok, so maybe the next time you submit a story on your own site to
Re:Server upgrade? (Score:2)
doesn't say much for the mySql setup.
much better to post a static page as the previous post suggests rather than a dynamic DB driven page
Re: vi [ot] (Score:1)
Link please? (Score:1)
Could it be? (Score:2)
::Drowns in his own irony::
NY Times. (Score:5, Funny)
Is anyone else getting this? Has my IP fallen into some kinda white list for people who actually buy stuff across the net? Since when did Slashdot take to linking paid content?
God, I remember whe... Purchase full text of rant [amazon.com]
Dave
Re:NY Times. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:NY Times. (Score:2)
poor lazy bastered && bank account==null
You should get in then, or just wait until a karma whore post the text later tonight. your third option is OMG..the library! what a concept, a gov't funded repository of information avaliable for your personal and free use.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:NY Times. (Score:2, Informative)
Enjoy!
Re:NY Times. (Score:2)
The paid content wasn't the focus of the Slashdot posting. The paid content was provided as further background information with regard to the author.
Furthermore, Slashdot has linked paid content in the past both in online form as well as using something called a "book review" -- it provided a third-party, descriptive "link" to some content stored as words printed on pieces of processed tree. I find the convenience of this "book" invention rather nice, but I take issue at some of the inherent ARM (analog rights management) features.
Anybody else disturbed by this (Score:2)
Why not document playing a better game, like Metal Gear Solid, or Parasite Eve... or even Puzzle Bobble for God's sake. :)
Re:Anybody else disturbed by this (Score:1)
As far as being scared of the game, Q2 scared the crap out of me many nights while playing the actual campaign. My home office is in the basement and since I tend to only play games when I can't sleep it makes for some gaming fests. I remember jumping back from the keyboard more than a few times.
Re:Anybody else disturbed by this (Score:2, Insightful)
Game design which actually frightens you is very good design, and very rare. This article makes me want to go out and buy it.
You could say this guy has too much time on his hands, but at least he's writing and (hopefully) making money at it; how much time did I just waste +reading+ about someone playing a videogame?
Uh huh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Gah...
Re:Uh huh... (Score:1)
Oh. That's the point. ooooooh. I get it.
lol (Score:1)
Writing about games is masturbation
Was it the 'up' or 'start' that confused you... (Score:2, Funny)
A) Our upstart company just acquired its first 128K ISDN line with a K6-2 running at 450mhz! My sister knows MySQL and she's our CEO/CIO/graphic artist! Post our story on slashdot! We swear our site can take the load!
or
B) Anything posted by someone named (Larry) Flynnhustler (Magazine).
*cough*
Alternate "War Game With Intelligent Enemies" Link (Score:3, Interesting)
Malicious Slashdotting? (Score:4, Insightful)
Even though the email says "our", the email address isn't from "@robotstreetgang.com", and the server obviously wasn't ready for a Slashdotting, despite the fact that the owner of the site was supposed to have sent this in. Anyone else wondering whether or not some guy just decided to take his chances at getting a little site that he has a grudge against Slashdotted? After all, making their bandwidth bill take a flying leap is one of the best ways to seriously impact the life of a nameless, faceless person that you have a grudge against on the internet.
::shrug:: Just a thought.
Re: (Score:1)
AmigaWorld (Score:1)
This guy is just bad at games (Score:1)
Thing is, it seems like it took him an age to work it out. He'd just saved his game too far down the line.
Best solution - start from an earlier save. If the game only supports one save, then you're gutted, but you've just gotta start the game again from the beginning. He was only like 7.5 hours into the game, so where's the problem? I bet everyone out there has a story where they were stuck on a particular part of a game, took a step back, re-did an earlier bit better than the first time, and cleared their problem. If games didn't have tricky situations where you had to retrace your steps, they would all suck, and you'd complete everything on your first attempt.
This is why GTA3 is so successful IMO (Score:2)
Come to think of it, the games I've enjoyed the most are mostly free form games- Elite and X, many RPGs including Daggerfall and EverQuest, Star Control 2 and many others. They all allow the player to decide what happens next at least to some extent.
Reading through it, the solution was clear... (Score:4, Insightful)
Reading through his account of being trapped with so little ammo, my first thought was "you must have really wasted a lot of ammo beforehand, why not use an earlier save?". I get the feeling that all through the game he was spraying stuff everywhere. Eventually he realized just that - his wall was of his own making (though you could claim poor game design if a normal difficultly level let you get that low on ammo, but I digress...) and by going to an earlier save point and using less ammo early on he had plenty to spare for the part that was killing him.
So, even though the obvious lession is "revert to an earlier save if you are out of resources", I think the real lession here is the old saw "waste not want not". I think that's why I liked Doom so much when it came out, there was nothing like using just a few bullets to coerce a room full of monsters to take each other out!
On a side note, I thought it was odd that he felt so bad about cheating at one point he deleted the save, but used what I would think of as flaws in the game (alien caught on pipes unerwater, and coming back into a room leaving aliens at the far end). To me, exploiting flaws like that is almost the same as cheating or at least seems close enough to me that his treating the two as totally distinct is odd.
Perfectionist Players (Score:3, Interesting)
I recently purchased and played through System Shock 2, which is quite a difficult game, actually (even on "Normal") and I realized that instead of the casual, "kill some but run from most" style I was used to, I was lapsing into the perfectionist mode.
However, thinking about it more lead me to conclude that the difficulty of the game forced you to save after every successful deed, as if it was part of the game design or something. After a while, hitting quick save and quick reload became reflexive, and the loading bar became the majority of my game experience.
The problem with FPS, I think, is giving the player far too much control and leaving almost nothing up to chance. I mean, in a RTS no saved game plays out the same -- the little critters or machines don't move/die/kill exactly the same each time, so it's not like you can blame yourself. However, the RTS is built for twitchy people, and twitchy people alone dominate the Counterstrike servers.
That being the case, I think that's why the cheating struck him as wrong. He wanted to prove his skill to himself. Cheating in a RTS game would mean something else entirely, but in a FPS it's like your not really playing. Everything feels cheapened.
I totally forgot what my point was, actually. -1, braindead.
Re:Perfectionist Players (Score:1)
Your point about perfectionist players is well taken, I wasn't arguing for that level of gathering and saving myself - usually I only save here and there after some major goal, and don't mind wasting a bit of ammo here and there or throwing a rocket down a dark cave "just in case". I gues my natural style of play is more toward system shock 2, where I try and keep as much spare stuff aas possible so to me it seems hard to get into a situation like that.
This article was awful. (Score:1, Troll)
Just a few days ago I was playing FF3, and I accidently let my ninja character get killed by not waiting for him when my party escaped from the floating continent. Yeah, I was bummed, but I didn't start the game over, which is what this chump would have done.
Hey! Man! Play the game once. Books are much more enjoyable if you just read them once through, then put them away. You don't have to focus on every word of every paragraph of every chapter and get it PERFECT to have a good experience.
- kengineer
Hmmmm... (Score:1)