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Games Entertainment

Fear and Loathing in the Mess Hall Complex 147

Posted by chrisd from the 1-more-grenade dept.
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."
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Fear and Loathing in the Mess Hall Complex More

Fear and Loathing in the Mess Hall Complex

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  • robotstreetgang.com aisn't coming up for me at all. This has to be a new world record! Does slashdot get an award or something?

    F-bacher

    • 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.

    • What about that human clock website earlier this year? You rember the guy put apache code on a cassete tape, loaded into his C64, and taped a CAT5 cable to the side!

      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)

    by phyberop ( 535162 ) on Thursday December 13, 2001 @09:36PM (#2702351) Homepage
    sure its personal, I know of a person that got all dressed up in black, and held a funeral for Aerith in FF7 when she died.
    Gaming plays a major part of peoples recreation these days, cant expect it not to affect some people :)

  • Italics.. (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I don't care what you say, they don't make the page load any faster!
  • Theres an article documenting someones attempting at beating a PSOne game... ? That's kinda weird, anyway i like the name of the site so i won't complain.

  • Server upgrade? (Score:4, Funny)

    by cosyne ( 324176 ) on Thursday December 13, 2001 @09:42PM (#2702378) Homepage
    Flynnhustler writes "Our upstart videogame culture site, Robot Street Gang, has just...

    Ok, so maybe the next time you submit a story on your own site to /. you should tell the guys at the data center or at least link to a very small frontpage with a list of mirrors? It's not like you got slashdotted without warning....

    • Warning: Too many connections in /home/helpfulsam/www/mainfile.php on line 33

      Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Too many connections in /home/helpfulsam/www/mainfile.php on line 33
      Unable to select database

      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 :)

  • I'd really love to read the link about gaming after September 11.
  • With the story /.ed, there aren't as many posts to the story, could it be that people actually want to read the story before posting? No couldn't be...

    ::Drowns in his own irony::

  • NY Times. (Score:5, Funny)

    by WasterDave ( 20047 ) <davep@zedkep.cAAAom minus threevowels> on Thursday December 13, 2001 @10:57PM (#2702624)
    WTF? "Purchase Full Text of Article"

    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)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Stuff on the Times site is free for the first two weeks, I think )tho you have to register to read it). After that, it slips into the pay-per-view archive.
    • Quick, edit you NYT's cookie to:

      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:NY Times. (Score:2, Informative)

      by Ted Cabeen ( 4119 )
      If you're looking for the "Game Theory" columns and you're at a major university, you can probably access them through Lexis-Nexis. The most common package for universities is the Academic Universe, which has full text for most major newspapers going way back. If you're in your universities IP space, you can access it here: http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe [lexis-nexis.com]

      Enjoy!
    • "Since when did Slashdot take to linking paid content?"

      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.

  • Is anyone else disturbed that not only did this person spend this long playing Alien Ressurection, but they also documented it?

    Why not document playing a better game, like Metal Gear Solid, or Parasite Eve... or even Puzzle Bobble for God's sake. :)

    • I tried documenting my experiences playing a game once for mini game guide I was writing. It was one of the most tedious things I have ever done. It is one thing to play a game, but it is entirely different to pause the game at every step to type up how you got past it in enough detail to be repeated by a mediocre player.

      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.
    • I've not played this game, but just reading the article scared me in places. It reminds me of being stuck in the SunSpire in Unreal. I knew the exit was past a room, but there lurked badly animated spiders. Even a badly animated spider jumping at my face is enough to make me hit pause and go sit somewhere else for a while.

      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)

    by rho ( 6063 ) on Thursday December 13, 2001 @11:37PM (#2702764) Journal
    FameSeeker [mailto] writes: "Our upstart ego-stroking site, CleverFuckingDiphthong, has just posted a new story by some reasonably famous guy. The story, You can't see it anyway [idontknowh...pmysql.com], is a detailed account of that semi-celebrity's navel-gazing. If you've ever read his I'm a Lame Idiot, and I Know It [bendoverhereitcomes.com] columns in the West Undershirt Times or his oft linked San Jose Mercury-News piece about gaming after Sept. 11 (no link, it's been linked to oft, you see), you know that Mr. Semi-famous takes a very personal approach to the exeperience [too much trouble to spell check] of autofellatio."

    Gah...

    • Hey! The links on this parent don't work!

      Oh. That's the point. ooooooh. I get it.
    • yup. Who the f#ck has time to read such drivel. then again ... who the f#ck has time to write such drivel.

      Writing about games is masturbation ... Go hump your sister. I *might* read that!
  • Doesn't seem very wise to post anything beginning with

    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)

    by titus_groan ( 217930 ) on Friday December 14, 2001 @12:50AM (#2702964)
    is here [bebeyond.com]

  • Malicious Slashdotting? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DarkZero ( 516460 ) on Friday December 14, 2001 @12:54AM (#2702976)

    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.

  • Some of you may remember Peter Olafson for writing the gaming column for AmigaWorld magazine, the major American Amiga magazine. In my book, this makes him very, very cool. Nice to see he's writing for the New York Times now. Amiga users were obviously an extremely talented bunch. :)
  • Man, while reading the 'Stuck' story, I thought "Man, I remember a similar section of Half-Life which I couldn't get past". But this guy doesn't seem to get the point. He was stuck at a part of the game where he obviously needed more ammo. How hard was that to work out? He said it himself - he couldn't kill all the aliens.
    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 such a successful game I think; there's plenty of challenges- but you aren't forced to do them all at once, in the game's order. And when things do go wrong you don't *have* to reload you can just suck it up and steal another cop car >:) When a mission is to hard there's lots of other things to do...random cab missions or finding a new jump.

    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)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Friday December 14, 2001 @11:21AM (#2704238)
    This is a bit of a spoiler, so you'll probably want to stop reading if you haven't managed to pull up the article yet.

    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)

      by albamuth ( 166801 )
      I think a lot of people play through FPS games in a way that smacks of perfectionism, ie: "leave no enemy alive, no ammo ungathered." I observed a friend of mine creeping through Half-Life, saving after just about every kill they make, meticulously reloading if they "used up too much ammo/health". I can't stand this style of playing. I used to be like that myself, then I realized I should be having fun, not getting stressed out about virtual bullet conservation.

      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.

      • I also played through System Shock II, and I know what you mean - you had to rely heavily on save, and even then were never sure that your saving in your current state was a good idea. That was a great game, and really make you think heavily about what you were doing.

        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.
  • The guy who wrote this, whoever he is, is completely pathetic. Yeah, sometimes I get stuck in a game, but I don't let it RULE MY LIFE.

    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
  • I'm not getting http://www.robotstreetgang.com/ at all. And I don't mean my connection ... I don't get how anybody can stand reading about someone playing a game. Never saw that Stienbeck novel on the chess game of '43. I have little time to even read the headlines of Slashdot, let alone read the individual posts, let a lone to moderate, let alone to ... let a lone to work. Just doesn't make for an interesting read.

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