Slashdot Mirror
Fear and Loathing in the Mess Hall Complex
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."
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.
Gah...
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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?
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley