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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."
=(
Hey guys? Look at the front page. Please close your tag!
...it's messing up the rest of the page
*everything* is Orwellian to cats.
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.
- passion
(subject)
o/~ Join us now and share the software
You would think that slashcode would have implemented a HTML validator and spellchecker by now just by the sheer amount of times /. gets egg on their face from stupid crap like this.
I guess journals are much more important.
Hammer of Truth
Fear and Loathing in Alien Resurrection
Posted on Thursday, December 13 @ 01:36:13 EST
In this chapter from Peter Olafson's forthcoming book, tentatively titled "The Gaming Life," the author describes his struggles with "Alien Resurrection" for the PSOne, and game design in general...
"Stuck"
By PETER OLAFSON
I was stuck for two months at the end of the Mess Hall Complex level in the game Alien Resurrection. I could not move forward. It just did not seem possible. If I tried to move forward, I died.
This Sony PlayStation shoot-em-up, based on the 1997 movie, was no longer a game. It had become a country-club prison, a tub of cement hardening around my ankles, a strait jacket with just enough give to feel like a suit coat.
After struggling countless hours through the mobs of terrifying creatures that had taken over the giant space vessel USM Auriga, I still hadn't reached the end of this water-logged region--a communications unit at the top of an elevator shaft. While my character, the eighth clone of Ellen Ripley, was in a good health, I couldn't survive if I strayed far from the shadowy room where I'd last saved my game.
It looked as though that long, narrow chamber would be my tomb. In my mind, I'd already become the skeleton that adventurers in movies find in an out of the way place, its back against a wall, its mouth fixed in a permanent scream, a scrawled note in its hand.
My note would have read: "Maybe I should have cheated."
I had done all the conventional things you're supposed to do when stuck in a game. I changed my tactics. I re-explored areas I had already cleared of enemies, shining my flashlight into dark corners and jumping into dark waters in search of shortcuts and supplies. I even peered down from one high perch to verify that the room beneath it was one I had already visited. I got too close to the edge and fell to my death, but I did not really mind. I had satisfied myself that I hadn't missed something important.
But when I sought to move on in the game, it inevitably ended in a rush of claws, teeth and lashing tails, with my back to a what seemed a hopelessly locked door, in my ears the clicking of an empty weapon and then the whine of my vital signs flattening out.
Few things are so frustrating as being stuck in an electronic game. Games aren't about being stuck. A game should be challenging, certainly, but also a source of pleasure and a sanctuary from the numbing routines of daily life. When a game turns into a chore, it begins to lose its purpose as entertainment, becoming part of the real-life world of obstacles.
At some point, every gamer has found himself in these straits: The game you're playing suddenly becomes a wall too high to jump, too slippery to climb, too durable to blow up.
You may become hung up on a mistake in the game's underlying code. A door that should open refuses to open. A character that is supposed to reveal important information remains silent.
A game may demand sustained success over an extended section before it allows you to record a new snapshot of your position.
And, sometimes, a game can simply be very hard to beat-whether because of smart computer opponents or a long learning curve.
Alien Resurrection has a learning curve. It took me a while to master the controls. It allows the player to save the game only at intervals, and the road between those spots, populated by savage creatures inventively positioned, is often long and difficult.
But I was the main problem. I was so close to the obstacle blocking my path for so long that I could no longer see it for what it was.
And, sometimes, I was just too scared to think straight.
In a typical attempt, I materialize where I last saved my game-what looks like a monitoring station of some sort, with a desk at the far end, three chairs and a button on the wall nearby. (A luxury of the hopelessly stuck: I sometimes wonder briefly about the fellow who worked here-this dead, green-suited man with a wound to his stomach and blood on his face--and what he did.)
I push the button (which repairs a control valve farther along on my path), collect the grenade launcher from behind the desk (which just supplements the ammo for the launcher I already have), and take an elevator (down, I think, though this is unclear) to a large, T-shaped room.
It now feels oddly empty. Toward the end of the Mess Hall's middle segment, with which this last segment overlaps, I killed the three aliens here with my pulse rifle-a sort of powered-up M-16--and a handful of facehuggers with my pistol. (These crab-like creatures try to jump on your face and implant an alien embryo. If they succeed, the embryo eventually will burst from your chest, unless first removed using a portable autodoc unit.) The pistol doesn't do much damage, but it never runs out of ammo, and so is the weapon of choice for dealing with these lesser critters and the eggs that hatch them.
In one arm of the "T," I turn a valve freed up by the earlier button pushing. This opens a trapdoor that leads to a flooded tunnel. These doors are open for only a short time. I hurry across the room before it closes again, swim through the tunnel and climb out, with some difficulty, into a large and gloomy chamber with sticky slime on its floor and instruments.
So much slime it makes my skin crawl. I read it a sign that I'm getting close to something unusual.
I'm wrong; it's just for atmosphere. The next "boss" monster is about two levels away. However, sticky slime in any amount is a bad sign in the "Alien" movies, and it is a bad sign here.
A corridor frames the room. I turn the first corner and cross an invisible line. Two aliens are coming; I can hear the swish and thump of their passage in the darkness and see the flicker of their black silhouettes moving in front of distant lights.
Ordinarily, I would shoot them with the pulse rifle or shotgun. But I'm down to one shotgun shell and earlier battles in the T-shaped room wore down my pulse-rifle ammo to a bare handful of rounds. What's left isn't enough to kill in either case, and I don't want to give the aliens an opening by changing weapons in the middle of a fight.
I'll go with grenades-the only ammo I currently have in quantity. If I can hit the lead alien on its trailing edge with a grenade, the blast may take both aliens down.
But this requires meticulous aim and positioning, and, given the speed of the aliens' approach, I can't reliably reproduce the result. So, more often, I advance just far enough to trigger the aliens' appearance and then immediately retreat back into the tunnel. The aliens pursue me, and with them clustered above or just inside the tunnel entrance, a single grenade claims both.
The accommodations here don't always allow me to be this efficient. Rounding the second corner in the corridor produces the same response as the first corner: Two more aliens start toward me. The deeper darkness, and the knowledge that the tunnel door has now closed, shutting off retreat, makes them seem more ferocious, but they are no tougher than the two before them. As before, taking out both with a grenade seems a question of luck as much as skill, and getting past this point on a regular basis usually requires a grenade for each alien.
This is getting expensive in terms of ammo, but I don't see that I have a choice.
However, the victory gives me access to a central enclosure off the corridor. Here, I find a ladder, broken and unclimbable, leading up into darkness, and a crate. I'll have to destroy the crate with a shotgun or heavier weapon to get what's inside: 12 shotgun shells.
I hear three clicks as I walk over the shells to collect them-in my mind, three signals that, this time, I have a chance to survive.
Back in the corridor, I turn the third corner and trigger a third pair of aliens. A change of pace: They are easy targets. They run toward me in close formation and exposing their left sides, and a single grenade hit there takes both down.
A single alien waits in the room beyond, and will leap out when I open the doors. If I'm quick and accurate, I can reduce it to a dollop of green goo with a shotgun blast while it's in mid-leap.
But often as I've reached this point, I'm still thrown off balance by the suddenness and odd angle of the creature's attack and its seeming resistance to my own attacks if it lands intact. In fact, it is no hardier than its fellow aliens; this impression reflects only the nervous distance I've maintained from the creature and my erratic aim when facing it.
This raises a useful point: Alien Resurrection scares me on a regular basis. While the feeling naturally dissipates when I have to play the same chunk of a level again and again, there are empty hallways in the game that I cannot walk down without looking over my shoulder. There are patches of darkness that feel inhabited whether something is actually hiding in them or not. There are doors I hesitate to open.
In places like this, I pause the game to collect myself before I continue.
While this makes playing a thrilling experience, it does not make me play well. I hold the controller too tightly. My thumb rests too heavily on and about the "fire" and "use" buttons and I sometimes nervously use up supplies I'd rather keep. I reload weapons the way some people bite their nails.
In any case, it's in dispatching this lone alien that often I make a key mistake: It can take four or five inaccurate shotgun blasts to achieve what should have taken one, and that's partly fear talking.
Inside the room, I find an elevator door (locked) and beside it a small podium housing a "palm switch." Usually, activating such switches opens a nearby door.
But the elevator door does not open right away. And, in the attempt, I have turned on a spigot. Behind me, aliens are approaching again, and not just one or two.
Near as I can figure, around 10.
Best case, I have enough grenades and shotgun shells to kill eight or nine.
However, the aliens are coming in single file, and, for a while, I can take them on one at a time. I use the second or two before the first bursts into the room to position myself with my back to the elevator door and aim the grenade launcher at the center of the opposing door. This will plant grenades directly at the feet of entering aliens. (If I use it when they're closer, I risk blowing myself up in the process.)
The doors open; I fire; the first alien goes down in a splash of steaming yellow blood. Another appears behind it. I shoot it down as well. Then a third, and after a brief gap (which I use to reload), a fourth, fifth, sixth.
Around this point, I run out of grenades and switch over to shotgun. Still the aliens come, and now I may have to face more than one at a time. Fortunately, I still have a good supply of shotgun shells. The shotgun damages a few aliens and may kill two or three.
But it's not enough; it's never enough. The weapon holds only four rounds and it takes two close-range blasts to bring down an alien. Hence, when I'm reloading or firing at one alien, another may be attacking me freely, and I soon find myself back in the shadowy room where I started. That bloody, green-suited body on the floor might as well be mine.
In the game's eyes, everything I've just done counts for nothing. To beat the level, I will have to do it all over again, minus the mistakes, and then tackle whatever I didn't live to see in earlier attempts.
I did it over again dozens of times. It didn't change much. In some attempts, I managed to save a little more or a little less ammo for the final battle. In some attempts, I got a little further along than in others. Once, in that final battle, the aliens clustered around the entry door and I managed to take out two with a couple of the grenades.
It looked as though I'd made it through alive. I thought the elevator door had opened behind me. I tried to turn around to look, heard a single beep from my motion tracker, and died. I don't think I ever saw what hit me.
I died so many times that I started throwing down the controller and leaving the room, as if the game and I were involved in a bitter quarrel and it had said something unforgivable. I usually came slinking back within a day or two, embarrassed at my twin inabilities to solve the game or resist it. But with the variety of gameplay reduced to small changes in the numbers of grenades and shotgun shells, I started to think about ways to dodge the game: cheating, quitting or just getting rid of it entirely.
I thought about this last one quite a lot, and Alien Resurrection briefly kept company with game-related T-shirts and old books and videos in a bag to be donated to charity. If I didn't have to look at it, I wouldn't be tempted to play it.
This turned out to be a symbolic protest, as I took the game out of the bag a few hours later. It had a hold on me. While I've never thought myself especially good at games, I amazed myself by getting as far as I had in this maddeningly difficult one. (The Mess Hall is about two-thirds of the way through the game.) It had become a point of pride to get through it. I didn't want to surrender
But maybe I could cheat.
I do not usually cheat in games; the last clear memory I have of doing so dates from 1993. I do not say this to assert any special nobility of character, or, conversely, to suggest that there is anything wrong with this sort of cheating. It seems to be deeply ingrained in the electronic gaming culture. (Whenever I search for information about a game on the Web, invariably the first thing I find out is how to cheat in it.) People probably buy many more games than they can finish by conventional means, and need easy ways to fast-forward to the end.
For myself, I'd rather be stuck. In a moment of weakness, I cheated in Alien Resurrection, and it immediately sucked the life out of the game.
It happened at the beginning of the Mess Hall level. I was stuck here almost as long as I was stuck at the end, and, as at level's end, I played this section over and over, figuring I would eventually learn it by heart and find my way through.
This was how I had survived similar trials earlier in the game. Each time, I sensed my skill, health and supplies weren't up to the game's challenges, and each time, I persevered by trying again until I mastered the challenges. Each time, the level seemed to seep into my system, as though by osmosis.
I worked especially hard to finish the first section of the Mess Hall level. Its opening room was so ludicrously hard-three aliens hanging from the ceiling in mid-room and no clear refuge in sight-- I couldn't help but see it as a direct challenge. Game designer to player: "OK, beat this."
It took forever. I even went outside the Mess Hall level to prepare for it, replaying the final battle in the previous, Maximum Security level with a pistol to conserve precious pulse rifle ammunition. (Ripley is also the character in that earlier level, so the stock of ammo she has at its end is carried over to the Mess Hall.)
I found I could further conserve that ammo by crouching in an alcove in the Mess Hall's first room and using the flamethrower. This weapon, for which ammo was plentiful, made the aliens run around madly, rather than standing toe-to-toe with me and attacking.
I slowly learned how to use the grenade launcher I found two rooms away. It's a powerful but volatile weapon that initially killed my character almost as often as it killed aliens.
I learned how to swim, how to take on air while underwater and how aliens behaved there.
And after many, many attempts, I began to make real progress. I did not blow myself up by accidentally detonating a grenade on the surface of a deep pool as I tried to target an alien in its depths. I was not overwhelmed by the stream of aliens that attacked me outside an elevator on the other side of the pool. (Elevators seem to bring out the worst in the aliens.) I was not bushwhacked by a facehugger in the dark little room where I opened the first of the flooded tunnels. I always knew what was coming next, and when and where it would arrive.
One day, all this knowledge seemed to kick in at once. I killed all the aliens, collected all the supplies and swam through a flooded pipes toward a save point. Once I reached it, I could store my progress and begin the game there from this point on.
At the very end of the section, just before I reached the save point, I ran into a problem: I got scared.
I'd had some shaky moments when I swam down the first pipe into a flooded room. This was my first extended experience underwater. The room seemed huge and dark, and a potential repository for enemies. Occasionally I got twisted around, wasn't sure which way was up, and ran out of air.
But heading up the central pipe in the ceiling, I found a large, above-water chamber half-full of alien eggs. I gleefully dismantled them with grenades--it was one of those rare spots where I could wreak havoc and the game didn't seem to fight back aggressively-and turned two valves. This opened a trapdoor atop an adjacent pipe that led to the save point.
This seemed to put me back on track. My confidence was restored. Working from this base, I realized that the flooded room below was relatively small and empty of enemies. It even had some supplies. It was just dark.
I was barely back in the dark water when the motion tracker let out a beep.
I'd half-expected it. The game had responded predictably to my opening this path by sending out an alien to stop me.
I could certainly kill one alien-if indeed it was an alien. I had a hunch it was just a facehugger that had eluded me in the egg room above and somehow slipped unseen into the pipe.
But I couldn't see what it was. I peered through the water back toward where I'd originally entered the room.
Nothing.
Beeep.
I turned on the flashlight. I saw only air bubbles and darkness.
This was starting to freak me out a bit.
Enemies in games rarely have agendas of their own. They just wait around for the player to show up and then do their thing, and I am sure this is what was happening here.
But, at the time, it didn't feel that way. I felt as though this invisible creature was waiting for me to make a move.
I blinked first. I retreated to the egg room to replenish my air supply and to think (I half-hoped this maneuver would lead the creature into ambush; it did not.)
I knew what I needed to do: Leave the relatively safe haven I was occupying just beneath the egg room pipe and hunt the thing down.
But I dreaded the prospect of such a hunt. If the creature found me first, it would probably kill me. If I stumbled upon it and got in first licks with the grenade launcher, the only weapon that works underwater, I would probably kill myself in the process. Either way, I'd have to play through this whole ultra-hard section again from scratch and then deal with my invisible nemesis again-probably with the same result.
I needed to ambush the creature from a distance for the grenade launcher to work its magic, and, hence, decided it was better to wait for it to come to me
I swam back down to the flooded room, planted myself over a stream of air bubbles to keep up my air supply, and I waited.
Beep.
Maybe it needed some prompting. I laid down a spread of grenades in an arc around what I assumed to be the creature's location. bam. Bam. BAM.
Beep.
It flashed on me here that maybe I wasn't facing a simple alien. Maybe something nastier. Something that could absorb grenade damage. (My "boss" alarm kept going off needlessly in the Mess Hall level.)
Suddenly, my confidence was decaying into a scrabbling panic. I was Captain Dallas nervously shooting a flamethrower down the air ducts of the Nostromo in "Alien." I was Corporal Hicks under the atmosphere processor in "Aliens," yelling, "Marines, we are leaving!"
I was leaving in a big hurry: I decided to make a run for the final pipe.
This was plainly a mistake. The trapdoor had long since closed-in my agitation, I'd forgotten that such trapdoors remain open for only a few seconds--and of course this was exactly the event my invisible nemesis had been waiting for. As I turned from the closed trapdoor, my heart sinking at the realization of what I'd done, something large and black swam into view at the bottom of the pipe.
It was just a plain old alien. I aimed the grenade launcher down the tube as it swam toward me, and we died together.
After all I'd been through, it seemed a supreme indignity to get this close to my goal only to have it torn from me at the last moment.
Of course, this happens all the time in games. "Keep the Player Happy" has never been a particular tenet of game design.
But being sensible and determined wasn't getting me anywhere. While the time stamp on my saved games indicated I'd been playing only about seven and a half hours, that reflected only the actual time logged between saves. I must have devoted several times that amount of time to unsuccessful attempts.
After a few variations on this theme-none as scary as the first, and most involving my death at my own hands-annoyance finally took over from determination, and I compounded my mistake and looked up a cheat code online. By pushing buttons on the controller in a certain sequence, I exposed an otherwise hidden menu that allowed my character to become invincible.
Using this cheat, I went all the way through the first section of the Mess Hall without taking even a ding. I escaped my invisible nemesis, and swam up the last pipe to the save point.
I know that I did this because I had the saved game to show for it. But I have no clear memory of actually traveling through this section of the game on the cheat. With some reason: When I was cheating, the game was weightless. It no longer contained me. I was floating above it. When I escaped my nemesis, I felt nothing. When I saved my game, storing this weightlessness for future use, I somehow felt less than nothing. I felt as though I had already died, and had been condemned to haunt the Mess Hall level.
I could have cheated again at the end of the level. No one would know. It would be a secret between the game and me. After all, it's just a game.
But it would nevertheless violate the intricate relationship that I had created between my character and the game over all those hours of play. I wouldn't be me in Alien Resurrection anymore, with my health and my inventory and my experiences. My health would be perfect, my inventory complete, and my experiences meaningless because they wouldn't be policed by the game's hazards.
I couldn't go on playing this way. I couldn't bring myself to use the ill-gotten gains of the saved game to continue. In an act of penance, I erased the offending file, loaded an earlier save of my own making and struggled through this section under my own power.
It took a few days, rather than a few minutes, to get through it, but it gave me back my game and my passion This time, I made it past my nemesis, and even sympathized with the creature, if only slightly, when I saw it had gotten hung up on some piece of equipment. (Then I backed off to a safe distance and killed it with a grenade.)
This time, when I saw the blinking green light of the save point, I felt the gratitude that the marathon runner must feel upon seeing the finish line.
Of course, while I was discarding options like cheating and giving up, I wasn't doing a great job getting through the last section of the Mess Hall on my own. Playing less often, I seemed to be getting worse. I was now dying in comparatively easy battles in the slimy corridor. Frustrated at seeming to slide backward, I started to blame the game itself. It wasn't that I couldn't finish the game. The game could not be finished. And, as if to confirm this rationalization, I stopped playing it.
I didn't give Alien Resurrection away. I don't think I even moved it. I just stopped dealing with it. It remained inside the PlayStation, with the plastic jewel case and manual loose beside it. Other games, papers and bits of office detritus sometimes covered the manual. Cleaning up, I would occasionally stumble across it-feeling initially a mild sense of regret at tasks left undone and later just registering, eye to brain, that it occupied this space.
Quitting was the best thing I could have done. The game drifted slowly out of my life. Indeed, it might have stayed out of my life if my parrot hadn't tried to eat the manual while I was away at Thanksgiving.
Checking the damage, I was curious enough to turn the game on again, and found I had acquired perspective over the three intervening months.
I quickly identified my problem: I'd been using too much ammo in the middle segment of the Mess Hall level--a short, watery region through which I'd breezed on pent-up momentum from the achingly difficult region that preceded it.
"Breezed" is the operative word. I still had a saved game from the start of this section, and should have reexamined my performance here the moment I got stuck. It didn't occur to me; because I played through it quickly, I thought I had played well.
I hadn't played that well. In the first flooded room of the Mess Hall's middle section, I'd nervously fired a grenade at each of two aliens I saw swimming toward me. If I'd waited a few seconds longer, I could have killed both with one.
I didn't need the medical supplies I'd retrieved from the bottom of a watery shaft. Ripley was already in good health and already carrying a number of first-aid and autodoc kits. Skipping this step would save two more grenades--the one I'd used to blow up the boxes and the one I'd used to kill the alien that appeared as I swam back up the shaft.
I hadn't always used the weapon appropriate to the task. The two aliens that dropped down from the ceiling after I left this shaft and climbed a ladder appeared simultaneously and next to each other, and should have been tackled with a single grenade. I'd used the shotgun. It's easy to waste shotgun shells against multiple, moving targets, and I wasted a few here.
Finally, I could re-fight the battles of the T-shaped room on my own terms. When I stepped out of the elevator, the three aliens there always uncurled from their hiding places and advanced on me. Unthinkingly, I had always accepted the challenge.
But if I stepped quickly back into the elevator and hit the button to move to another level, my disappearance seemed to defuse the aliens. If I let a short interval pass, I could take the elevator back down to this room and find them hanging out docilely on the far side. One of them even appeared to be wagging its tail.
If I stayed at the back of the elevator car, they wouldn't see me when the door opened. And if I aimed the grenade launcher just right, I could kill all three with one long, arcing shot, and save about two-thirds of a pulse rifle clip.
By the time I completed this research expedition, and saved my game again, I had one more grenade, 44 more pulse rifle rounds and seven more shotgun rounds than when I'd started.
Now, this is far more thought than people with normal amounts of time on their hands should probably give to a game.
But it did the trick. The new ammo allowed me to use mostly shotgun shells in the slimy corridor, thus saving the pulse rifle ammo and most of the grenades for the big battle before the elevator door.
This time, I cut down all the aliens at a distance in that fight and survived with barely a scratch and with ammo to spare.
It was actually easy.
Trained to expect the worst, I was primed for new threats to follow, but the rest of the level was anticlimactic. At the top of the elevator shaft, I destroyed three eggs and activated the terminal that ended the level and saved my game.
Even before then, I was released from my prison. In the T-shaped room and the flooded tunnel, I moved with the light feet of a player who could see a post-Mess Hall future beginning to unfold before him. Battling aliens in the slimy corridor and at the elevator door, I fired my weapons with the relief of a player who still needed to be good, but no longer had to be perfect.
The Mess Hall is finally out of my system, and I am grateful for it. The hardest level in the hardest action game I have ever played, it is at once my worst defeat and my greatest triumph.
Alien Resurrection is almost out of my system. Since leaving the Mess Hall, I can't seem to slow down. As the character Christie, I tore through the huge Warehouse Complex level that followed, and, as Ripley again, I'm currently making my way rapidly through the Docking Bay. Here, I faced a real boss in the Newborn, a hybrid of human and alien, and dealt with it briskly and efficiently using my new electric gun.
Currently, I'm trying to find my way up a dark hallway where I am repeatedly ambushed by three aliens. But I'm not stuck; I just need to backpedal faster when I see them coming.
Fear still wells up in me occasionally. I felt it riding my upper back, the base of my neck, the top of my skull as I closed in on the third save point in the Warehouse Complex. Too many apparent exits and entrances to watch easily. Too many possibilities for bad things to happen when my back is turned.
Too much darkness.
But, oddly enough, the Newborn, terrifying in the movie, barely scares me in the game. This may have something do with looking directly into its innocent bellybutton rather than its horrific face. (It's an "innie.") And, moving at much greater speed than in the Mess Hall, I'm more in the game and less in my own head, and nothing I can see is as bad as what I've imagined.
I'm still easy and accurate with my weapons, and my feet are still light as I move through strange tunnels, rooms and air ducts. I feel as if they could carry me anywhere. I could run to the end of the level. I could run all the way to the end of the game.
Peter Olafson has been writing about games since 1989. His most recent articles appeared in the New York Times and San Jose Mercury-News. He's currently working on several game-related books-one of which will include this account of being stuck in Alien Resurrection.