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."
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
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
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
I'm anispeptic, frasmotic, even compunctuous to have caused you such pericombobulation.
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.
Flynnhustler writes "Our upstart videogame culture site, Robot Street Gang, has just...
/. 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....
Ok, so maybe the next time you submit a story on your own site to
I find myself humming or whistling a song from FF2, FF3, or Chrono Trigger when I walk to class. I make bad jokes referencing role playing games with my friends... too bad most of them don't know what an rpg is. I play RPG's like I use to read books - they are the only intellectually stimulating games I find anymore (ever?). But when you're out jogging and the music is going off in your head almost ten years after you first played it, you know it's had a big effect on your life.
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
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
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::
WikiAfterDark.com It's a sex wiki, go now!
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
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Go feed somebody.
--------- http://www.ahref.com: a community for web developers http://www.piou.org: yet another blog ---------
Why not document playing a better game, like Metal Gear Solid, or Parasite Eve... or even Puzzle Bobble for God's sake. :)
Gah...
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
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*
is here
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. :)
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
- posts may be recorded for legal or training purposes. Thank you for your co-operation.
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.
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
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.
I think the karma police are after me
yup. Who the f#ck has time to read such drivel. then again ... who the f#ck has time to write such drivel.
... Go hump your sister. I *might* read that!
Writing about games is masturbation
I think the karma police are after me
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.
[pink beam of light]
vim actually *does* show non-closed italics tags (same for emacs, which also has a preview mode if the right extensions are in use). If the folks in question are behind enough to be using vi or lame 'nuff to be using pico, otoh, they get what they deserve.