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."
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.
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."
It just goes to show that STATIC content does NOT need to be served from a DATABASE. Generate the pages from a database, sure. Only makes sense. STORAGE. But NOT for EVERY BLOODY PAGE VIEW. At least, not unless you're going to spend for the hardware to do it. I'm calm now, I swear.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
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.
Gah...
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
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.
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
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]