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."

Comments

Server upgrade?

[cosyne]

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....

It almost becomes part of your soul

[Ghoser777]

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

NY Times.

[WasterDave]

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

Uh huh...

[rho]

FameSeeker 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, 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 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...

Malicious Slashdotting?

[DarkZero]

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.

Re:Sure gaming is personal

[Chundra]

Becauthe the Japanethe verthion wath written in Lithp.

Reading through it, the solution was clear...

[SuperKendall]

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.