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Hurricane Ivan Hits Gaming Hard
Hurricane Ivan's US landfall has affected gamers across the country. The World of Warcraft Beta is still down this week while the data center it's housed in is dried and brought back up. Star Wars Galaxies also experienced outage due to adverse weather conditions. And many thanks to Leon Kiriliuk for alerting us to the Pinball Association Notice that "two-hundred thirty two classic pinball machines and some rare video games were destroyed, including an extremely rare Tattoo Assassins prototype and a sit-down Omega Race!" Update: 09/21 02:33 EDT The World of Warcraft Beta is back up and running with a new patch.
I'm glad it didn't hit as hard as many people were expecting. Many people said that New Orleans was going to be a soup bowl and Mobile Bay was going to be totally obliterated.
/. readers clicking on a link towards the top of the discussion.
:), except of course Burnout 3 which is always broken because it's one of EA's first attempts at Live-enabled games. Does anyone know how much money Microsoft paid EA to do Live! if any? Or did EA finally just give in?
I have a pdf full of pictures of destruction in Pensacola as well that I'd love to link, but I have no hosting that would stand up to
I don't think it hit gaming too terribly hard either as xbox live was still up and running
Chris
Tornadoes are small but I have a redundant backup of all my servers running at a co-loc in chicago. I also backup and put weekly disks in a safe deposit box at my companies bank. The biggest tornado to hit was in May of 1999 and it was only a mile wide (would be an F6 if they thought that wind speeds could get that high). A hurricane is different, they can be as big as Texas. Storing priceless items in the path of a possible hurricane or any other forseeable natural disaster is very short sighted in my opinion.
The only thing I try to protect in a disaster is the lives of my family and my employees. A good backup/disaster recovery plan may never be needed but where would you be if your business burnt to the ground? Error on the side of caution.
Yes, but in all honesty, the tornado was caused by the hurricane. Ivan caused some massive (drastic understatment) tornado activity (at least in Virginia) on Friday.
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It's Omega Race. I'd throw you into a woodchipper for a sit-down unit.
motherfuckers will use this to delay hl2 again
The servers are back up and were as of 2130 PST yesterday. From what they told us in the forums the servers had gotten wet and had to be dried out properly and then powered up and tested before allowing the Beta testing to continue.
If the worst problem you have all day is that you can't play Star Wars Galaxies, you're having a pretty darn good day.
"It's a wonderful idea. But it doesn't work." -- Tad Danielewski
In its own way, it's as bad as if one of the Smithsonian buildings or a Science & Industry museum was destroyed. There's a great deal of technological and popular cultural history that's been lost due to Ivan The Terrible. Ugh.
Those who complain about affect & effect on
Insightful?
Ok, I gotta say it:
Overlord post==joke
When modding a joke, you:
A. Mod it funny if you find it funny.
B. Mod it overrated if you're tired of cliche jokes.
C. Maybe mod it redundant if twenty people have already made it in the same thread.
Where do you get insightful in this?
That's truly sad. A lot of those are lost permanently as a result-- only MAME romsets left, and MAME can't truly get the feel for such things as a sit-down cabinet for some of these.
Even worse when some of these are incompleted prototypes that just never made it to the production stage.
A friend of mine works on the AOL Campus in Dulles, Virginia. On September 17th, 2004, one of his coworkers, Steve Gibson (not of grc.com) captured some images of what I believe is the tornado that caused this damage. The photos can be seen here, here, and here, if anyone is interested.
Update: 09/21 02:33 EDT The World of Warcraft Beta is back up and running with a new patch.
So this patch makes it immune to hurricanes? Wow, that's some funky coding!
Well, if you click on any of the purchase links they offer for the expansion, you'll get taken to a preorder page. None of these sites actually indicate any reason for the delay. EBGames actually silently updated the shipping date without notifying any of the people who preordered.
I can completely understand that a hurricane can disrupt shipping, and accept that. I really, really wish that Square-Enix and the various stores that are offering pre-orders would actually tell us about this instead of requiring people to call up store managers to find out what's up.
I'm sure lots of things are still delayed from the aftermath of the hurricane. It's completely understandable. But it's really infuriating when companies won't just tell you what's going on and instead act as if things are proceeding exactly as planned.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Next week on Slashdot: Blizzard's WoW servers taken out by Blizzard
Pinball machine don't matter in the best of times, and they certainly don't matter now. It's going to be long storm season this year.
Too bad about the TA machine. I just tried it for the first time 2 weeks ago.
1. The game is an incredibly blatant Mortal Kombat ripoff. The most trivial details of MK seemed to be copied over.
2. There's an anachronistic "INSERT COIN" font that sticks out. it's the same font used on the TI-99/4A. Looks horribly out of place compared to the rest of the GUI.
3. The characters do ridiculous things. One, a Native American seems to do some sort of rain dance each time he wins.
Too bad I can't get to the boss creatures, "prizm" looked funny.
There is still one other Tattoo assassins prototype, according to bunnyears.net at Data East. Maybe it can be bought once they go out of business.
he'd leave the house and go find one. women aren't as rare as omega race sit-down arcade machines: there's plenty of us floating around, many of us with geeky interests, and many of us without mates!
I love pinball, and it saddens me that most of the gaming companies that manufactured the games are giving up on it. It's a great mix of fun and skill on a phsical level. I can't believe the pinall market is going the way of the dinosaur. Oh well, at least it's not people that died. :(
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
I'm all for backups, offsite and local, but until the building is dry and powered there is not much you can do with them ;-)
For local backups a fire-resistant safe could be useful, I am now wondering how water-resistant such safes are. In addition to water from weather there is also water from sprinklers, steam from fire suppression?.
Here's a high-res picture of the SWG data center that was hit by a tornado, as seen in those two cell-phone camera photos on the SWG site. I don't know why it's posted on the WoW site, though.
Apparently, both WoW and SWG use the same data center. The writeup made it sound like two separate data centers were hit by hurricanes.
If you are going to put up a datacenter for something that's to run 24/7/365.25 why would you put them somewhere like Florida or in a Tornado Alley?
Why not in Utah or Minnesota or Sioux Falls South Dakota where the violent storms or floods are less likely?
Video games are a lot easier to figure out and turn on, though. One switch, and they usually have at least a demo, if not directions on the front of the machine.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
On the plus side, my spam has reduced dramatically.