Left 4 Dead

What a night, was to tired to get anything done before bed, so I figured crash a couple hours and than see what’s on. Well, I spent the night dreaming of fighting Tanks, driving all across the Interstate and dealing with public transit, all filled with zombies >_>.

Guess while my body demanded sleep, my brain demanded Left 4 Dead action lol.

Finally saw the zombie Jimmy Gibbs at the shopping mall tonight. After whacking it across the head with a crow bar outside the Dead Center stage 5 safe room, I couldn’t help but think how much it reminded me of Bill Murray in Zombieland!

I’ve read about the zombie of Jimmy Gibbs haunting the last part of Dead Center, assumably hanging around near his stock car before the survivors have to gas it up and punch through a zombie horde with it. But I never expected to see it, let along hiding in the back corner, coming out of the safe room lol. Unlike the common infected (zombies) that repeatedly spawn on the map, he just wears his white racing suit.

Guess he shouldn’t have been busy signing autographs when the zombie apocalypse started, or something like that lol.

Hmm, the big question is whether I should write my l4d series survival guide straight in the blogger interface, using Google Docs and publish as a separate web page (Blogger integration was killed off in the ‘new’ gdocs), or just vim it together in markdown or docbook+xsl, and c/p it here.

Hmm.

Somehow it figures, that after getting through *almost* 5 out of 5 levels on advanced, barely taking any scratches, and shooting zombie A through on to the finale! Instead of high tailing it to the rescue boat, I take care of a lazzo’ed teammate and end up mobbed in zombies he limps clear.

Of course all 3 of my teammates have to leave me for dead, when they could just through a pipe bomb to distract the zombies and someone pick me up lol. Nooblets 8=)

I’m thinking about writing a short/moderate length survival guide for Left 4 Dead 2. Haven’t been playing much of anything lately, but after like 60 hours into the game, I’ve become extremely competent at it. When I do play, I’m still a lethally proficent team member.

Unlike some people, I also have a rather strong aversion to leaving fallen teammates behind, except for bots, hehe. That means I can drop more than my fair share of zombies in a hurry!

There is just something so cool about employing fire and manoeuvre techniques against a horde of zombies, and on the fly to boot.

How do you survive? Team up, nut up, and shoot’em up!

Just got out of a Hard Rain campaign in L4D2 with some excellent teamwork going on. Once we hit the end game however, our luck resoured.

First the tank smashes one of the teammates into the roof, incapacitating him while two of us leap off the side and the fourth man dives down the hole in the roof; who summary gets tackled by a charger moments before rescues due to arrive.

I’m one of the two dreebs who leap off the roof, because it hurts less than being hit by a tank lol. We kill the tank and pull a quick split: he goes to save the charged guy while I go zap the teammate on the roof back into action with my defib. kit; not exactly something I would want to do during a real thunderstorm. That goes out the window when my fellow pigeon gets himself whacked by a charger from behind, and I have to save his bacon instead.

Another tank suddenly comes stomping through the middle of the building as the charged teammate finally dies – we get our butts bounced out onto the lawn by the tank. Now this is where it gets silly.

Taking an adrenaline shot (speed booster) and making ready to fight the tank 2 on 1, while hacking my way to the roof: I ended up slipping off the peer and getting water logged — as the rescue boat runs me over and the tank flings my sole surviving teammate into it, killing him instantly.

Then the hard rain campaign plays it’s end video clip, as the boat floats away. Miraculously Spidey01 who almost got drowned before being run over by the boat, was the only player to survive the campaign!

There is just something so wrong with that, lol.

Lately I’ve been playing a lot of L4D2, the sequel to Left 4 Dead. I was never able to acquire L4D, so I was of course happy to find part two on sale :-D.

At first glance it is a fairly typical game: the objective is to reach the levels end (safe house or final evac point) alive, while killing anything that gets in your way. Then again that pretty much describes most games on the planet, doesn’t it? Even most of the original Rainbow Six was that way really, until the patches came. For joe smuck, L4D2 is certainly enjoyable enough from the perspective that you have like a good 150-600 zombies per map, the average is closer to 300 I would say.

What I have found, is an incredibly well designed game!

Left 4 Dead works off the premise that a rabies like virus has plunged the world into a zombie apocalypse. Unlike the more graphic depictions in the original Night of the Living Dead, or the flesh-eating norm in most zombie flicks: L4Ds infected “Zombies” just beat the loving crap out of people, no eating. The weak of stomach will be happy that there is nothing remotely resembling the whole truck/gas station thing from NotLD. Gore mongers ofc being made happy by what happens to the zombies ;).

Four “Survivors” are thrown together in the plot, and multiplayer tends to recreate this feeling through a lobby oriented way of hosting games, as well as a “Quick match” function. Gladly, they avoid the brain damage behind SWAT 3s massive lags. Rather than being strictly round based, killed survivors may respawn in a “Closet” somewhere and are stuck in spectator mode until “Rescued” by living survivors. Even going this far, they work to help bring that survival-horror flick mood to things. You just never know who your going to meet during a zombie apocalypse ;).

At it’s heart, Left 4 Dead is a game for people with a different “Taste”. It’s not going to satisfy simulation fans and it isn’t just another DooM clone in a CoDs skin either. The game play and design tends to attract a different crowd, enough so that I have been impressed by some of the teamwork you can get going with a random crowd of survivors. We can only hope the same happens if there ever is such a zombie take over o/.

The control layout at first glance, just breaths of a console games influence (it’s also on the XBox 8=). In actual practice though, it works flawlessly: it is simple, consistent, and almost intuitive. I say almost intuitive because it’s more consistent than most preceding games on the PC lol. At its core, you simply shoot everything as normal or shove things around using what’s equipped. When medical items are in hand, holding fire uses it on yourself, where as holding shove uses (or give) it on(/to) the team mate you’re looking at or shoves. More normally that would’ve been an action/use-button kind of thing. Once you get used to the item model, you’ve mastered the only “Thinking” required. There’s also few controls, which makes my old-side happy, since I grew up where six buttons and a D-pad was a lot of keys. Whoever worked through how to play test this thing, must really have earned their pay cheque IMHO.

Since each level is riddled with a ton of common infected, having four guns firing is a great help. With a little applied thinking and the fact that you are so much stronger than a single infected (zombie), team mates are not needed so much as they come in handy. Namely with that much bullets and limbs flying everywhere, someone is going to protect you or draw off attention from you, sooner or later ;). A basic application of tactics can also be useful, but needs to be adapted to fighting swarms of melee-oriented targets rather than an armed attacker.

Most game modes are little evolved past single player, so there is no real reason not to play in Campaign (co-op) or Versus mode. The difference between co-op and versus mode, is that one team controls the “Special” infected and their spawn points (under tight control). In the strictly co-operative mode, everyone is a survivor, and bots fill in for missing or idle players. Having players as the special infected in versus mode, generally results in a more challenging game than co-op, if not quite as plausible as the one driven solely by the “A.I. Director”. You can’t spawn to close to the survivors, or to fast, but the positioning can still be a bit much at times. Such as a bathroom that’s already been swept clear.

Something that really makes the game, is the special infected: most posse an attack that once successful, is effectively a death sentence unless another player saves your bacon. The rest are mealy a recipe for mopping the floor with everyone. It’s been done to such an exquisite balance that loose cannons are still found, but you will almost always find *team* games! No one can survive alone indefinitely, and statistics tend to add up when a campaign takes nearly an hour (or more depending on pace). The shortest game I’ve actually had, was about 35 minutes for one campaign, but we blew through it like four lighting bolts, hehe.

I’ve never seen a game that so well balances individual skills along side the need to work together, let along one that feels like your knee deep in zombies gone wild.

The game can be rather gruelling at times from the horde, but it’s rather enjoyable. Where as most games have fairly limited replay value, L4Ds use of a “Director” to drive the gameplay takes things to the next level. At the very least, randomising the location of items and enemies is a pretty damn simple thing to do in terms of game design, if so often ignored. In L4D however, it goes as far as giving the A.I. Director control over enemy spawning, item placement, and can be unforgiving at times. In the end the game play is always slightly different, and tends to flow with how well you’re doing. One of the most impressive moments (from my developers perspective) was playing through The Parish campaign, and noticing on the previous attempt: we found a weapons cache in a store room, second attempt it was totally barricaded off – because we were doing well that time around.

I wish every game could take advantage of such technology. It would make things so much nicer, and sure as hell beats Raven Shield. The closet I’ve seen to L4D, is SWAT 3s best maps, but L4D takes it to many more levels of gameplay.

My only gripe with the game has been it’s fairly short: about 6 campaigns (Dead Centre, The Passing, Dark Carnival, Swamp Fever, Hard Rain, and The Parish), ranging perhaps 3-5 levels each. Realistically you could clear the entire game (online) in 3-4 hours time with a solid team, and a rapid pace of attack, sans failures of course. That and the game crashes if I set the shader setting to a higher quality setting than my graphics card apparently supports >_>

After more than 18 hours of Left 4 Dead 2, I must admit the game is addictive.