This is how cool we are.
Left 4 Dead is a game where you co-operate with three other players to traverse a post-apocalyptic landscape, while under constant attack from excitingly varied monstrosities and threats procedurally generated (!) by the AI. There's also a Versus mode, where four survivors play against four infected and compete to make it through the largest chunk of story. Finally, Survival mode asks the players to hole up, stay put, and see how long they can survive against the infected. The "bronze standard" is around four minutes, and the "gold standard" is ten minutes. I tried all of these game types over the weekend, and there were highs and... well. Let's be kind and call them lows.
Night One: I join a game early in the Dead Air campaign, which I have never played before. The scene is an abandoned twilit airport check in, and we're doing well. There's a German guy and two guys who never speak. The difficulty is Normal, and we breeze through it, and it's awesome. There was this one part where everyone had fallen off a ledge and I took down a tank on my own before helping them up, with a combination of propane tanks, Molotov's, aut0-shotgun fire, and furious reloading. Because it was my first match, I got a ton of achievements too. When we round it all up, the credits roll to my delight. I've topped a lot of scoreboards. A thoroughly wholesome experience.
Okay, yes, I snipped out the ones where I sucked, but look!
Night two: Met a very experienced L4D player who sounds like he's from Cornwall or the West Country, according to my pee-soaked hand-drawn map of the UK left over from my childhood when I gave a shit. He gave me lots of tips on how to beat the shit out of tanks and zombies, where to find stuff in the Blood Harvest campaign, why I should get good headphones... I'd play with this guy again. One of the other guys didn't say a thing the whole time, and just did stupid things like throwing Molotov's at trains for no reason and wasting medkits. When we triumphantly beat it, he said "GG ALL", like that. I agreed; we can afford an idiot between the Cornwall guy's expertise and my FPS sensibilities.
I also played some Versus mode and we get consistently out-pummelled by the enemy team, but have great fun in the process. I love pretty much every type of infected, and I got to spawn as the tank, topping the inter-team scoreboard for "Most Survivors Punched". Awesome.
Night three: Play about three campaigns, just the tail ends, and they're all full of annoying, bossy, self-centred pricks. This is where I got the above screenshot, where you'll note my health is "1" and the sillouette of my fellow teammates are fucking tiny. Occasionally my buddy would hop in and save the day, but I gave up on the Story mode and decided to try some Survival. I had to leave my computer after the two minute mark; L4D provides a rudimentary AI to fight for you if you need to suddenly go and, oh, I dunno, play Team Fortress 2 or see your parole officer. I came back and we were at the ten minute mark and I had a gold medal. Oho!
The thing about survival is this: Everyone has a favourite map, and a favourite way to camp out in that map. Mine is the Lighthouse level, and I like to be inside the actual lighthouse as the doors get battered in and the walls collapse. L4D incorporates an annoying democratic voting system, whereby any majority of players can change the map, restart the round, kick a player, or change the difficulty. So this means that if one person starts a vote to "change map to The Crane?", and the other two are feeling remotely laid-back and just hit "Yes!", you can't play on the map you were just getting used to any more.
It also means that almost every time, some guy will lead you half way across the map saying "fallow me" and proclaim that this corner here is the ultimate invincible hiding place, that it's a glitched area and infected cannot find you there. I have two issues with this. The first is that I don't want to sit on a weird chimney or behind some benches, I want to feel like I'm fighting off a horde of aggressors in a desperate battle of wits (and guns). The second issue I have is this: OF COURSE THE FUCKING ZOMBIES CAN FIND YOU. Every surface is zombie-scalable. The Smoker can shoot his tongue and hit you from anywhere. The Hunter can leap higher than the tank can throw you.
Night Four: Someone calls me a noob for shooting the car (whose alarm attracts the horde). I was really shooting a hunter; 90% of my screen was the hunter. 90% of my bullets hit the hunter. You guys weren't saving me from that hunter. But no; I'm a noob. Obviously.
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