Reviewed on PC. Also on Xbox 360. Developed by Valve. Retail versions published by EA
Left 4 Dead is Valve’s latest First Person shooter, based mainly around online cooperative play. L4D has also managed to at least partially bury the meme-cow (a cash cow for memes) that was TF2, at least in the short term. So what is it about this game that’s got everyone excited?
So the conceit is that each of the four stories are their own survival horror movie. Four survivors- Francis- the tough biker, Louis the office worker, Zoe the spunky chick and Bill, the old fart ex marine. Those are my descriptions based on playing the game so forgive me if they misrepresent the ‘canon.’ The four of you basically go from point A to point B Starting and ending each level in a new safehouse. And along the way there are zombies. Like everywhere. There are the common or garden zombies who just move towards you, sometimes slowly, other times rushing at you, often in numbers. And there are the specials.
There’s Boomer, a giant fat bile factory, who, if you get too close, will vomit on you and have hordes of zombies rushing you. Then there’s smoker, with his enormous tongue; Hunters who’ll jump you and pound the crap out of you; and tanks, who are basically big motherfuckers. There’s also the witch, but DON’T DISTURB THE WITCH YOU TARD!
That makes it sound simplistic but its actually a blast to play, easily the best Valve MP game in ages. You can play either by yourself which is underrated and an enormous amount of fun, and are able to select any chapter in any of the campaigns (of course there are no checkpoints within any of the chapters, so if you die you start again). Or you can play with three others, each of you taking on one of the four characters (one of each BTW). You need to work together, if someone runs off and gets cornered, they will need to be rescued. You can of course heal yourself or heal you teammates and they can of course heal you if they feel like it. But Multiplayer does highlight one thing, the AI in this game is very good (even on single player).
This is down to the much vaunted AI director. This will spawn enemies at just the right time and in just the right places. No two playthroughs of this game will ever bee the same and for that reason I recommend playing the single player through by yourself at some point. When you play with people, they’re selfish with health packs, shoot you by mistake and run off by themselves and get killed- which is a pain since that leaves more infected for you to deal with. There’s also a versus mode where four humans can go against four players on the zombie team. The zombies are weak but respawn and can choose exactly where they will lie in wait for their human opponents.
The graphics are pretty decent for a source based game. It doesn’t look ugly per se, it just looks a little underwhelming compared to even some the best console games, let alone high end PC’s. Sound is fantastic, from the music, the voiceover work to the punchy effects.
Left 4 Dead looks like a poor value proposition when you compare it to Team Fortress 2, but it actually offers so much more, not least is a very good single player mode. It’s memes are also not as moronic and insular meaning this is a fun game for everyone to get right into. Everyone loves zombies right?
Controller1.com rating 3/3
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The latest Focus Test is up so go and listen. There’s a bit of gallows humour towards the end so If you’ve lost your job recently, you may want to switch off once Boomblox talk has stopped
A Wii game on the Focus Test. Who’d have thunk it? Its incontheivable.
In parts of Asia, many PC games are free with the makers recouping their costs on players making microtransactions. This can be for a new spell in an MMO, weapons for an action game, or maybe even clothes for a social game (think Home, but popular). EA is going to try this approach in the west with the free-to-play Battlefield Heroes on PC.
EA, even though it makes a lot of money, isn’t always flush (hence the regular round of Russian Roulette their dev studios play each time the company has a tough quarter). EA isn’t offering Battlefield Hereos for free out of altruism, their hoping you’ll buy lots and lots of stuff just like people are doing in Korea. So what will you be charged for and how much?
Weapons: (price 99c- $3) This is the most obvious one. Why grind to upgrade to a new weapon? Just pop in your card details when you agree to the EULA and you can go from being hamstrung by a n00b pop gun to having a gatling gun and pwning all teh cazULs (casuals)
Costumes: (price 99c- $2) If you want to play as a wizard in a shooter, you should be able to, provided you’ve got the dosh to spare. You can also customise you character with kevlar body armour ($3) shin pads ($1), pocket protectors (70c) and transitions lenses in a number of fashionable styles ($120)
Team Killing: penalty ($5) . If you TK, you will get charged, not with manslaughter, but five bucks. Taking a life is easy, paying your debt to society is harsh.
Playing like a Tard penalty: ($10) This is a nasty one, because if you do things like call for map
change votes 30 seconds before the end of a map, switch teams incessantly when you’re losing and generally act like a douche, you will get charged.
Barking orders into the headset like you know what you’re doing penalty: ($5) Yes, you have a headset. We know. But you’re not very good so why should your orders be listened to by anyone else. If you want to be Napoleon, go and play an RTS and shut the hell up.
Bandages, Healing, etc ($3): You don’t medical attention for free in the real world, so why should you be a freeloader in Battlefield Heroes? Medics in games like TF2 and BF2 are like real doctors. Real doctors make a lot of cash and dive around in Mercs and BMW’s while medics in games just sit around healing everyone and have more achievements than anyone else. Just think about 8 years of medical school and translate that into playing on achievement farm servers for 8 years. Who’s wasting whose time?
Pay for instant respawn ($5). In real war, rich men pay to get out of serving. In a fake virtual war, real men pay to avoid having to wait to respawn. Get on it EA!
Fuel for your Tank (linked to the real world price of oil). Seriously, one of the worst parts of Battlefield games are the Vehicle whores. Well, make them pay for their fuel and we’ll see who long they stay inside the tank.
Pay for Perks: Hey, in CoD, you have those perks that you have to earn by playing the game a lot. Not so much in BF:H. Plunk down $3 for Martyrdom, $5 for 3 frags, $7 for Fireworks.
Swear Jar: This game is going to open the market to people who aren’t perhaps ready for the barrage of bad language. Drop the F bomb and you’ll lost a buck. Question someone’s sexual orientation and you lose two dollars. Racial remarks lose you $5 and sexist remarks get you a drink thrown in your face.
Campsite Tariff: Shooters, particular those with larger maps are prone to camping. Spawn camping is particularly rife and mainly unavoidable in the BF style of game. In order to reduce this, you’ll have to pay site fees and rent when you go camping. Pitch a tent, pay the landlord.
EA’s on a winner with this game.
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Today was a weird day. Some friends of mine worked at a games company up the road at a now closed Pandemic office. Its a shitty time to lose your job and I’ll always grateful mine is still (touch wood) around. So I’m going to raise a glass of Diet Coke to my friends at that now deserted place. Join me if you will.
It’s interesting. Last week, Ziff Davis Media closed long-running magazine EGM one month shy of its 20th anniversary issue (obsessive compulsive completists- you may now start pulling out your hair- though wash your hands first. And again afterwards. And again) along with laying off around 40 EGM and 1up.com staff. The Fanboys have reacted with sorrow, sadness, poetry, rap and donations to keep these guys in podcasting equipment. The 100+ Neogaf thread is testament to the impact these guys and gals had on videogame geekdom. Hey, I loved 1upyours, even though the music was just Electric Rodeo in Soundtrack Pro.
In the last month, Crystal Dynamics shed some staff (30), Free Radical nearly went broke and made most of its staff redundant (140), Pandemic closing brisbane (as part of EA’s cutting of 1000 positions, Factor 5 shedding half of its staff, Midway issuing pink slips like its going out of fashion, THQ, Turbine, Aspyr, Brash. Even Sony and MS are getting in on the act “Hey guys if they’re firing 10 000, we can’t be seen to not fire more.” The last two may not actually be cutting games jobs yet but this is on top of most major industries. We’re in a recession. We get the message. This is after a year where Silicon Knights cut staff, Lucasarts cut numbers, Activision dropped a number of projects after its merger with Vivendi (with some redundancies I believe) and EA already closed studios earlier when they acquired Bioware/Pandemic from Bono and, oh, John Ricitello. You could imagine the bloodbath now if EA had managed to take over Take 2?
Losing your job sucks if you didn’t want to lose it. Ron Livingstone tried to get fired in Office Space and he merely got a promotion. But something of a double standard has emerged. Internet assholes, being the assholes they are are quick to add their comments (try moderating the comments- for spam- of even a small website like this and you know its a decent sized job each day). On the Kotaku comments underneath the Pandemic Brisbane closure story, the general sentiment is “oh, they only made Destroy All Humans 1 and 2 and that cancelled Dark Knight game (allegedly)? Not Mercenaries or Saboteur- the games I want to play? Then I’m all right. Their games weren’t good anyway and they deserve to be fired and shot and bulldozed into a mass grave.”
I’m exaggerating slightly but the point is, they don’t deserve this. No one does. No one in games sets out to make shitty or less than great games. The guys who are making Imagine Babies would probably rather make games like WoW, TF2 or Gears but that’s the job they got. The guys making Nickelodeon games do so since that’s the work on offer. They’ll try their best with the budget (manpower),time, publisher and licensing constraints (the number one reason many licensed games suck is not because of the devs are incompetent, its because the license holders can be incredibly protective of their moneymakers).
So we have the love for 1up’s very talented guys and gals, and we have hatred for the 1500 or so videogame developers who’ve lost their job. There’s sometimes satisfaction expressed that people who are laid of from a developer of anything less than AAA titles lose their jobs. Wow- that’s pretty fucked up.
Left 4 Dead left me non-plussed a few weeks ago when I last wrote about it. I have kept at it a little longer- still in the single player mode. I’m finding it a lot more fun than the Singple player of some other PC FPS’s I’ve played in my time. So much that I think the single player is a greatly overlooked part of the game. I’m not even sure I really want to play multiplayer all that much.
Years ago, my first taste of PC multiplayer was the coop mode Terrorist Hunt on Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield. I had skipped Quake, Unreal and BF 1942 for various reasons but I got heavily hooked on that MP game for months on end, playing at night on our work LAN. We played the games maps as well as custom maps and we never played adversarial modes. Why? Because my friend who mostly hosted hated playing against other people. This was before co-op was a major selling feature of most shooters. He probably would have loved left for dead. I don’t know I’ve not seen him in a while since he’s gone off games.
I’m currently on the last mission of the Airport level (or the third of four campaigns). Even though its the equivalent of playing BF1942 with bots, its still a highly agreeable single player game. But even though I love PC multiplayer shooters, well CoD at least, I don’t know if I will want to play much more multi of this. Something about Valve games that attracts the rather unforgiving hardcore. In SP, if you shoot your team mates by accident, you get a warning. In MP, if you shoot your teammates you get a smack on the head. One of the single best features of CoD WaW is the one-level zombie mode that is unlocked once you beat single player. I hope Treyarch can turn that success into something a little meatier in future iterations or even DLC.
Fallout 3 is one of those games that you know will just eat your time. I’ve been slack and am still only three hours in but I’ve only had time to play the game on weekends recently so my progress is slower than a Trabant on an economy run. I’m liking it far more than Oblivion. I made it 10 hours into oblivion before losing interest but I hate later had pangs of regret in selling it. Actually wait, I gave it to Clint and he wiped his ass on it, or something. Or he got a dirty disc error. Something like that. I like the setting but obviously in a game that can take 100+ hours, I’m only going to see a limited version of all the game has to offer. And that’s OK. I need an ending to games and if one isn’t in sight, boredom takes over, quality or no. Probably F3′s shooter presentation is what is making it more palatable to player over something set in another fantasy realm. F3 is SF which has always been more my cup of tea. Irish Breakfast, if I’m not mistaken. Mine’s strong with milk, no sugar.
Lastly I played a teensy bit of Rock Band ACDC. For various reasons, including a ridiculously cheap price tag (not RRP), I bought thsi rather than the full version. I am disappointed that you can’t use it to buy DLC, but it is weird for someone who’s played Guitar ero for so long to suddenly play exactly the same game with such a different look- despite it being exactly the same.
Clint comes up from midfield, Cam tries to tackle him. George looks on. Its the world game. GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL!
At this stage we havea pretty good idea of what games are coming out during the first quarter of 2009. Let’s have a quickl look at what’s coming down the pipe over the next few months. I don’t know why I’m doing this since I’ll likley be spending the next few months finishing the games I already have but anyway…
Lord of the Rings: Conquest. This is A LOTR skin for Battlefront, which itself was a Star Warsified clone of Battlefield 1942. Penny Arcade have managed to destroy any anticipation for this game with a single comic. Oh dear.
Next up, oh looks its bloody EA again with Skate 2, the sequel to the game that made Activision’s multi-decade contract with Tony Hawk as smart as buying Ford stock. Skate 2 looks like an improvement on the original for those that loved Skate 1. At least its not called SK8 2.
Street Fighter IV. Capcom have finally realised Fighting Game fans can count to four. The important thing is that no matter how good or bad this game is or how it sells, Capcom will still be releasing Street Fighter 2 Extra Ultra Alpha Omega EX GTi later in the year.
Godfather 2. EA’s first take on the world of the Corleone family was like Fredo. A bit weak, ineffectual and plain useless. So which Corleone is this one going to be? Micahel? Sonny? Tom Hagen? I’m guessing Connie.
50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. Could this game actually be the over the top Gears clone that does to 3rd person shooters what Saint’s Row 2 did to open world games- make them so stupid but fun that people love them more than the games their based on?
Killzone 2. Yes we made fun of it yesterday, but by many account KZ2 could be the shooter of a fairy shooter thin first quarter. Will it get people away from CoD4, Resistance 2 CoD WaW? We’ll see. There are a lot of people hoping for big things from this game.
Resident Evil 5. Your black zombie killing simulator is coming in March. It has been likened to the Second coming of Christ, The End of WWII and Beatlemania reaching Finland in 1987. Did you like Resident Evil 4? If so put this in your cart. What’s that? You didn’t like RE4? Well, if you’re not part o fthe solution, you’re just part of the problem.
Guitar Hero Metallica. This will be interesting. People say GH Aerosmith tanked but for the band, they made more money of that than they ever did off of their studio albums.
F.E.A.R. 2- I o.n.l.y. a.d.d. i.t. h.e.r.e. b.e.c.a.u.s.e. I. l.i.k.e. t.y.p.i.n.g. p.e.r.i.o.d.s i.n. b.e.t.w.e.e.n. e.a.c.h. l.e.t.t.e.r.
Onechambra: Fap Squad. That’s not the full name of the game (one on Wii and one on 360) but it might as well be.
Halo Wars: RTS comes to the Halo Universe from a developer who are being shut down as soon as the game ships.
Tom Clancy H.A.W.X.- This last Holiday season, the gaming industry reeled from the fact that the only Tom Clancy title on the market was the RTS End War. Well, the next Tom Clancy game is an arcadey fighter game like Ace Combat from the people who bought you Blazing Angels. The H.A.W.X. name is pretty silly but there you have it.
Ninja Blade. This game is unlikely to be heard of ever again after its release in March. Let us speak of it no more.
Of course, the world has gone DLC mad. We have DLC for Fallout 3, Fable II, GTA IV. For some people (ie me) these look more interesting than the new games coming out.
I personally, sticking my own two cents am only looking at picking up KZ2 out o fthe above listed titles. Halo Wars will bethe first Halo game I won’t play. I know Cam will be heavily investing time in Burnout DLC and SFIV when it comes out. Clint will probably get whatever we least expect him to get and love that. After the last two years, I’m curious to see what there’s be for us to play later in the year.
The target bake that was displayed at E3 2005 has nothing on the final product. The most delicious PS3 only game of 2009 will soon be with us. It goes down nicely with red wine and you can eat it either with a knife and fork or just be brave and use your hands. Careful, its hot!
