I know I’ve been talking about Left4Dead for months now, but I’m still very much in love with my zombie filled game.

All I’ve been playing is expert campaign and versus…and expert difficulty is insanely hard. My usual Left4Dead group (Brandon, Ben, and Matt) have tried to make it through all four scenarios on Expert difficulty. Sadly, we’ve only successfully beaten one out of the four campaigns. I mean, Advanced is fairly tough as is, but for those teeth-grinding, white-knuckle moments there is Expert. Our sessions usually last about five hours, which mostly end in tragedy. It’s disheartening, yes, but it’s incredibly satisfying if accomplished. Not only do the zombies do much more damage in this mode, but so does friendly fire. For example, Matt is a great player. He’s a good shot. He’s dedicated to play a game for five hours that he might not even win… but he uses the sniper rifle, which is a one shot kill to anyone on his team.

‘BANG’

Matt has incapacitated Bonnie!

“… Sorry.”

Not to say that the Assault Rifle or the Auto-Shottie are any better, but you don’t have to be point blank with the Sniper Rifle to take down one of your compadres with a misplaced shot.

Also, the AI Director is a jerk. I’m sure everyone has had a defining gameplay moment where the invisible jackass has thwarted their efforts and killed off the whole party. In my experience, it’s always on the last level when this moment occurs. It’s always with the escape vehicle on the horizon. So it goes something like this:

After the unrelenting horde of the undead has beaten down on our heroes, they start staggering toward the rescue vehicle. Zoey is near death. Her health is dwindling by the second as she gimps behind her teammates who are in slightly better shape than she is. However, they’re all bleeding out and recovering from the last Tank attack, when there it is: the escape vehicle is in sight. Glorious survival and victory are just a few steps away. The rest of the team gets inside and starts shouting while providing support fire. Amidst the chaos and the roar of the zombies approaching behind Zoey, Bill meagerly shouts out, “Smoker!”… Which has already grabbed Zoey and is dragging her toward the throng.

Smoker has incapacitated Bonnie!

Zoey is left to die for the good of the team.
/roll credits

“…For the good of the team”

I hate hearing that when I’m down. Although, it does give me a good excuse to warble, “L-leave me!” or “Don’t let them eat me! Shoooot meeee!” like I’m actually in a zombie flick. Yes, I’m an idiot and probably the worst person to play Left4Dead with, but at least I’m having fun.

Speaking of idiots, last week Ryan and I decided to play Versus. After exhausting our options of playing with actual people, mostly by saying “brah” every few minutes (don’t ask), we finally got into a game… with just us two. We connected to a party chat and started Blood Harvest. Surprisingly, the game isn’t quite as taught with only two people (What. No way!). The infected side has one special zombie that spawns-in every ten seconds or so (much faster than the twenty some seconds in the standard four on four). This doesn’t help with the crackshot AI-support that a single survivor gets. The AI is merciless and could explode an infected from the darkest corner or through the thickest tree. The match was pretty even throughout our whole campaign, until Ryan met with an open window followed by a mighty long drop. Either way, the entire experience was worth the stupid smack talk and watching Ryan plummet to his death. Very satisfying.

The game is refreshing to play online as I stated in my previous post. It’s weird. I can’t explain why zombies bring people together, but I can only hope that the zombie apocalypse happens… and heals the world.

Freeware is a term used to describe computer software that is publicly available for no cost or an optional fee (and I mean legally free, so there’s no possibility of the feds breaking into your house and finding your extensive collection of loli hentai). You’ll find that most freeware programs are typically word processors and miscellaneous programs, but you know what else is freeware? Vidja. Yep, you heard me correctly: There are free games out on the interbutts. Turns out that some of them are pretty good too! I’ll be covering two of my favorites; which you all should play if you have any taste at all (since I can’t embed videos on the wordpress, I’ll just have hyperlinked images containing the URL of a trailer).

Cave Story

Cave Story, an action-adventure game designed by Studio Pixel, is my favorite freeware and indie game to date. It combines many classic styles of gameplay from the ol’ NES days; specifically Metroid and Mega Man, and has very artistic pixel-based visuals, making it both look and feel like you’re playing an old classic. There’s not much to talk about in terms of story, but the characters are all portrayed quite nicely and actually have more depth than a kiddie pool. One drawback you may have is with the playtime of this game - as it roughly takes 4 -to-6 hours to beat if you’re experienced. Do not let the playtime fool you, however, this game is definitely difficult if you don’t take it seriously… or if you just happen to waltz into Hell like I did.

As good as Cave Story is, it’s not just the game that amazes me - it’s the creator himself, Daisuke Amaya (Pixel), who singlehandedly created this game over the course of five years. Everything from the gameplay mechanics to scoring the game’s music - he did it all. It’s absolutely amazing, given the depth of the game, that he was able to accomplish such a feat. Even if you end up not liking Cave Story (what the fuck is wrong with you?), you have to respect the guy for managing to do this amazing feat.

Turns out there’ll be an enhanced Wii port of the game soon; completed with enhanced visuals and a remastered soundtrack. I’ll definitely be grabbing it as soon as possible.

Bootfighter Windom: XP

Anyone up for demolishing some cities with giant fighting robots? Bootfighter is a game that emphasizes on the use of mecha vs. mecha combat. Why? Well why the fuck not?! They’re mecha. You do not need a reason to kick ass with a giant robot. Anyway, this game plays like a 3D fighter of sorts, only you’re placed in densely urban environments, and anything getting in the way of you and your opponent is either going to be crushed or blown up. The neat thing is that these mecha are designed in a manner similar to the famous Gundam anime series (Windom), and each unit is named after a particular operating system - ranging from your usual Windows to various Linux distros (Windom).

You have your projectile, close range, and ’special attacks.’ Each except special has one or two keys to use for specific situations - for example: one button will have you shoot with a cannon; the other is a high-powered railgun that pretty much rapes everything in its path. So you get a total of five possible attacks, and a guard command (the combat-based sixth key) In addtion to the aforementioned abilities, you can also jump and - depending on the unit - transform into a flying machine to elude your foe. All of these different fuctions add a level of complexity to the gameplay itself; ‘which moves to use’, ‘when to use them’, ‘when to evade,’ etc.

The game has multiple playing modes, including everyone’s favorite: online play. You can either fight 1-on-1 or choose to fight alongside a battalion of other mecha lovers to destroy the, well, conveniently placed enemy forces roughly equal to your size. Got to love the flawed logic behind vidja and animu. You can even add a little player icon and pre-set battle messages (victory, defeat, etc) to further individualize yourself from other players. I have a lot of fun playing this with my brother, and hopefully you will too.

Zombies are my undead bread and butter, so naturally when a zombie co-op shooter is available I jumped to play it…when it came out….a few months ago.

…Yeah, I’ve been kind of lazy about updating, but there’s a lot of games that came out, Christmas, school, my little brother got his arm stuck in the microwave, my grandma dropped acid, and she freaked out. She hijacked a busload of penguins… In all seriousness, I’ve been certainly getting my money’s worth out of Left 4 Dead.

Left4Dead is a zombie-themed, survival-horror FPS developed by Valve that keeps its players together by surrounding them with hordes of the undead.  I have been dreaming about this game for years. Left 4 Dead is a survival zombie game that keeps its players together with threats of mini-zombie bosses and hordes of the undead. Each level is a different scenario (hospital, airport, farm house, boat) that you and your companions need to fight through to finally reach rescue. Seeing as I have the 360 version of the game, there’s not a lot of options for levels yet, but you’re looking at four different areas to choose from.

The game doesn’t have much of a story in the ways of cutscenes or character development.  Luckily, Left4Dead doesn’t really need a gripping story to keep you playing.   Even so, there are some elements of story that allow the player to piece together what’s going on.  In each safety bunker, you are able to read graffiti on the wall ranging from survivors names to theories of the zombie apocalypse.

The game does thrive off of co-op. In my opinion, if you’re not playing this game with real people, you’re not playing this game right. While your AI companions are not completely stupid, it’s hard to coordinate anything if they only follow you around blindly shooting anything that moves. But as you all are aware of, jerks do exists on XBOX (gasp, say it ain’t so!).

Although, Left 4 Dead does a fairly good job of keeping the “griefers” in check by adding the specials and mass amounts of undead.  If someone decides to play a hero (basically playing a one man army guy like Master Chief), they will quickly be snuffed out by some of the Special Zombies who need to be taken out by a team.  Also, if you’re playing with random people, you always have the option to vote someone out and have them replaced by a good ol’ silent AI character.

The gameplay is generated by an insidious AI Director.  This invisible watcher can make your life in the game a living hell. Essentially, what it’s supposed to do, is gauge how you’re playing and ramp up or tone down the difficulty. Although, after playing it for a while now, it doesn’t really feel like there’s something controlling anything. It feels more random as if there’s not deciding factor what gets thrown at you whether your stomping through the area or getting spanked by the undead.

That’s where the “versus mode” really kicks it up. In this game type, you’re able to play as the infected and hound the survivors to death to score points. It gives the makes the game more intense and a way play while racing through the level with actual people controlling the special zombies.

What the 360-version of the game lacks is levels.  While the game offers hours and hours of re-playability (what with constant changing spawns thanks to the AI Director) the levels you play can get somewhat stagnant as there’s only two scenarios for versus and four for co-op. It’s not that the levels are bad, but they get kind of old. For versus, it’s easy to know all the good hiding spots for the infected pretty quickly if you’ve played the same scenario a dozen or so times.

Another small flaw is there’s no customization for the characters. It is a small complaint, but I’d love to make myself or even change the look of any of the four characters in the game.

I still really love playing this game. It’s always great to have a shooter that I can get into and even people I don’t know that I end up playing with are actually enjoyable. This game makes people super nice. Left4Dead encourages you to help your fellow gamers, so you hear a lot of “Thanks!” or “Nice shot!”.   The game really does force you to work together as a team whether you like it or not.   If a Smoker has someone dangling over an edge, someone has to go free them or that character will die.   It really is essential to work as a group.

Really, it’s refreshing as is the game itself.

This game has figured a way to introduce cannibalism and flame throwers into the same scenario. But I’m not into making white people my slaves.

I took too many jets (which is like the game’s version of Nuke from RoboCop) and now I’m having withdrawls. Enemies in this game go from flashy robots to walking shit-flingers. And someone killed my dog a few hours ago, so now I’m trying to kill everyone I see on this save file.

Now I’m over looking a group of super mutants and robots shooting it out. What weapon shall I use? Sniper rifle? Nah, never really does a complete job, instead it just horribly mames my enemies. Laser rifle? It never really leaves a pretty dead body to eat. No, I pull out the Fat Man (it sounds like a bar joke, but it’s not).

No, the Fat Man is a launcher. Sort of like a potato gun. But instead of spuds being flung at enemies, there are miniature warheads being tossed around.

I’m too lazy to bother aiming, so my first nuke goes into the distance and either doesn’t explode or it went into some one’s bomb shelter and fucked up their apocalypse.

I re-load and this time my character crouches down and the view is fairly simple. Lots of brown, lots of dead bushes and a setting sun (this game kills with the shadows and the shades of browns). Those super mutants that were fighting those robots from earlier? Well they lost. Now those robots are bursting my thought bubble and they’re slowly approaching.

The second mini-nuke I fire obliterates their robo-bodies. A mushroom cloud hangs in the air for a few seconds and radiation poisoning starts affecting my character.
It’s a lose-lose situation. I wasted a nuke and I can’t eat the robots.