Wednesday 6 May 2009

L4D Noob

Months after actually purchasing Left4Dead waaaaay back when Steam had it on sale the first time I decided to actually play the game last night.
1st noob mistake - not checking the controls before entering an online game. I actually thought "better check the controls before I start", then I didn't. Fortunately my super 1337 FPS skills prevented insta-pwnage - and the basic zombies drop like flies so that was cool. Unfortunately I hadn't a clue how to use med packs or anything else that required anything more complicated than shooting. Some furtive glances through the control menus and I figured out some shit like picking stuff up (and there were some handy on-screen tips), other stuff like med packs and pills I pretty much had to stumble upon myself. 2nd noob mistake - letting the game choose a match "at my level". Yeah, although I'm a L4D noob I'm certainly no FPS noob - I'm not "1337" (ok I lied before :() but I can hold my own. So I let the game match me up a suitable game, and since I'd never played before it stuck me in a noob game with a bunch of noobs at low difficulty. It's rare I come top in the end of level stats for online games - that's how I know things were a bit too easy and my fellow players not too great. Actually there was one dude who seemed to know what he was doing, he usually came 2nd in the stats :p, so, lesson learned, plump for a minimum of medium difficulty. 3rd noob mistake - Agitating "The Witch". There's a special class of enemy called The Witch, near as I can tell there's one per stage of each scenario - The Witch cries and moans like a little girl and huddles up in corners, she'll leave you alone as long as you don't attack her or agitate her with your flashlight. I agitated her more than once I must confess. To be fair though I also contributed the most damage to taking her down each time too. L4D is actually a pretty decent co-op zombie survival sim, there's lots of little nuances that make you think "nice!". Using med kits for example requires you to stop for several seconds while it's applied, a bit more realistic than the insta-heal most games utilise for their med kits, and it adds to the game dynamic as you need to wait for a lull in the action or find a safe spot to apply the kit. The game is co-op, so it's in your own interest to keep your team alive as they might be the difference between your own survival or becoming zombie food - as such you can choose to use your med kit on team mates rather than yourself - another nifty mechanic is that injured players move slower which is added incentive to use your kit on them as slower players are less useful in most situations. Aside from the co-op related innovations the game is otherwise a fairly standard FPS, but the co-op is what makes it fun. It's much better if you've got a mic or headset, the team can communicate better and you get a better sense that you're playing with real people rather than bots. If I had to criticise the game I'd probably ask for some more interesting weapons, the choice is meagre; pistol, dual pistol, shotgun, machine gun, assault rifle, sniper rifle. And besides the meagre choice you're only allowed to carry the pistol/dual pistol plus a single one of the others. I suppose they sort of went for realism on that scale - the weapons are all real and they're fairly likely to be found in the settings the game puts you in, but me, I like unrealistic fantasy weapons. Interestingly my headset worked perfectly with L4D over Steam after my GoW issues with the same device over GFWL. Makes the fact that it works so poorly with GFWL all that more strange and annoying. Anyone fancies a game I'm freedoms_stain on Steam, and I'm out.

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