There’s games and then there’s games. Valve’s Left4Dead has basically opened up and polished up a genre of games, and has done so in a way that other co-op, post-apocalyptic, four-on-four person teams will never be the same. Yep, the genre is “COPAFOFP w/ Zombies.” Ok, I kid.

This game was hard for me to write about not because everyone else has given it a great review, but because it is so. damned. good. Plus, I really wanted to say something important about it’s game play.

Reviewer credentials - never review a game you haven’t played extensively. Yes, I’m whining at YOU, Yatzee!
According to my Steam account, I’ve got:
34 hours of playtime
37 of 51 achievements
My biggest Hunter pounce was 10 points (out of a potential 25)
and I’ve yet to make it through any campaign on Expert.

But I keep trying. So why’s it taken me so long to write about this game? Hell, it’s been out for weeks - what’s defective with me? It’s because I’ve read and watched a ton of reviews and all of them have raved. Simply raved about this game, except the standard Yatzee Croshaw wingeing and nit-picking, telling me he phoned this one in.

I’m going to talk tangentially about this game: it’s a fucking masterpiece like most Valve games, and it’s got the polish that EA would’ve simply ignored to put into it. So raving more about it isn’t going to help.

A core of the L4D gameplay is cooperation, and helping each other. Everyone knows that the clock is ticking - you have to make it through the map. You have to kill zombies. Everyone, except the very newbie, knows that this game is bent on killing your character and simply will not allow a “respawn” - it’s do or die. In versus mode, it’s even more pronounced.

What is important is that I’ve added more Steam community “friends” in the last 2 weeks than I have since I’ve installed Steam. You can immediately tell good players from bad after one game of L4D… scratch that… not good players, but good PEOPLE. Bad people - like jerks and whiners - are almost completely cut out of the game play because… well, they’re jerks. Either through voting or a tit-for-tat Dawkins’ like grudging (from Dawkins’ Selfish Gene), where you help someone, but they don’t help you - no one else helps them either.

The good people work together as a team, who have low tolerance for whiners, who have a willingness to both teach and learn new strategies and tactics. Team Fortress, Halo and all the rest of the group vs. group games wish they had this level of excellent game play. And yes, there are some guilds that develop impenetrable cooperation, but it does congeal as part of the game play itself. It doesn’t evolve from the game play. We will get back to that evolution point in a bit.

The strategies used on the first week of game play have completely transformed in less than two weeks. As players get familiar with other players and maps, they enact different strategies - usually variations of fast/slow for survivors and bottleneck/harrying for infected (that’s zombies). The players have developed standards - one or two people end up becoming tactical leads and the others simply support them.

Also, players develop different tactics based on the situation - as we (the collective players) learned of weaknesses, we’ve also learned of strengths - in the characters of the infected or the maps, or the ability to teamwork. As the strategy is consensus based, all it takes is one ass-tard… sorry, player… who wants to Rambo the game and the entire game play is changed. And one person who whines about the speed of his computer simply gets booted because there’s a low tolerance - the game play is too fast and communication too important to tolerate whiners.

So, not only does L4D have evolving strategies, tactics, but culture as well. If communication is a precious commodity, tolerance for someone whining “Fuck fuck fuck they’re cheating that’s bullshit you fuckers” on a webmic will immediately get the boot. Thus, a meta game exists enforcing good standards of team play.

And this is where we’re seeing an incredible change in player behavior. If you act like a jerk, your three partners “darwin” you out of the gene pool. As a human being who wants to have a good time, you learn either because it’s in your nature, or because you’re force to cooperate. You learn to play - not “nice” but “good”.

In a world that celebrates evil-wins-out behavior prominently displayed in reality shows Left4Dead is a really “good” thing.

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P.S. It would be neat if, when playing solo, the bots need a command console such as “Protect [character]”, “Defend HERE” - just a few simple commands would help a lot. Plus, I hate it when the bots set off the car alarm… but.. ok, I can live with it. Stupid bots. Also, should be able to play solo as infected to learn the tactics.

One of the most fun things about the Fallout series was that IT WAS NOT FOR CHILDREN. It was not only post-apocalypse, but post-ethical, and downright postal. The interaction between sex, death, and the unsavory behavior everyone was pretty extreme… at least so it seemed to me.

Here’s my reviewer creds:
Playtime: 24+ hours on normal difficulty, four characters and at least several chapters into the main story (after the introduction of the Enclave)
Version: PC
Resolution: 1600×1048, but screen lag forced me to move to a lower resolution
Number of Crashes: More than 5, less than 10
Do I intend to finish the game? Maybe, once I find the cheat codes…

Well, Bethesda, in re-purposing their Oblivion engine, has brought Fallout 3 franchise to life. And they’ve made it into a modular improvement model so they can keep adding functionality at $40 future releases.

So the good news, it’s relatively stable. It’s relatively fun. There’s only been one or two places that I’ve actually laughed out loud. There’s a decent pastiche to Lovecraft which I’ve played all the way through, and I’ve both saved and destroyed Megaton. So what’s my problem with it?

Maybe I’m jaded but I missed the sexual innuendo that came with the preceding Fallouts - hell, not that I’m a proponent for bovine copulation, but it was just given that everyone fucked anything in the preceding Fallouts… It’s like Conan - the women where whores and so were the men. But… I can overlook this one issue.

Duality morality needs an enema. The whole Angelic vs. Demonic behavior… in this game it’s “karma”… is the worst metric. The decision I make today has no impact on tomorrow, except through rumor/public opinion. KOTOR. Mass Effect. Oblivion. BioShock. Games should come with a disclaimer of Mother Theresa/Baby Eating Morality.

The fight scenes are not as enjoyable as Dark Space or Half-Life. Environmental manipulation is limited. There’s TONS of things to open up and grab the shit inside… but as soon as you point your mouse at them, you know they are empty… it’s like you’re fucking psychic. So… there’s absolutely NO IMMERSION. Every time you find a medkit, I think, “In a post-apocalyptic world, people are dying everywhere… and this medkit found in the center of a well-populated environment has either been judiciously restocked before I got here OR no one else thought of EVER opening up the medkit.”

Even the Super Duper Mart has everything… and I mean everything… inside.

You know, as I write this review, I’m actually convincing myself I haven’t been having fun playing this fucking game. I’m actually angry with myself because I didn’t realize it until 4 days later. I’ve haven’t been playing a game, I’ve been going through the motions trying to “find the good stuff,” wanting to “find a gem buried in the gameplay” and thinking constantly, “Man, this would be better if…”

Ah! It’s like I’ve been living a Christian life, getting to my death bed and realizing, “SHIT! This heavenly god crap is bollocks!” Bethesda did create a “triple AAA” game. They did maintain most of the themes, gore, and some of the humor. But in short, it’s just not fun.

And once again, I’m dissing on the most popular game on the market wondering why people design, play and buy this shit.

So let me edit my reviewer creds:
Do I intend to finish the game? No, I’m going to go home an uninstall it.

I want more gaming enjoyment, fuckers.