Left 4 Dead
No, this is not a follow up to my health insurance rant. Though that would be ironic.
Sorry that this is going up two days late. Things have been batshit insane around here this week. I officially got the first page of Atomic Robo 4.1 finished. I’ve been involved in a series of phone calls and emails from the other side of the Earth that have me both terrified and hysterically excited, which I won’t be able to talk about in detail for several weeks to come. And I worked out our health care disaster in a way that looks like it will work out for everyone involved. . .at least until next year when I get to do it all over again. But the doctor tells me that life with only one kidney is not so bad, and I should be back on my feet again no later than Christmas. God, what a broken system we have.
As a point of research I picked up Valve Software’s Left 4 Dead. While I’d heard nothing but rave reviews for this game, zombies are not a subject that excites me. I know how strange that sounds considering that robots, monkeys, ninjas, and zombies are the four classic tropes that buff the awesomeness level of any given comic simply by being in that comic. But really, of the four only robots interest me.
Left 4 Dead is not really a zombie game in the classic sense. It’s a bio-disaster horror game. The “zombies” are actually mutated humans and come in a variety of shapes and sizes and sporting an array of special abilities all designed to result in a TPK. Oh and they are fast. Really fucking fast! On the bright side, also unlike a classic zombie tale, guns and ammo are plentiful enough that the game doesn’t turn into “bullet husbandry” as you try to conserve that last round for a desperate head-shot on the biggest ghoul in the mob. In fact, your sidearms never run out of ammo. Sure, that’s unrealistic, but what it means is that when a swarm of baddies comes racing down a dark alleyway at you, you don’t hesitate to squeeze the trigger of your assault rifle until it goes “click-click-click”, then whip out your .45, pistol whip a guy into the wall and blow the next guy’s face out the back of his head.
I may be imagining this next part, but I think the game adapts to your style of play. If you takes things slow and cautious, shooting zombies from a distance, one at a time, it seems to recognize this and hordes of them will suddenly appear from out of nowhere and overwhelm you. However if you keep moving, whereby basically putting yourself in the position of always being surrounded by at least a few zombies, it seems not to do this. Combine this with all the guns and it makes for a VERY fast paced, exciting, and kinetic game. Its fucking brilliant
You play as one of 4 survivors who, as a group, are trying to make it from safe house to safe house, and ultimately out of the city alive. The AI for your teammates is very solid. So solid I would say they are probably better than the real people that you can team up with online to play this game with.
The only downside is that last night I woke up sweating every five minutes as one zombie-mutant nightmare after another kept me from getting any real sleep.
The only other nerdy things I’ve been up to lately is Pathfinder. Holy shit do I love this game. On Sunday I got together with Brian and two other friends to play. Quite an impressive feat when you consider that we all live in three different states, and four different cities. (Well, a village in my case.) But with the help of two amazing bits of free technology from The Future we got together around a virtual tabletop and rolled simulated dice on our iPhones and computers.
Brian’s monk Iron-Crane Li laid on many a Furious Blows (and blow furiously he did), Mookie’s half-orc bard named Bart did his best medieval Gene Simmons, and Chris’s Rogue Tavro spent more time picking pockets and looting dead bodies than contributing to the fight against Evil. All through the magic of Skype and MapTools, (It gets interesting around the 5min mark). As far as I can tell we all had fun -there was certainly a lot of laughing -especially when I learned how disturbed Mookies was by the site of burning imaginary cats.
That’s all for now. Here are a few character reference sheets I made up for Robo 4.1 -Enjoy!
