Left 4 Dead=Left 4 Awesome

If the zombie apocalypse is this fun, then I wish I was dead. That could be interpreted many ways. One is that (a) this is a terrible game and I want to kill myself, (b) I wish I was dead to become a zombie, or (c) um… never mind, only two ways that I can think of. Well, the correct interpretation is (b). I guess in this case, and the same is true with many zombie games of late, I would rather be infected than dead. In L4D, you don’t have to dead to be a zombie. 

I’ll skip the Infected for now and go to the survivors. The survivors are who you play as in the campaign. You’re a group of survivors of the epidemic of zombies and you’re trying to get to a certain place in each campaign were survivors are being evacuated. That is really all there is to the story, except that there are four different campaigns that each take place in various locations that would be found in a city. One goes through the streets and up on to the top of a hospital, one through the countryside and a small field to be evacuated at a military outpost, the next in an airport, and the last in sewers that take you out into a forest where you get picked up by a boat during the finale. Speaking of the finale, all of the campaigns have an epic finale where the survivors hole up somewhere for a period of time until the transport arrives to evacuate you. Then the campaign ends. 

The campaigns are fun, but not fun enough for me. Why would you play as a human, when you could play as an infected and screw with the human players? I just never really got into being a survivor and always would much rather play versus mode where you take turns being survivors and infected. 

So versus mode is where a team of four joins another team of four and one team plays the survivors for a round and tries to reach the safe room. There are five safe rooms (I think) in each campaign. The other team plays as infected and tries to apprehend the survivors and kill them all before they reach the safe room. After the survivors reach the safe room, or the survivors are all killed, the teams switch roles and play the chapter over again. The important thing about that is that there are many different variants of each chapter so it never feels like your playing a game that you just played. I always preferred the infected, as I stated earlier, because it felt way more fun. 

In versus mode you can play as the “special” infected, the Hunter, the Smoker, the Boomer, or the Tank. The smoker are like cats. They crouch down and can jump like 30 feet onto a target and then start to tear them to shreds while also knocking them down to the ground where they are defenseless and can be attacked by other zombies. The smokers have long tongues that they shoot a hundred feet out and into a survivor. They then drag the survivor closer and closer and attack them when they get close enough. Also, a survivor being attacked by a smoker only has a few seconds to shoot them before they are stunned. The tank is, well, a tank. It has a huge amount of health, can knock people to the ground with one hit, and can rip huge chunks out of the ground and throw them at the survivors. The Boomer, is a large, fat zombie, that barfs on the survivors which attracts the “horde” (the term for the normal infected). I’m serious. 

a Tank

 

Combat is intense. There is nothing else to say about it. It’s frantic, fast-paced and intense. There is no problem with the combat unless you cannot get yourself to think quickly and make split second decisions. The only problem with it is the guns. There is not a big variety of them and the sniper rifle? Who wants a sniper rifle inside a hospital? Or sewers? But still its really great combat. 

So Left 4 Dead is a really good game. I am one of the few people who didn’t really ever like it as much as every one else did. But I liked it and I definitely see how and why everyone else likes it. I recommend this game only for hardcore shooters as you really need to have a lot of experience. 

Oh wait, haha, I forgot something. The AI director. The AI director is an AI that controls all of the other AI and controls how many items and ammo stashes you find. If you’re doing great the AI director will make more zombie babies, and if you’re doing really bad it’ll throw you some slack and make it a little easier.

is that it? That’s it. So go and play your games and keep looking at my blog.  I don’t have a million views yet. Oh, and comment. You have no idea how excited I get whenever I get a comment. Seriously though, take five seconds and comment. 

Love,

Jake Goulder

Peefackle’s Author

Better Late Than Never: Gears of War 2

I know it’s a little late, (10 whole days after the release) but it’s good to start with Gears.

I was kind of disappointed by Gears. Wait, don’t ridicule me yet. I was disappointed mainly by the fact that it comes out at the same time as so many other awesome games like Mirror’s Edge and Left 4 Dead. But also by the fact that I won’t have time to play anything else. So yes, Gears is super awesome.

Everything that CliffyB said he would deliver, he did. The campaign is pretty awesome and the story is strong, but it’s not what you’ll be playing most of the time. The strong point, and I mean the really really strong point, is the multiplayer. Especially horde.

Horde is mind bogglingly fun, and that fun factor increases with the amount of people playing it with you. My friend and I just this weekend made it to wave 40, and then tried for about an hour without success to beat it. That’s what is so fun about it. On the Day One map you go and sit behind the cover above the arcade and wait for some massive boomers to come and shoot rockets at you while you pelt their faces with shotgun ammo. And on wave 40 it takes about a clip and a half (at least) to kill a boomer like that.

On horde if you don’t use teamwork, well, you get screwed. On the later waves there will be some grenadier with a shotty, who will run up to you and blast you and your separated team into little tiny bits while you try to meet up in the middle of the map.

To say the least, horde is hard. But that is what’s fun. It’s just so hard to describe the excitement on your friends’ faces whenever you beat a wave that you’ve been working on for a long time.

What’s really interesting about horde is how Epic did the waves. Each wave, the locust increase in numbers and harder enemies spawn during every wave. But at every tenth wave starting with 11, the locust get either their damage, accuracy, or health increased, but the enemy spawns start back over at level one. It works out very well in the end, even though it doesn’t sound like a big enough challenge. And let me tell you, a grinder with 3 times as much health, twice as much accuracy, and twice the amount of damage is not cool. It’s like fighting RAAM all over again, 70 times.

 

 

The online is fun too. Especially Submission (which should have been called Meat-flag, as Epic originally announced). You take down a shotgun wielding AI, take them as a hostage, and drag them to a capture zone, where you win the round. But all of the online is very fun. The connections are almost always seamless, and the games are intense. Really intense. The matches are fun on almost any map, as long as your team is not the one getting curb-stomped and chain-sawed all of the time.

There is not really anything bad I can say about Gears multiplayer, except for one problem my friends and I were having: It takes forever to find a team to play with, and then a team to play against. I expect that the problem should be fixed soon, but I’m not sure if it was because of the limited amount of people who got the game in the first week, or because of a network problem. Whatever it is, it should get better any time soon.

So yes, go and buy Gears right now, if you don’t have it already. It’s easily one of the best games I’ve played on the 360 since Oblivion and Halo and it is worth the 60 dollars. Hell, it’s worth a lot more than 60 dollars. So go and buy it, before the price goes up.

Feel free to leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

Oh yeah i forgot a few things. The difficulties. The difficulties are now Casual, Normal, Hardcore, and Insane, which you can’t even play until you’ve beaten the game at least once. The gap in difficulty from normal to insane really is insane. Most of the time you don’t even go down, you just die. Add that to the fact that the locust have up to four times the amount of health as you, it is pretty damn hard. 

I also forgot to talk about how the story is strong. The addition of the search for Maria, Dom’s wife, adds a lot to the game. You really can relate to Dom, you know, especially if you’ve lost your wife in a war against a terrible alien species. Besides that off shoot, the main story is very good. At some times you won’t get why you are where you are, but the blood and violence lets you forget that and just have fun doing whatever it is that you’re doing. 

Well, now that the entry is actually done, go and buy Gears. You’ll thank me.