Saturday, July 11, 2009

L4D Issues

So far I've been playing L4D since the last time we went LAN and played it. Great game. Really fun, and requires a lot of teamwork. I usually play on Versus games unless I want to get achievement, in which case I will create my own campaign map and play, with sv_cheats ON. You can get achievements as long as you turn it off whilst you are doing the achievement, turn it on again after and continue. So like if you want the Crownd achievement, you noclip to a place with a witch, noclip OFF, sv_cheats OFF, and then blast the witch before doing an sv_cheats ON and noclip ON again. I usually use cheats for 'Survive a campaign' kind of achievements.

But talking more about the gameplay, I use Garena and play in Singapore Room 1, mostly only those in the friend's list, which I assume are players who live around my area. The objective of the versus game is to either, if you are a human, get all surviving humans into the safe room at the end of the map, or, if you are a special infected, incapacitate or kill all the humans. Humans have really high HP, and they also have medkits, so they are a formidable force to be dealt with. Luckily, the special infected are not your ordinary zombies but mutant-zombie beings who have the ability to render a human immobile during attack. That is, only the human you are attacking. That is why the rest of the humans are supposed to protect the human by killing the attacking special infected. It's simply a case of sticking together blasting anything that comes you or anyone else's way.

Special Infected also have perks to help them in their quest such as the Tank and Witch, both of whom can do great damage. A witch is quite useless, but if used well, can act as a very good distraction or incapacitating force. In one hit, any player that gets hit by it will become incapacitated for sure. The Tank is a playable race that comes out only once in a while and only in certain maps. It's simply this large humongous gray hulk thing that can whack objects at people, throw stones at people, or simply just whack people and send them flying. It can turn the tide between winning and losing. In a maximum of three hits, a tank can incapacitate a person, and with a 5000+ HP bar, it is no easy kill. Humans, however, can exploit an infected's weakness which is that once caught on fire, it will never stop losing HP until it dies. So if a tank is hit by a Molotov, which is a fire grenade, his effectiveness will decrease by four times.

The best would be simply to dodge all the human's molotov's, which is quite hard, you have to be quite a distance away and hope that the human throws it blindly. Or, you could pretend to charge at the human, wait until he visibly takes out a molotov then quickly move to the side. But the molotov's has quite a large area of effect, so either way you have to be careful and fast. Also, work with the rest of the special infected since they will usually use the confusion you create to their advantage.

Zombie hordes, blood, gore, guns, vomit and scary witches, it was no doubt I didn't like it at first. I thought that it was just disgusting, and totally not fun when I watched Raveen playing it in school. He was playing with bots I guess. Anyway, I had the same idea as my dad did last night, when he told us both (Me and my bro) to stop playing because it 'spoil your mind', apparently. I pretty much had that same initial idea that it would 'spoil your mind', but then again, my mind is quite hard to spoil, although it can get influenced. What made me overcome this first impression that L4D was disgusting and shouldn't be played?

Well, that would have to be the LAN session, but we didn't really work well as a team, I guess. Nobody ever made it to the safe room, but when I play on Garena, I find that it actually is possible for humans to make it to the safe room, whilst I always thought that the infected had the upper hand. There are advantages and disadvantages on both teams, but I guess it's quite a fair game altogether, although I don't really know how to calculate the fairness of a game.

So what was it that made L4D so interesting and fun? To start off, zombie fighting isn't fun, but it sure is interesting. Blowing their heads up can be seen as violent computer gaming, but if my Dad has no trouble with Counter-Strike then he probably wouldn't have any trouble with that either. He is probably against the idea of 'zombie' and 'hordes' and 'infected' and blood I guess, which are the exact things I was against when I said I didn't like L4D initially.

The thing that changed my mind was how unbelievable hard it was and how much a team has to cooperate in order to succeed in the mission. For example, the special infected have generally low HP, so heading it out on your own would be suicide. Every special infected on the team has got to attack at the same time in order to maximize the damage done to the humans at every point in time (the special infected respawns every 40 seconds, humans don't). For humans, everyone has to stick together and cover one another as they move through the map. Hiding in corners is also an excellent way to fight off the horde. There are several 'Alert the horde' points throughout the campaigns so you have to camp and kill the hordes of zombies off before progressing. Of course, the special infected are still present at that time, so camping together is the best way to do it. Shotguns, Uzis, Auto-Shotguns, M16s, Snipers and Dual Pistols firing at the same time in the same direction, nothing can stand in your way, not even a tank.

But I can't exactly explain how L4D is actually a good social interacting platform which educates children and youth on how to work together and effectively together, as a team. That would just be a preposterous idea, especially to my Dad, who would be just as stubborn as a my brother to refuse to give up his beliefs, and instead impose it on his children. I don't blame him though, I guess its a genetic make-up thing. Haha. Everyone in my family is rather stubborn in one way or another, so we're quite used to that. It will take some time for my Dad to understand why L4D is not such a bad game that 'spoils your mind'. Perhaps it will happen someday. Perhaps never. In any case, I can't play it forever, now can I?
kaizersabre performed alchemy @ 7:12 AM