::A Geek in Korea::

The gamer group decided this weekend was an Xbox weekend. I had been talking about Left 4 Dead for quite some time. We had been having a problem getting everyone to come and play when we visit the Xbox room, so competitive games weren’t popular. There are also skill issues and teams to worry about. Left 4 Dead solves all this because it is for four players, you play co-operatively, and it’s got a goal that requires everyone to work together. As long as we could play offline through the room’s network connection, we were going to be able to play a game that would work for all of us.

I got the game going with one other player who arrived at the same time I did. I had settled on the Bill character, while he was Zoey. We worked our way through the first campaign, “No Mercy” set in a hospital. Since there were only two of us, there were AI players controlling our allies. The campaign was fun. The hard part came at the very end, but no matter what we tried,  we couldn’t survive the final encounter waiting for the helicopter to land. We tried three or four times. The best part was that while the general flow of the encounters were the same, the game is never plays the same way twice. Once we might get attacked by a horde of zombies, while another time there could be a Hulk smashing us in a hallway. Meanwhile another group of friends arrived, and they wanted to join our game.

We asked the room owner to set up our game, but he said it couldn’t be done through the network. Since we had played multiplayer through the network before when we played Call of Duty 4, I thought he just didn’t know that the game worked offline. I set up a server, and soon enough we had the full compliment of four players in the game. All my hype was no justified, we could play a cooperative game together on the same team!

We did pretty well for playing our first time. We had some trouble in one of the campaigns called “Death Toll”, so we switched to “Dead Air” which takes place at an airport. Blasting away TSA zombies was so satisfying. We finally survived a swarming final encounter when the game throws everything at you and there is a countdown event. I actually made it to the plane alive along with one other player. That was the first time I had reached the final goal in all the final encounter scenarios in the game. Sadly a Hulk ripped apart our compatriots, and after failing so often I decided better than to hope off the plane to attempt a rescue.

The game is intense, well designed, and fun. It forces you to work together, and no one can be Rambo and go off on their own. I clearly didn’t learn this lesson, as I was the most healed and helpless, but also one of the top killers in the game. I want to play the other two scenarios we didn’t finish to completion, and also see what the “Versus” mode is like, with half the players taking the roles of Zombies, the other half Survivors, and seeing who scores the most points as they try to complete the mission.

We played the game for around five hours straight until wives and girlfriends started calling and asking to eat in the evening. At that point my eyes were so burned from watching out for Zombies that it was painful to keep playing anyway. Very awesome game. Looking forward to playing it again with people.

Next week is D&D, and we’re going to even try to bring a new person into the RPG fold that has never played any tabletop game before at all. He’s said that he doesn’t understand how a game “with some paper and…some dice?” could be fun. It’ll be nice to not be the “new to RPG guy” for once. I’ll try not to let it go to my head.