A little while back, a friend of mine gifted me a copy of Left4Dead to help him out with recording for a video project he was cooking up. I played it using my wife’s graphics card (mine isn’t DX9 capable, so won’t play L4D) on the Freaky Free Friday, and here’s my mini-review. I had an absolute blast going through each of the campaigns the first time. They did a fantastic job with the atmosphere, the storyline, the scenery – each of the campaigns is it’s own little movie with a climactic ending… completely and utterly awesome.
The problems start with the fact there’s only four of them so far. A couple of my friends replay them by rushing through as fast as they can, and what strikes me as a problem is that it actually makes the game too easy. I like how the director AI actively tries to mess you up by spawning a horde if you hang around in one spot too long – but what about if you’re rushing the level?
You’d think that someone who has a 50-60% chance of surviving “Normal” difficulty at regular pace shouldn’t be able to rush through “Advanced” or “Expert” campaigns with a 90% chance of making it to the crescendo sequences alive, right?
So I’m starting to wonder if maybe the AI Director couldn’t be tweaked a little bit to let you rush for a bit, then more or less make a wall of zombies to stop you in your tracks. I like fighting a whole lot more than I like running, particularly when you already know the maps.
So anyway, somehow I’ve managed to stay up late the last couple nights, it’s been around 1am to 1:30 before I’ve crawled into bed. In stark contrast, my wife’s been falling asleep at about 10 most nights. Maybe this is bugging me sub-conciously, because I had a dream last night that I was downstairs staying up late (which is odd, because my PC is upstairs) and when I came up she’d built a wall over the archway to our bedroom, that had a door in it with a sign that said “keep out”. My pillow and a blanked were on the floor.
Then I woke up and screamed “insurance lead generation“. Weird.