Mwe he he…

Go, Valve, go.

I ran for the chopper pad without the chopper there and firing blindly took out one of the smoker players AND the huinter whilst limping, span round with no ammo, whipped out pistols and killed the tank player just as he landed on me. I stood there breathing for a while as the chopper arrived only to be mobbed to death by a horde just as the chopper opened up. Then we all burst out laughing.

I think you are best off letting other people do the server search :P

In unrelated call-the-men-in-white-jackets L4D news, I’ve come to the conclusion that the survivors have lost their minds. In the hospital of No Mercy, we had just gotten into the elevator after several close calls. The doors shut, and it started its slow ascent. Zoey made a quick note about how the zombies were too fast, and proceeded to call “zombie bullshit” on the matter. I laughed in RL. It made sense to laugh in game, so I pulled up the radial menu, hit “laugh” and the most awkward laugh came out. I did it again. Bill chipped in. So did Francis. And Zoey. We were all spamming laugh as the lift climbed the last few floors, knowing our fate behind the doors. We’d lost our minds, laughter our only cure. Pure, demented, awkward laughter.

This game rocks! ^.^

Which should I buy, damnit? Fallout 3? Farcry 2? Left 4 Dead? WHICH ONE?!

I crave the free-form rpg goodness, the sick humour, and slow-motion buttfucking; I want a proper shooter, though, where I have to plan every assault, and take a water canteen to my desk; but I want to play a good co-op game, by which I mean a co-op game which descents into “shoot the car as that dick passes it, that’ll teach him to spray me when I’m inches from death”.

I’m banking on everyone buying those for me at christmas. This is like banking on Half Life 3 popping up at the weekend, or waiting to buy Spore on Steam.

Actually, I’ve had an idea. I’ve just got into the habit of checking over and improving whatever I write before hitting that magical button, and I had an idea for Left 4 Dead. Maybe they could have 20 acheivements or so and each one would be puzzling and give no clues as to how you can unlock it. Then, mid-mission, you’re lured away by a personal message, clue, or cue, and given a secret mission by some evil person. It might be that you need to prevent everyone from escaping at the end; you might be given a special item replacing your grenade that acts as boomer vomit, or somesuch, and in return, certain zombies like the Tank and Witch aren’t bothered by you. It would be engineered to cause players to hunt for suspicious behaviour, like obviously having some sort of pipe bomb and never using it, etc.

Hmm! Although, in fairness, people do tend to find reasons aplenty to betray me. That was just the demo, with one car alarm.

Hey, anyone else find out that the gas station near the lift in No Mercy can explode? Boy, I sure would have loved to know that when my whole team decided the gas pumps would be a good idea to corral the zombies. A few errant bullets later and 3 of the team were incapacitated instantly. The lone survivor had to deal with a horde, boomer and a witch blocking the only retreat route.

We got out of that by the skin of our teeth. I love this game.

Also tried out versus mode for a fair while.. Marvellous fun. In the 8-man game I was in, the Infected seemed to have a much easier time of things than the Survivors, who never managed to get more than about 30% of the way to the saferoom on any stage (this held true for both sides). Anyone else experienced this?

My main grumbles are that it takes forever to find a dedicated server. It would just search endlessly without result about 70% of the time when we were trying to initiate a versus game. And lag, when it strikes, can be a huge problem.

I’m itching to play some more tonight!

Still, I’m going to try it on a non-laggy server if possible.

On the other side, it’s far, far scarier to know that a human is stalking you than the AI director. Humans are just naturally underhanded, backstabbing, conniving bastards. The AI director has to fake it.

I’m not sure if y’all know this, but when you play versus, you take turns being infected and survivors, that way everyone gets a turn vomiting zombie attracting pus.

I think advanced could use a few balance tweaks.

So long as you survive the horde summoned when Richard and Tom shoot a Boomer not five centimetres from your position when you drop down anyway…

The time we spent huddled together blasting and whacking anything and everything in sight will go down in infamy, it was great :D

I also found the versus mode sort of clunky, with a real slapped-together-at-the-last-minute vibe, but it’s so hilariously ridiculously fun it doesn’t matter. Barfing on someone will always be fun, especially when they’re being choked by a smoker and slapped by a hunter at the same time.