Left 4 Dead: First Impressions
Monday, May 4th, 2009
A gripe about Gamefly. Even though I have three other games ahead of it on my Game Q, Left 4 Dead arrived today, a full week after I returned Mass Effect. Actually, that is two gripes. The first being the low availability of popular games, and the second being the rather lengthy turn-around time for this game rental service.
But I remember the early days of Netflix, and in 2004, the turnaround was not nearly as quick as it is now that everyone and their brother’s ex-girlfriend subscribe to Netflix. So maybe if Gamefly can grow a bit more, the games at the top of my Q will be sent out from a more local distribution center rather than Pittsburgh (I’m in Oregon).
Anyway, that is not the point of today’s post. You really should let me know when I start to stray from my missions, much like I wish Left 4 Dead would…oh, wait, there is really no way you can not figure out where to go in this game, a First Person Shooter in a 4 man (well, there is one chick, Zoey) team that must make their way out of a zombie apocalypse. Sure, there may be a lot of utility closets with nothing in them, but you won’t lose your way. And that’s good, because Left 4 Dead leaves you without a map.
What I like…killing zombies and lots of them. There are several kinds of zombies, from the relatively benign regular zombie to the Tank zombie, that will seriously mess you up if you let it get close to you.
There is a cinematic in the beginning that kind of explains what happened and why you are where you are, facing a city full of the crazed to catatonic. I didn’t really watch it through from the beginning as I didn’t have the television switched over to the ol’ Xbox 360, but when I did make the switch over, there were a lot of explosions. I like explosions.
I didn’t read anything about the game before playing it, in terms of game controls and such. And it was really easy to figure things out. The controls are pretty intuitive, although I must admit it did take me a sec to figure out how to take advantage of my health pack. You have to “arm” the health pack and then pull the trigger. Sorry, I guess I’m used to hitting an X or a Y, not pulling a trigger for the entire time it takes to recharge your health.
The game plays as a co-op A-Team of sorts. There’s the big biker dude, appropriately named Francis. There’s the white collar black guy, Louis. There’s the token chick that is a zombie movie fan coincidentally enough, Zoey. And of course, there is the crusty old vet named Bill.
The set-up is mission-based rather than following an single plotline, or so it seems. I sat down for two hours and played through the first mission, which is broken down into 5 segments or chapters. This first mission entailed making our way through the city, the sewers, and up to the roof of the local hospital in order to jump aboard a rescue chopper.
My only complaint so far is that when playing the game with only AI team mates is that my character (I played Zoey, duh, I’m a girl that wants to play girl characters — are you listening video game developers?) has to do all the work. The AI guys are total wusses. I gotta run in the room, I gotta kill the horde, I gotta take all the damage and thus all the pain pills. But then that damn Francis keeps snaking the pain pills before I can restock.
I’m going to try and talk my boyfriend into playing co-op mode with me later on, to see how the game plays with another human involved. Otherwise, I will get down to business checking out the other play modes, including playing the game as one of the infected zombies.
Neat.

Ok, that said, the game has the choice of playing either a girl or boy version of the main protagonist, and as that made me so happy, I am playing the girl version of Commander Shepherd. I didn’t really follow much in the beginning as I was trying so darn hard to figure out what the hell I was supposed to be doing, but I got to do a little choosing when it comes to the background of my Commander Shepherd. I think I chose a past of no parents, raised on the streets and joined the service as soon as I could. Cliche! Not sure what bearing that past will have on my future in the game, but I’m willing to play along.
Let me explain. Mass Effect starts pretty slowly, which is both good and bad. Good, because like I said, I was clueless; and bad because I was getting a little bored. In fact, my boyfriend was trying to take a nap on the couch and was concerned that I was firing up the Xbox (he hates the sound of gunfire when trying to sleep — very understandable). I said, “Don’t worry. This game is like a boring movie.”
Atlas…Like Atlas Shrugged? To be honest, I couldn’t finish Atlas Shrugged. I read The Fountainhead, and got through the Ellsworth Toohey 30-page speech about altruism, and when I ran across the same diatribe in Atlas Shrugged, courtesy of John Galt; well, I just closed up the book and gave it away. Rand is not hard to read as in she discusses difficult issues and uses hard words; no, Rand is difficult to read because there is a lot of repetition and it gets really, really boring.
All in all, I love the plot. I like killing the “splicers” (though I do wish for a little more diversity in these crazed foes) and random other bots and Big Daddy’s. I even like rescuing the little sisters — I haven’t “harvested” one yet. It’s just hard for me to kill a child, even if she carries a giant syringe that she likes to plunge into her victims’ heads.
Resident Evil 5’s demo came out exclusively on Xbox Live last week. I
Hey, what do you know, seems I’m playing a character that you may already know and love, Chris Redfield. I have a new partner, and she is a hottie-ass-kicking zombie slayer named Sheva Alomar. I read somewhere that when the creators first started showing betas of this game, it came to someone’s attention that Chris was killing a bunch of black people in Africa and maybe that wasn’t so cool in this current political climate (or any for that matter). So the solution was adding a black-ish female partner. And who says video games don’t strive for equality? I wonder if Sheva is earning the same as Chris.
There are two scenarios: Public Assembly and Shanty Town. In Public Assembly, you and Sheva are outside one of those African towns that looks like it could have been a stand-in during Black Hawk Down. Once you get in a seemingly safe building, you witness a public beheading of someone who doesn’t quite get the respect he needs in this town in which everyone is going cra-zay. This huge hooded executioner swings this huge, serrated axe, and then of course, someone spots you. Now, you have all these zombies coming at you.
I went to the Public Assembly first, and I didn’t last that long. I couldn’t get used to the switch up from A’s to X’s for picking up ammo. Also, you cannot pull your left trigger to aim without standing still or moving really, really slowly, so it’s hard to run and shoot, but then you only have so much ammo, so it wouldn’t do you much good to run around shooting up the place. It’s pretty hard, which of course, makes me love it even more (wink).
So, first impressions…it’s a pretty intense game. I am playing it on easy, and I’m glad I did. I reminds me a little of Dead Rising in that once a zombie-like necromorph you struggle and have to press a button repeatedly to try and knock the damn thing off. 







