Review: Left 4 Dead 2

    Left 4 Dead 2 was released on Tuesday (11/17), a mere one year after the first one, and the level of improvement that Valve has added is pretty impressive.  Everything that has been added to the game has been done so to increase the mayhem that your team has to go through.  I’ve always been of the opinion that the best times in L4D1 were, ironically, when you were getting beaten to a pulp.  You needed to REALLY work together as a team when your team was getting pounced by a hunter, pulled by a smoker, fighting a horde off while trying to stay away from a tank… ALL AT THE SAME TIME!  The feeling of never being completely safe made each experience a nail biter, a feat few games can match.  However, the more you would play L4D1, the more you would get it’s tricks.  When a horde came, everyone ran to a corner and spammed the melee trigger, a tank brought out the molotov cocktails everyone had, followed by a mad dash backwards to get out of his monkey arm-range.  Boomers?  Please, throw a pipe-bomb.  It grew into a game that you almost HAD to play on Expert difficulty or Versus to get the charm out of it.  L4D2 has fixed this and then some.  Simply put, there are no tricks.  This game is hard, and it constantly puts your teamwork skills to a test, and we’re not talking 1st grade spelling test here, this is more like senior year of college, theoretical physics final exam.  Even if you’ve been through each campaign the amount each single one deserves, the next time you play you’ll have to adapt to the changing environments, the different weapon choices you’ll have, and, most importantly, the very versatile special infected.

    Graphically, the Source engine looks a little dated, but to say this game looks bad would be the opposite of the truth.  The facial animations look as spot on as they ever have on the Source engine, even though the details and general “crispness” is a little lacking all around.  The animations of the character models are much improved over L4D1.  Where in the first one zombies would kind of stagger and jerk when you shot them, everything seems a helluva lot smoother now.  Additionally, the zombies will… break apart… a little more realistically.  Hell, you can blow a hole in a zombie with a magnum and see through the area where his torso used to be, and as a kicker, he’ll still be running right at you!  The melee weapons, which include an axe, a cricket bat, and yes, even a chainsaw, all do horrible, nasty things to the zombies, and really, what more could you ask from a zombie game?  From an audio standpoint, L4D2 continues the excellence from the first one.  It’s creepy stalking through an abandoned town hearing the grunting and groaning of zombies, broken by the guttural growl of the hunter, the wheezy cough from the smoker, and don’t even get me started on the charger’s sick-cow bellow (laugh now, you won’t be when he’s charging your butt half way across the map as you round a corner).

    The game comes packing with five huge campaigns.  The levels are A LOT longer now, only adding to already increased difficulty.  Even the campaigns that have four instead of the normal five levels last longer than any of the campaigns in L4D1.  What’s even cooler is that each has it’s own “thing” regardless of the fact that they’re all based in the southern US.  A shining example of the new campaigns is the Hard Rain campaign.  For this campaign, your goal is to, throughout five levels, collect gas cans at the end of town and trek back.  So as you move through the town, you’ll have to ration your supplies.  If there’s four health packs in the second safe room and you take three of them, on your return trip you better hope you’re all in pretty good shape, because there’s only going to be one left in that safe room.  The AI director will also alter the weather condition in the second half of this campaign.  Heavy (and I mean HEAVY) rain will kick in periodically if you’re having too easy of a time and make the visibility reduced to almost zero.  Turns out I had no idea what “tense” was until I was huddled around my team mates in the middle of a flooded street, being able to hear the zombies rushing in at us from all around us, and not being able to see a damn thing until they’re swinging at us with their gaping wounds and glowing eyes.  The finale of the final campaign (if you’ve read up on this game at all, you know that you have to cross a bridge) is epic.  It is, without a doubt, the most intense five minutes in a video game I’ve ever experienced, each time I play it!  You hit the button and see the bridge lower in front of you, off in the distance you can hear the zombies scream, and the metal divider drops in front of you once the bridge gets into place.  Once it slams on the ground, it immediately reminded me of the first Medal of Honor game (or really any WWII game after that) when they had you play the storming of the beach of Normandy.  Call it far-fetched if you will, but your heart will be pumping once you begin that long run all the way till the end… that is, if you make it!

    True to Valve’s word, there is a story in L4D2, though most will probably overlook it their first time through.  A word of advice, take your time in the safe rooms, check out the posters and memos on the wall, there’s actually a pretty interesting story unfolding before the survivors, as well as a few easter eggs tying it all into L4D1.  It’s pretty clear why people are missing the story, though, as the game requires you to move quick in order to succeed.  And in true Valve fashion, the story is not told through cut scenes, but rather through the environment and the characters themselves.  Luckily, you can care as little or as much attention to the story as you want to and still have fun with this game, just some added pleasure if you choose to seek it out.  Speaking of which, the characters all have their own personality and really add to your immersion into the game.  Players will find their favorite characters, and it’s hard to hate any of them.  Though it’s impossible to top L4D1’s cookie-cutter perfect zombie apocalypse survivors, if you head into this game with an open mind, these characters will fill the void very nicely.

    If the campaign isn’t enough for you (and getting through all five campaigns on Expert with realism mode turned on should take you a fair chunk of time), L4D2 sports Versus play for all five campaigns as well as six distinct maps for their new game mode, Scavenge.  Versus is very similar to L4D1, so without spending too much time on that, it should be noted that playing the new special infected feels awesome, each one controls great and works as you expect them to.  Also, because of the longer levels, you’ll likely rarely see any team get all survivors to the safe room, allowing for much closer games.  Scavenge, the new game mode, consists of two teams of four taking turns playing the survivors and running around an arena collecting as many gas cans as they can and returning them to the starting location to pour them in a generator.  Each gas can adds twenty seconds on to a timer, the round ends when the survivors collect all the gas cans on the map (pretty rare), they all get incapacitated / killed, or the timer runs out without any survivor holding on to a gas can.  If a survivor is holding a gas can, the tension kicks up as the game enters into overtime.  The clock flashes 00:00:00 and the survivors rush to pour in the gas can to get them precious seconds back while the infected team tries desperately to get the survivor to drop his gas can, thus ending the round.  The team that gets the most gas cans wins the round, and the team that wins the best of three rounds takes the match.  This game mode creates some very intense matches, a lot of times coming down to overtime and, like the campaign play, keeps every moment as nail biting as the previous one.

    So what we have here is a sequel where everything is improved upon.  Because I try to keep my integrity with these reviews, I set aside a paragraph before I began this review to state the cons with this game, hoping something would come to me before I got to the end.  Alas, nothing did.  All I can say for all of you looking to bash this game is to try it out.  Some people may not like the increased difficulty.  Some people may not like the longer campaigns or the more wide open maps.  Some people may really hate the characters.  I am not in any of these groups.  If you had asked me to make a list of changes I wanted to see in this sequel, I would have named probably half of what I got, the extra (and I’ve barely begun to discuss them all with this wall of text) is just the bloody frosting on this upside-down brain cake.

Why I'm NOT Playing Modern Warfare 2

The above comic from the very talented guys at Penny Arcade pretty much sums up why I think Activision is the lowest of the low when it comes to publishing companies. Therefore, as someone who considers himself as someone who looks down upon the douchebaggery of companies, I've decided that anything Activision publishes has no place on my shelf. Now before you roll your eyes or post comments stating “Oh blah blah go ahead and whine, your money doesn't mean diddley squat to Activision, and I'm playing a great game right now with Modern Warfare 2.” I'm not so pretentious to think that my money DOES mean anything to Activision. Their opening day was highly impressive and it's only going to get better as the week goes on, but rest assured it will be at least one unit less than what they could have gotten. It's the principle of the thing, and that's why until I can get Modern Warfare 2 in a used condition and ensure none of my money goes to that company, I'll have to miss out on what is probably one of the greater games to release this year. Also I'm tired of sending messages to all of you sending me game invites!

A usual retort to this thinking is “Well, all the publishing companies are buttheads, you're a huge supporter of Left 4 Dead, and EA is just as bad!” That's absolutely false in my opinion. True, EA used to be the big bad wolf. They'd buy up small development companies, shut them down, failed to support their games, and ruined many great franchises. I'm a guy who's all for steps in the right direction though, and EA has taken leaps. Hell, even John Carmack thinks so. Just look at the games EA has recently been publishing; Mirror's Edge, Dead Space, Battlefield Bad Company, Burnout Paradise, heck even look at the continued weekly support for their Rock Band franchise. Bad Company and Burnout Paradise are two excellent examples of taking a franchise in a new direction, where Activision's idea of “new direction” is to allow Xbox 360 avatar support in the latest Guitar Hero game. Again, the above comic says it perfectly, they'll take the intellectual properties they have and just run them into the ground. I absolutely loved Guitar Hero 2, I mean who didn't? Now I can't even tell you how many they have. And true, EA is notorious for providing very low incremental upgrades to sports games year in and year out, but ya know what? They remain very high-selling games, and while it's true that the Guitar Hero games are at least meeting their quota, the latest Rock Band installment outsold Guitar Hero 5 in the month of September.

It's funny looking at Activision now and seeing how they've turned into the EA of a couple years ago. After acquiring Sierra and all of it's developing IPs, they shut down production on a number of titles that have since been released (Ghostbusters and Brütal Legend to name a few). When Tim Schafer went to EA to publish his game, Activision sued them. And note when I say sued “them”, I mean Double Fine. No, Activision didn't even want to touch EA, because they knew they didn't have a shot in hell. It's absolutely deplorable to me for Activision to go after Double Fine like this. Not only is Double Fine and Tim Schafer known for creating great (if criminally undersold) games. And it doesn't take a whole lot of insight to see that the reason Activision dropped Brütal Legend is because the game doesn't lend itself to be (in the words of Bobby Kotick) “exploited.” This is Activision being the school yard bully beating up and stealing Tim Schafer's lunch money, and it's even more pathetic at this level (and no, I didn't get beat up an inordinate number of times in school, it was a very fair amount :-D).

The real shame of all of this is that I'm positive that Infinity Ward did a bang-up job with Modern Warfare 2 (notice that at the original request of the developer, I'll refer to it without the Call of Duty moniker). The Spec Ops co-operative mode looks sweet, the multiplayer, while not always my cup of tea, definitely looks worth the price of admission, and the campaign, regardless of the fact that it most likely has the same tired Call of Duty formula, looks chock-full of “holy crap” moments. Personally I can't wait to try it out, but until I can get it used, I refuse to give my money to Activision.

Left 4 Dead 2 Demo Impressions

The Left 4 Dead 2 demo was publicly released today on Xbox Live, one week after people who ordered from Gamestop locations were treated to an early release of the same demo. For fans of the original Left 4 Dead, you'll be happy to hear that L4D2 feels like L4D. The controls are as tight as ever, and the cinematic feel of the first transfers nicely to its sequel. What's more impressive is how snugly all of Valve's additions fit into the game play. The three new special infected; the Spitter, the Charger, and the Jockey; work well with the old special infected, who all still make an appearance. Instead of going into detail about all the additions, I'll stick to just sharing my thoughts about the actual play through, which you can see in the video above.

The first two levels of the Parish campaign are set in New Orleans, and they've captured the look of the city really well. The first thing you'll notice is the big-band sound blasting the L4D theme in horns and tubas, it's really cool. When the good times kick in (and in L4D fashion, you'll have zombies running at you in the first 10 seconds), you'll notice the zombies seem a bit more... detachable... than their previous models. Limbs will be blown off, backs and chests will be ripped open to expose the gooey infected insides, and it's all done in great good gory zombie fun. Even in the first level you'll find new weapons and if you play through multiple times, you'll find different paths blocked off or opened up, which definitely makes things more frantic as you're searching for which way you can go. The first level is very short, and has really tight alleyways, so as long as your team sticks together you should make it alright.

The second level is considerably longer and has more open spaces, taking you through a park among other places. They've done a really good job of designing a city that's in the clutches of a crisis. In the second level you'll run across a bus depot that was obviously being used to shuffle people out of the city. You'll see queue gates and signs on the wall telling people about the extraction, it really helps the cinematic feel of the game. The crescendo event in the second level is every bit as intense as Valve made it sound. Once you trip the alarm and summon the zombie hordes, you want to move quick, as mobs of zombies and special infected will continually jump you as you try to shut off the alarm. What this amounts to is a frantic chase through the crescendo event where it's REALLY hard to stick together as a team.

Herein lies why I'm so excited for L4D2. Where the first one really shined is when things would go insane. Having to maintain teamwork while things are going to hell around you kept things intense and interesting, and all the additions to this game aim to make it more intense. The only disappointing thing about the demo is realizing you still have to wait before you get to play the full game. Check back here soon after the 17^th for a full review of the game!

Review: Borderlands

Borderlands is the recently released “Role Playing Shooter” from Gearbox Studios, creators of the Brothers in Arms series. They’ve set out to release a game similar to the PC classic Diablo II, but with guns, guns, and more guns. The result, however, is a game that does not live up to it’s much touted genre as Gearbox would like you to believe. This game is largely just your basic RPG that happens to be in the first person perspective and puts an emphasis on the guns. Unfortunately, even with the guns in the equation, even the most novice player of first person shooters will be able to shoot the brain-dead AI present in the enemies, which makes it feel more like a point-and-click mechanic that even a tactical-lite shooter. Combine that with the fact that not even the most devoted first person shooter junkie will have much luck against an enemy just a couple levels higher than he and it becomes clear that this game is MUCH more RPG than Shooter. The letdowns keep coming when you discover that the game has a mere 160 side quests, most of which are simple “get this” or “kill that” quests, and very few of them have any kind of connection with each other or the main story. When you consider that other RPGs (for instance, this years’ Sacred II for the Xbox 360) has upwards of 600 side quests, Borderlands is a game with few objectives.

You start the game by choosing your class. You have a choice between...

• Mordecai the Hunter, who specializes in sniper rifles and pistols. His special action is to throw out his pet Bloodwing to attack your enemies.

• Lilith the Siren, the magic-infused character, who acts not unlike a mage in other RPGs. Her special action is to enter into Phasewalk, an ability that makes her invisible and vastly increases her run speed for a short time.

• Roland the Soldier, a well-rounded character whose special ability allows him to throw down a turret to help clean up your enemies.

• Brick the Tank who acts like his name implies. His special ability sends him into a state of blood lust where he whips out his fists to deal damage as nature intended.

The classes are all pretty fun to play as, the special abilities for all characters refresh fast enough to really mix up the action, and since the shooting is so dull, it’s very much appreciated. The skill trees are fun to advance up and offer a variety of different ways to change your character up. For a small fee you can even re-spec your character in case you ever want a change.

If you’re a person who enjoys the loot hunt of other RPGs, you’ll be hard-pressed NOT to love this game, as loot is literally everywhere. Everything from new weapons to class upgrades can be found everywhere, and the game’s tagline, “87 Bazillion Guns”, is probably not far off. It’s pretty impressive when you pick up eight different sniper rifles and not one fires or feels like another. That means that if you ever feel like you need a change in what gun you’re firing, you won’t have to look for long. Finding that gun that you won’t get tired of, however, is a different story. Take for example the sniper rifles. Each gun has an accuracy rating, and a “good” sniper rifle seems to run in the 95 or 96 percentile of accuracy. In this game, what that means is even with the sniper rifles you’re going to have a hard time consistently hitting the critical spots of enemies who are even 100 or 200 yards away, so close you can see their facial features through your scope. It doesn’t matter that you have your cross hair right on his melon, the accuracy rating throws your shot off. This then boils down to using sniper rifles like high-powered semi-automatic assault rifles, ones with high fire rates. While this may be fun for some, those of us who picked the Hunter class probably wanted to feel like a sniper, which this game makes it hard to do so. This shortcoming isn’t restricted to the Hunter, too many of the guns just aren’t that much fun to fire. It keeps you invested in the loot hunt, but sooner or later it gets monotonous going from one boring gun to the next. It doesn’t help the fact that you can’t help but feel like you don’t have to go into cover or focus fire in a co-op game or any of the other mechanisms other shooters have made normalities. Dull shooting with dull guns against dull enemies all in search of slightly less dull shooting with slightly less dull guns against still just-as-dull enemies gets... well... dull.

The never-ending train that is this game’s dullness continues with the story and settings. Each character’s ultimate goal is to find “The Vault.” Why each character is looking for the vault is never really explained in-game. And it’s hard to spoil anything because the story quests are all so very forgettable, you’ll have a hard time actually piecing together what happened in the story outside of “I went and collected this, then had to go kill that.” It’s compounded by the fact that none of the settings stand out from one another. Pandora turns out to be a pretty boring place, regardless of the creatures and bandits roaming around it. None of the areas really have anything to distinguish it from the places you’d been before in the game. Even when you get to the snowy areas later in the game, the terrain looks like they simply took all the sand-colored areas and made them white. This does, however, bring me to the absolute best part about this game. Even though all the settings look the same, you likely won’t get bored because the game is dripping with style. The character designs, art style, comedy relief all have a distinct style that you won’t find in other games. You could pick out designs and go “yep, that’s Borderlands alright.” If only they had more diversity in climate and level design the settings themselves might be fun enough to walk through.

Co-op mode is only somewhat of a saving grace for this game. Four people can take in any combination of the characters into the same game. It increases the loot your party as a whole gets and it boosts up the enemies health and damage output, but sadly not their brains. You’ll still see a complete lack in teamwork on the enemies’ side and the best “AI” you’ll see is a bandit hiding behind cover for 2 seconds then popping up and showing that big beautiful head for 20. It does not make the shooting any more fun, but the loot addict in all of us will get a kick out of the increased loot drop. There are PvP arenas located at various places throughout the world, but it’s a wonder they even spent the time on them with the game being so frustratingly outnumbered. You can enter the arena in teams or all for all, but the Siren vastly overpowers the other characters. Three of the skills in her skill tree can “stun” her target which amounts to her having a nuclear bomb in a battle of rubber-band guns. Two of these skills can be increased to give a 100% chance to stun, while the third can increase each bullet you fire to have a 25% chance. So if a Siren is firing a submachine gun or assault rifle at you, simple math dictates that it’s not going to be long before you’re at the mercy of the Siren. When you get stunned (and mind you there’s no counter to it), you slow down to a near crawl, your guns are woefully inaccurate, and your fire rate decreases to almost as slow as your movement speed. Heck, even the rockets from a rocket launcher can be outrun when you’re stunned as they too are slowed down to a crawl. Why Gearbox spent the time on these arenas instead of working on, say, more sideline quests only implies that hopefully they have plans to improve the PvP with DLC.

In the end, this game falls victim to the problem that most games have when they try to mix two completely different genres. What it ends up being is a painfully mediocre shooter with some painfully mediocre RPG elements, and you can’t help but feel they made some sacrifices to mix both in, like the basically non-existent AI or the woefully inadequate number of boringly designed side quests. The stylistic approach taken to the game is very welcome, even it makes it feel even more like a missed opportunity. If all you’re interested is the loot hunt, there may be some fun in this game for you, but for those who want at least some objective or are looking for a more refined game (shooter, RPG, or otherwise) can do a whole lot better.

Kick Start the Blog

Commencing reboot in 3... 2... 1...

Welcome to the Battle Room

Orson Scott Card references aside, welcome to my blog! I plan on updating this whenever I have something to say about anything related to the technology or entertainment field. Feel free to comment and tell me how off-base I am or to agree with me.

In case you've been living under a rock, Netflix has recently gained the ability to stream movies directly to XBox 360s connected to XBox Live. Being a rookie to the whole Netflix thing, I promptly signed up for a two week trial. Wow, is all I have to say. If you haven't tried this thing out yet, go sign up, you owe it to yourself to try this out.

This has only helped prove my point that digital distribution is the future. With the Live subscription's 44% sales increase since NXE hit, it's only a matter of time before people start downloading TV shows and movies. Even though only 1/8th of Netflix's catalog is available for Watch It Now, and even less with Sony pulling out of Netflix's digital push, I can't help but think this is the beginning of downloading movies and games instead of running to Best Buy or Walmart or the Move Galleries of our cities.

And about Sony's withdrawal from Netflix's Watch It Now service, they're only pulling out of the XBox 360 crowd. Their movies will still be available through other devices such as TiVO and Roku boxes. Odd, me thinks. If Sony really wants Blu-Ray to survive in the long run (and it's looking pretty promising), then you'd think they'd be against digital distribution? Weird.