Sacrifice and Mutation

I had been looking forward to the ‘Sacrifice’ since ‘The Passing’ was released for L4d2, especially as it would feature my favourite survivors, the originals.  I was also fairly pleased it was being released for both L4d and L4d2, and getting it on PC meant it was free.  The launch came with a lot of problems, though..

While my download came quickly for the original game, it took two days for my Left 4 Dead 2 download to come down.. crawling along at amazing speeds of 4kb/s.  When it finally finished downloading, it then refused to work.

However, I was in a better position than others.  Heavy traffic like this always seems to lead to authentication problems and issues with other games on Steam, getting “game unavailable” messages.   While I could at least play l4d, Tim’s machine didn’t even start downloading any updates for two days, and he couldn’t play any of his other Steam games because of… “Game Unavailable”.  Not good.

My first play through of the DLC was therefore with just one friend instead of a full human team 😉

Having Bill sacrifice himself and save the team as per the story wasn’t as easy as expected, though we had two bots with us.  After our sacrifice kept being beaten by the rush of zombies, we found the best method involved jumping back down the ladder early.

In this version, the achievement only comes for the Sacrifice instead of the whole team, but it’s easy enough to play through again.

I was slightly disappointed at the way the sacrifice ends.. once you hit the generator it’s all over.
I would rather have liked a Last Stand style effect, just to see how long I could hold out, or even a cutscene with a tank appearing and throwing Bill to his proper resting place in the smaller room.

Due to playing rather a lot of WoW and Minecraft, I’ve sadly let the mutations slip by in recent weeks.  The TAAANNNKK! mutation came this week.. and if you picked the right map and avoided the bugs, it was a lot of fun.

Bugs?  Oh yes..

On the No Mercy map, we found ourselves trapped as tanks on the wrong side of a fence, with no way of getting to the survivors.  We ended up trying to kill each other in hopes of spawning elsewhere, which worked after a few deaths, but by this time the survivors were too far along.  Another game was weirdly imbalanced; on one level my team was held back from spawning for a good while longer than the other team.. and then as survivors we faced three witches where the other team got none.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game that skewed before!

Despite the bugs I would love this to be added as a permanent mode; being the tank feels brilliantly powerful, and it’s a great feeling if you manage to get away as the survivor too.  Just.. maybe fix the bugs, huh Valve?

Night Terror

Last night we were playing on the original Left 4 Dead, on a quite awesome custom campaign called Night Terror.  This is a six-part campaign created by NIPPER and DrBoo, available here on l4dmaps.com.

We played this campaign a while back, and it was the haunted mansion map which stuck in my mind the most, with it’s originality and fantastic voice work by the narrator.

The door closed in a small circular room closed once we were all inside, and the ceiling started moving upwards..  The narrator informed us that there were no windows and no doors, and that we could try and find a way out, or take his way out.. mind tricks being played as the ceiling was replaced for a few seconds by a different ceiling with a hanging man, though you need to be looking straight up to see him.

My favourite bit though, was the ghost ride along the path once outside.
Somebody has to get off to open the gates, and then again to restart the buggy, but then it’s a nice ride through the haunted graveyard 🙂

The next bit of the nightmare is straight out of the Mines of Moria, and very clever too.  The book lying on the edge of the well is the trigger for the next event, with some more fantastic voice work.  After you’ve done reading, the bucket tips into the well and summons a horde led by a tank!

This part is fairly hectic, and so far we’ve lost somebody each time.  Following this, things don’t get any easier with a huge room full of zombies, and another door which doesn’t open until after two waves.

Endless stairs.. Just as well Coach isn’t in this team, or he’d be complaining 😉

We had a silly number of smokers on the stairs last night, who just kept picking survivors off.  Such easy targets, with no walls to hide behind..

I also loved the Jungle map, which contains some sneaky traps, but overall feels a lot easier than the Moria section.  A friend was rather too amused by me getting squished by one trap which caught me completely unaware, coming down from the ceiling.  We all laughed when the bot was squished by a rolling spiked cylinder a little further on though!

The finale is started off by an alarm clock in a strange, destroyed bedroom.  Personally my alarm clock starts my nightmare, rather than ending it – I don’t like getting out of bed in the morning 😉
Another amusing touch comes with the ending.. the survivors rescue themselves, rather than being picked up by helicopter or boat.. by running into what looks like a glowing portal to a laser disco!

Left 4 Dead 2 Demo

I’ve just had my hands on the Left 4 Dead 2 demo, after looking forward to it most of the day 🙂

I pre-loaded this last night, so I’d be able to play once getting home from work.. glad I did as I hear the Steam servers are struggling – oh, what’s new?  I’ve come around to Steam and the whole digital download thing (getting at my games from multiple locations helps!), but seriously, the servers really need some work.  Every time there’s an update, add-on, free weekend or demo of anything fairly high-profile, chug, chug, chug..
As for chugging, I think I need to reinstall my machine.. performance isn’t great at the moment, and it was really noticeable when I loaded up the demo.

So, as to the demo..

It feels like a completely different game to the first, more like HL2 and episodes.  It feels less serious, less creepy.  I think that’s due to the daylight – but it probably isn’t helped by my current pc performance issues making me turn the settings down a touch.  Other than that, the bodies seem to disappear too quickly, which again makes it feel less serious.  I’m glad I don’t live in Aus though, with the censorship issues going on there at the moment.  I’m not a fan of censorship used in place of parenting 😉

I don’t know how much the demo can be relied on as a sample of the full game – the new specials were interesting, and I was relieved to see that the old ones were still present – but has the tank been downgraded a bit?  It seemed a bit too easy to kill, somehow.  One fun instance already though – being jumped by a jockey while entering a maze and fighting off a small group of infected: the jockey quickly dragged me round a corner, and I was taking a bit of a beating till my team mates fought their way round the corner too.

Looking forward to versus mode!

Crash Course

I love this new DLC for Left 4 dead.. I was almost starting to feel a bit fed up with the same maps, so this came at a great time for me.

Once downloaded – and that took a while, with everybody else hammering the servers!  I took my time playing it through and examining everything.   I see they’ve sneaked in a few additional comments here and there.. the dead helicopter pilot (shot by Zoey, because he turned!) and new dialogue.. one little exchange in particular shows they all LOVE Steam! 😀

Holed up in the safe room at the start of the second chapter, there’s a whole wall of poetry, and a bunch of comments too.. made me giggle 🙂

Versus mode though – that’s where it’s at!  So far, it looks like the map is heavily in favour of the Infected, for reasonably balanced teams of course.
I don’t know about ridiculously skilled teams – I’m going from personal experience as always – but somehow, despite the whole thing being shorter, there just seems so much more packed into it.