[Dracko]

That's a pretty poor reason for critical claim and esteem.
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[klj5j6li]

[ChoAnikiFan1994]

[Touran]

[Dracko]

Only if you're used to playing bad ones.
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[boojiboy7]

[shnozlak]

Why dont you all do a pod cast about why HL2 dose or dose not work?


I think it could be interesting to see how that turns out.
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Mixtapes galore ~ VG MUSIC
ᕦ(ò_óˇ)ᕤ http://phantom-photon.tumblr.com/

[Touran]

[CubaLibre]

I don't feel like talking about HL2 per se but saying that Team Fortress 2, Portal, Half-Life, Half-Life 2 and Left 4 Dead are somehow the same is idiotic. Which is what this argument was originally about. There are tons of people who hate Half-Life 2 but really like Half-Life 1; that's because they're different. Hence Valve is not creatively stagnant. I mean L4D and TF2 are such categorically different experiences in every way, including mechanically, I don't see any way you can accuse Valve of repetition whether or not you agree with where their experiments have taken them.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Toups]

[klj5j6li]

[CubaLibre]

You have a weird definition of civility.

It's one thing to call Left 4 Dead "shallow" (with no attendant reasoning), it's another to say it's uncreative - which it isn't; there isn't another game like it.

Saying Portal is "not theirs" is wrong, because it is. Have you played Narbacular Drop? Saying its humor is "not theirs" is even weirder. I mean it was written by one of its employees. I'm as wary of anyone of personalizing corporations but if you define "things Valve has done" as "things people employed by Valve have done for Valve", which I think is a pretty reasonable (even inescapable!) definition, you're left with Portal as an original effort.

Saying TF2 is like TF for Quake is like saying Virtua Fighter 4 is like Battle Arena Toshinden.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Tulpa]

Wait did someone seriously say TF2 is anything like TF?

Jesus fuck that's a stupid statement.
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[Dark Age Iron Savior]

time for the following to post a list of ten great FPS (each):

ATLUS
Interstellar Dinghy

[Touran]

1-10: Crysis

marginally a joke post, Crysis is a fantastic example of modern shooter trends - from the gameplay design flaws to (the sort-of) conceived from the ground up fit
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Man, I'm sorry.

[RT-55J]

FPSes suck.

EDIT: To clarify: I've never played an FPS with a good control scheme, and the first-person perspective absolutely kills my sense of direction.

[diplo]

turok: dinosaur impregnator

[RT-55J]

Chex Quest

[Dark Age Iron Savior]

wishing dhex posted here itt

[ChoAnikiFan1994]

[HarveyQ]

for me the attraction in half-life 2 comes from its "roller-coaster ride" quality. you're just shoved from one cool set-piece to another.

i really wish the tiresome story scenes weren't there, though. it's a fun enough story, dumb but well-told, but having to stand there and wait for the NPCs to open the door onward for you is irritating. it makes the game kind of annoying to replay. that, and the fact that a lot of the WOW factor comes from the clever use of scripted events (valve is pretty good at that, even if it's often transparent railroading).

i like the game a lot but i think it's one of those games that's ridiculously overhyped, here and elsewhere.

portal is top-class, though. sequels, expansions, whatever, i don't care, i just want more juicy portal puzzles. co-op! bring it on!
i don't really have any right to complain about portal anyway considering i bought it for the price of a sandwich.

one thing i will say about valve is that they can make a "realistic" looking game that is also not boring and ugly (and is in fact rather pretty at times).

someone should remake riven with the source engine.
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ghosts appear and fade away

[L]

[HarveyQ]

yes.
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ghosts appear and fade away

[CubaLibre]

[Ronnoc]

Top ten FPSs might need it's own thread.

I'd make it, if I could come up with a list. For the amount of FPSs I play, I don't like very many of them :-/

[bloody heartland]

[bloody heartland]

[boojiboy7]

[Dracko]

toups :|
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[Predator Goose]

To their credit I've never met anyone who hated everything Valve has done. To be honest, looking at the list of their output, I genuinely enjoy fully half their games and cannot deny that Steam is the only thing out there within a stone's throw of getting digital distribution right.
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I can no longer shop happily.

[Dark Age Iron Savior]

james, I'm not really defending left 4 dead from any criticisms by you (I haven't played it myself, though I would love to - nothing I have can run it).

But I'm wondering, how much of the versus multiplayer did you experience?

When you just wrote out Serious Sam, Dead Rising and RE4, I felt an idea begin to form in my head. I haven't played L4D, true, but I've read quite a bit about it and watched some videos, and I just realized that L4D seems a lot less like a first-person-overwhelmer like SS and more like a game of TFC (in HL) in one of the point controlling modes, where two teams vie for control, usually able to capture spawns, and sometimes with deliberately uneven maps that create attacker/defender scenarios.

I also thought a bit about Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory - it works along basically the same lines of two teams, one with an assault objective and one with a defense one - but ET allows for multi-map campaigns, with EXP earned during that session carrying over and the winning team being decided by whoever won more maps.

When I played ET, it was almost always a six-map campaign (six being all the maps the game came with, and I never really found any good custom maps). Most games never got through map four, let alone the whole six, but the progression from one map to another meant that the player frequently had to anticipate whether they would be able to make up for losses on the next map or perhaps be at a disadvantage, with the need to win right now.

Thinking back, I had some of the same feeling for TFC, even though nothing carried over between maps (except emotions). And also sometimes arcade games like shmups. There's a feeling of needing to ration your stamina and attention that just doesn't feel like it's there in something like Serious Sam.

ugh, got off point...


could you offer an evaluation of the game from the benefit-of-the-doubt-perspective that it is not so much a zombie co-op game as a versus game with drastically different teams and a co-op campaign which allows for learning tactics to be used in versus?

[Toups]

I don't like music that's all like "HEY CHECK THIS GUITAR SOLO OUT DUDE"
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[CubaLibre]

[Predator Goose]

[Broco]

I played a ton of co-op on the original Left 4 Dead (but I'm not a fan of the versus mode), mostly with random players on public servers. It's the first multiplayer FPS I've spent significant time on since Quake 3, since it feels so fresh and really I had been craving a great co-op FPS all along (I wrote an article for PlanetQuake expressing excitement for possible future co-op FPSes back in ~1998. It seems to have fallen off the net though.)

The greatest thing about L4D co-op is that just by virtue of the game's context, reward system, and other design details like the HUD, it turns what was considered a law of the internet on its head and makes all kinds of Internet assholes automatically friendly and cooperative. I have met very few griefers, maybe a dozen in total in hundreds of other players. It's a fucking zombie apocalypse, you're feeling assailed from all sides so the last instinct anyone has is to turn on their only natural allies. If you try to go it alone, the game will immediately smack you down -- special zombies have the ability to paralyze individual players, and even regular ones make you slow like molasses when they hit you so it's very difficult to move quickly unless you have multiple players covering all angles. There are all kinds of tooltips the game throws at you, reminding you that a player needs to be rescued or is low on health and could use your medpack. And the very existence of versus mode makes assholes gravitate to it instead of co-op (you can see in people's names! Names like DieFags, BlackDeath8583 are typical versus players, neutral names like mine are co-op players).

L4D's other great innovation is the procedurally generated enemy positioning, which gives the game some of the good qualities of a roguelike -- constantly needing to improvise in new situations and manage a different set of resources at each playthrough. But players need to do this as a team -- perhaps there are two good, but mutually exclusive solutions to a situation (throw a molotov and crouch in that corner until the horde is all dead, or sprint through the open area that the molotov would cover and try a hail mary to the safe room), and if players can't agree, then they're screwed. The best teams I've been in have this organic, instantaneous agreement where everyone sticks close and move decisively as a group in the same direction, like a flock of birds. The bad teams often have competent individual shooting skills, but constant disagreement and splitting up or moving too slowly because a player or two sticks behind.

[CubaLibre]

I would add that this interacts with a relatively stable level design that leverages the strengths and weaknesses of different combinations of enemy spawns and player resources to create familiar-yet-new situations. Once you've played the levels enough, every significant room might have "a plan," but each time the choice of which plan is workable is dependent upon what your group has and what kind of zombies are lurking about.

Plus, L4D2 significantly improves upon all of these aspects, including adding more special infected that can disturb your group in new ways, exponentially increasing the amount of tactical situations you'll have to manage (since specials almost never spawn alone on the harder difficulties). The levels also tend to have more alternate routes, increasing the amount of time you'll need to spend on decisionmaking. There are also more environmental hazards and the level designers were much more conscious of "sit in a corner and shoot everything" tactic, with each of the levels constructed to minimize its effectiveness by limiting blind corners, increasing paths to the player while decreasing lines of sight along which to shoot, establishing moving objectives that require the players to stay in motion, etc.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[notbov]

[Dark Age Iron Savior]

[notbov]

well, as far as campaign being training for versus... yes and no. while playing campaign teaches you the mechanics and interactions of the base concept, at no point are you actually given any insight on how to play as the special infected, aside from the AI director tipping you off to potential spawn spots and how the different SI's abilities can interact with each other. their solution to this is basically to give you tips on the loading screens and instructions the first few times you spawn as each one. in the end, though, you're really only getting one side of the story when you play campaign. this wasn't too bad when it was only 3 SI to regularly spawn as, but, even though the 3 added in 2 more or less have similar archtypes as the originals, there's still the matter of knowing when and where to spawn and attack and all the other fun details.

but, since scoring in vs is based on survivor play, you can somewhat get by with being a weak infected player to an extent.

[Broco]

One of the biggest problems with Versus is that the capabilities of the special infected were clearly designed with them in mind as AI-controlled enemies. Shoehorned into a player-controlled UI, they're very awkward. It's hard to accurately pounce with the Hunter when the distance is determined by "charging" time, to lurk out of sight as a Smoker when the first-person perspective doesn't really give you insight on what your enemy can see of you, to vomit properly with the boomer when a single accidental touch blows your load for a very long time and it's not clear how long your vomit stream will last. And the HUD crosses the line into overly complicated, with the "climb points", four different thru-wall highlight colors and those little circular charge bars. It's a mess.

The second thing I don't like about Versus is that it's hard enough to find four good players in co-op, at 8 players it becomes very rare to have balanced skill levels on both sides. I don't enjoy being on either a crushingly winning or crushingly losing team, and that's been most of my experiences so far (including one that Cuba probably remembers where I ragequit when I ended up teamed with publics against his militarily disciplined group).

[CubaLibre]

Haha, I wouldn't call us military, even at the time (and most certainly not any more). More like a jazz band - play enough together and your improvisations take each other into better consideration.

I guess I see what you mean about the infected HUD, but there's an incredible and special joy to playing the infected team and executing a particularly delicious plan. The fact that virtuosos can pull off shit like this belies any notion that the mechanics are shallow or simplistic.
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Let's Play, starring me.