I don't like L4D

Left 4 Dead does a lot of things right. In fact it nailed the zombie survival idea in gaming form perfectly, most would say. I haven't really watched any zombie movies, but I understand their appeal, and I "get it" when I see all the film-like details added to the game series, such as the film grain, the movie posters on the load screen, and the end credits. There might be specific film references in the levels themselves and those I wouldn't be able to catch for obvious reasons. I recognize the fact that for what the L4D franchise sets out to do, it accomplishes brilliantly, in a way no other game has been able to do, almost creating a sub-genre all on its own.

The idea is most of the population has turned into zombies. They have an animalistic sense for living flesh and are able to seek it out, so naturally wave after wave of them are going to be swarming towards you. Other survivors have gone before you, and have laid clues for getting out of buildings, forests, and other environments and into safehouses. You go around finding whatever health kits, weapons, ammo, pipe bombs and other items that might be scattered around, and the intent is for you to ration things out, help each other, and make do with what's available. You can't kill the entire population, even the local ones, with just your bullets, so your only choice is to simply live long enough to get to the next objective, be it a safehouse or a ticket out of the area.

The whole premise makes sense. The execution of that premise is flawless. There's no questioning why things are done the way they are, or what should be changed. And I don't like it. I understand I'm not the first person to say so. I'm among a small contingency of people who are the same way, and many would scoff at those people and me for our taste in gaming. Indeed the core idea seems foolproof: kill wave after endless wave of zombies. Bathe in the shower of blackened blood and half-decomposed entrails, and generally bask in the glory of gore. One of my favorite levels in Painkiller is the zombie level in the Ye Olde Village, so naturally I assumed I'd be joining the mass acclaim for this series with open arms. I willingly bought into the hype for the original L4D, albeit with some hesitation due to the price tag. But once it hit $25, I jumped right on it, and expected to be swept away in the tides of joy and entertainment bliss. But I wasn't.

My main problem, as I believe is the case with most critics of the games, is the AI director. The AI director's task is to shake things up, a job it does admirably. If you're too bunched up together, it tries to break you apart. If one gets too far ahead, attempts are made to overwhelm him or her. If things get too dull, some special zombies are thrown in, and on and on and on the challenges continue. It's a brilliant solution to the problem of campaigns getting repetitive and predictable, and it encourages lots of replay. The problem seems to be that whenever I enter the fray, the gods of gaming hell seem to possess this AI director, and what should be a walk in the park for an experienced FPS player on normal mode is a chastising shitstorm of assrape eviscerating my insides.

Now mind you, this can happen to anyone who doesn't know what they're doing. The game isn't very kind to noobs (though not the most unkind game ever) and unless you've been through each campaign at least once, you're going to have a tough time. But almost every time I've played I've played with my friend (the only source of encouragement to get me back into it) who is experienced at all that the story mode has to offer. Despite talking me through it, maintaining good communication with the group, I've had one wipe right after another where even he was baffled. Just my luck, I guess.

Never has a game frustrated me so much. One tank isn't enough. Two, three, or fucking four tanks in a row seems necessary. And I kid you not, but for the longest time in L4D2 if I was ever being disemboweled by a hunter, I was also bathing in spitter acid like the two went hand-in-hand. When it rains, it pours, I suppose. It's cheap, is what it is. That's the problem. When is a game most frustrating? Not when it's hard, no, because if it's a good game you know where you can improve and you do, and the game rewards you for it. It's when the game deliberately takes all control out of your hands to do anything about a situation, and it's simply out to get you. Can you stop a bad sequence of special zombies from happening? No, it's a crapshoot. Can you better protect yourself when it happens? Sure, if there's always someone there to help you. But relying on online gamers has never been an easy thing to do, and when the game gives you no chance to help others, or for them to help you because they're ALSO caught up in some mess of their own, all you can do is throw up your hands and curse at the heavens.

You know, one of the fun things about most shooters is the feeling of power. When I look back at other games, especially ones where you're fighting off waves of enemies, the best parts are when you've got a kickass weapon, loads of ammo, and are just going to town wiping them all out. The sense of accomplishment comes when you're able to endure and survive everything that's thrown at you, that you can take on all comers. You're the biggest badass in the world, and there isn't shit anyone can do about it. But what you get in L4D instead is a feeling of helplessness. You're vulnerable to the whims of destiny, your fate hangs on the throw of a die. You can't possibly kill everything, you never have enough health or ammo, so your success depends on your teamwork. Even then, teamwork itself, even with the best execution, is challenged at every turn, unraveled by unsympathetic changes in the odds, and compromised by the luck of the draw. When I can't win, and there's nothing I can do about it, then I have a hard time liking the game I'm playing.

The Plight of Highend Graphics

This rambling is kind of a response to a blog post by Antony Leather of bit-tech. The question posed is that of the effect of Crysis on the PC gaming industry, more specifically on the consumers whose burden it is cope with the demands of the game on their home computers. Is (or was) it a trivial matter, perhaps even a positive influence on PC gamers and the market, or was it such an unreasonable expectation on the target demographic to affect a movement of consumers away from the PC into the user-friendly arms of the current console generation?

Interestingly, a recent article on Fudzilla uses similar language in its last sentence: "No wonder gamers are turning to consoles in droves." Both entries were published the same day, and it seems unlikely that one influenced the other.

This idea that people are actually leaving the PC in favor of a more simplified gaming experience strikes me as a misguided notion. It would seem to me those who have stayed with PC gaming up to this point and for any reasonable length of time have come to terms with the fact that PC gaming involves certain obstacles and considerations that go beyond that of mainstream gaming. With gaming on a platform of superior visual fidelity, freedom, and control options, the price is that you know a little more about the technical underpinnings of the the hardware and software that you're dealing with, and yes it might require some upgrading sometimes. But Crysis didn't introduce this idea anew to the market of PC gaming. When was the last time a game pushed the envelope to such levels?

Hmmm, the last time I remember something like this happening was... I dunno, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion? But hell that wasn't really a stretch to run, was it? It might have put the sweat on the brow of your average flagship graphics card at the time, but there were plenty of other reasons to buy one of those anyway. Before that there was perhaps FEAR. But the really standout year where all hell broke loose on upgrading had to have been 2004. How many people beefed up their systems in preparation for Doom 3, or Half-Life 2? Hell even Far Cry pushed the limit of what computers could do back then. It was one game after another that really required additional expenditure on the hardware we were running. I don't remember a lot of people complaining about that though, in fact most people were happy to upgrade, if it meant ushering in a new era in graphics and gameplay.

But then you might say, "yes but the argument is that Crysis couldn't be satisfied. There was nothing that could max it out at the time, or even a couple years after its release!" Well that's true. I can think of a couple other games similar to that, where their graphics settings were created with the future in mind, beyond what current systems were capable of, namely the Everquest series. But it seems rather funny to me that PC gamers would be high-tailing it in droves over one little game that makes unreasonable demands on current-day technology, even though that was the expressed intention of it, and to compromise with slightly lesser settings was hardly compromising in the grand scheme of things, when "medium" looked better than anything else out there. Furthermore in 2007 and especially the following year, the price for really good performance graphics took a nosedive, to a level hardly seen since the Radeon 9500 Pro and dare-I-say the Voodoo days of old, with the 8800GT and 3850 cards released that generation. And if you did pony up for the most expensive model, that model (the 8800GTX) kept its value for much longer than virtually any card before it, unflinching from its $600 price tag for at least a year after it launched. Spending money on an upgrade at the time, even if it was for just one game, hardly seemed to be much of an sacrifice, especially when taken into the context of previous years.

And what else was pushing the envelope like Crysis did? Nothing, that's what. You might get a European game here and there (Stalker) that used some of the newer bells and whistles, but the vast majority of the PC gaming library since the launch of the current generation of consoles has been games that could run on the most modestly-priced of graphics cards. It has never been cheaper and easier to be a PC gamer, so why stop now? Are PC gamers such ninnies as to be disheartened that easily, where all the other advantages and merits of the platform are quickly forgotten over one instance of frustration?

If anything, we should be thanking Crysis for doing us a favor. PCs used to be the centerfold for innovation and cutting-edge technology, but no one seems to be interested in that anymore. Here comes a game that shows what PCs are really made of, taking us back to a time when no other machine could do what a home computer was able to accomplish. How many people dropped their jaws when they first saw Doom? A handful of us remember those days, and retain a passion and love for the technology behind the game as much as the game itself. If it weren't for Crysis, what would those people have to look forward to?