LGS: Left 4 Dead… on PC, hellz ya!

…or how a tragedy led to a PC Gaming Renaissance…

The recent “break” from my Xbox 360 (2nd RRoD) forced me to take a long hard look at my recent gaming habits.  And it made me realize what was long forgotten — that I have always been a PC gamer at heart.

My stepfather was a computer guy and because of this, we were always the first to have computers at the house.  Apple IIe, IBM, etc.  I learned how to play video games on personal computers and for years and years, that was it for me.

My mother wouldn’t allow me to have a console at home, and much like sugared cereals, it was something that I had to wait to do until the weekends. So Saturday mornings, I would wake up at my Dad’s, eat a bowl of Honey Comb and fire up Frogger on my cassette player attached to my Atari 800.  Many of you probably didn’t know you could play games off cassette.  Oh ya, baby.

Yes, it was as awesome as it looks!

My only other exposure to console gaming as a child game in one of two forms:

1. Riding my bike over to Sal Bartolotti’s house and banging on his barbecue until he let us in to play wrestling on his NES.
2. Breaking into Tim Martin’s neighbor’s house, sneaking around and eating their food, and then firing up their NES.

[As an aside here, I was obsessed as a child with the ability to break into people's homes.  I did it all the time.  Any house.  Anywhere.  I would break in and read their magazines and eat their food and then leave.  Tim and I used to play a game where he would lock all the doors and windows and see if I could get in.  I climbed on the roofs and pryed open window jams.  It was wicked pissa.

I don't know what mental defect I have in me that made this so fun, but I still think it would be fun although if I found a kid in my house tonight, I'd be burying him in the woods behind my house tomorrow, probably. That's a joke, btw.]

Anyway… I got back into PC gaming — and heavy — with the advent of Wolf3D on shareware, and then DOOM and DOOM2 — all which ran so sweet on my “IBM clone” 486 sx 25.  ROCK N’ ROLL.  Those games got me into MP pretty big time, as my roommate and I would sit up all night with six packs of beer in our dorm room and LAN.  Ya…

Then it was Quake, Quake 2 (which made one my worst jobs tolerable)… and then happily breaking into the actual industry by working on Quake 3 Arena and then Unreal.  And I was goddamn good at both Q3A and UT04.  I LOVED it.

See — a PC gamer at heart.

But when my 360 died, I found myself staring into the face of a really powerful gaming laptop with only WoW and WiC installed on it and a pile of FPSes downstairs waiting for a console to come back.  No FPS playing because my CONSOLE was broken??  WTF??? The very thought sickened me, so I took the initiative to grab Left 4 Dead off of Steam and fire it up.  Man, I gotta tell you, I couldn’t be happier.

To be plain about it: Left 4Dead is fucking amazing.  Period.  End of story. It combines two of my true loves in life — zombies and blowing the shit out of zombies.

L4D builds on my recent feelings that co-op gaming is the future of the industry, and it allows me the satisfaction of knowing what it would feel like to run screaming into a room full of undead with a repeating shotgun, mercilessly popping heads until the ammo runs out and then running screaming out with hordes of baddies on my ass while my friends laugh at me and fire over my shoulders.

If that’s not what life is all about, I simply don’t know where this world is heading.

This is wicked scary, and wicked fun, and scary fun...

As for the game itself — it nails the feeling of great FPS combat — the weapons feel perfect and heavy, the design and concept is sharply executed, the action is continuously exciting and no two games are ever the same, even though there are only 4 missions.  It’s simply a spectacular game — beautiful in its simplicity of concept — that makes playing online a snap and fulfills the desire to play for hours or the quick fix playsession for only 15 minutes.

I honestly can’t recommend it enough.

I played the demo on 360 and it was fun — but playing this game on PC is where it really shines.  The increased accuracy and snap movements made available with the mouse make clearing extraneous rooms in search of pills, pipe bombs and molotovs feel more natural and less like an invitation to get your brains eaten.

The game is currently in top rotation for the staff here at Maverick PR, although we often have to have our own private server because we delve into business discussions while stomping Zombie brain matter.

But, that said, we’d love to have you play along with us if you’re bashing zombies on PC and you’re a friend.  I’m not hard to find on Steam — PR_Flak is, surprisingly my name.  The more players you get, the more fun it is.  And I promise to try to avoid shooting you in the back.  I really do.

As more co-op games emerge and I actually spend the time to “game” with “other people” in a “social manner” — I find that I am becoming happier and happier with the role games play in my life.  Titles like Rock Band, Gears of War, Halo and Left 4 Dead have really changed the old head-to-head mentality I was consumed with.  Gaming is growing in leaps and bounds and I think a lot of it has to do with people SHARING experiences, rather than trying to destroy the experience of someone else.

Oh ya… my score for L4D?  9.8/10

Why not a 10?  Nobody’s perfect.

The only thing that has ever gotten a 10/10 from me is playing “Breaking and Entering” at Tim Martin’s house.  That’s a perfect 10.

- PR_Flak