With Left 4 Dead, my mercurial tastes have done me a service. When I first got the game, I didn't care much for Versus, so I stuck with the Campaign mode until I had played all four campaigns into the ground. Then came the Survival Pack, with a new game mode that I enjoyed for all of 15 minutes. (Amping up the difficulty to get a few extra hours out of a game has always struck me as a cheap contrivance, especially when there are so many other games to play.)
But lately, I have rediscovered Versus. I'm enjoying it immensely now, and I expect that the warm, fuzzy clusterf*ck I'm experiencing at present will continue for quite a while. Apart from the mode's diversity - both compared to the other modes, and between different sessions of Versus - the main factors contributing to my L4D resurgence are these: (1) my gaming crew made the belated transition with me; and (2) they all bring the suck as epically as I do.
Versus mode is the ultimate griefing engine. There's nothing fair about it, and the infected team is rewarded not so much for skill at the controls, but for being devious, sadistic, and ruthless a-holes. You wait for one survivor to get soft and lag behind, then you pounce on him and rip his nipples off. Or you donkey-punch three of them a country mile off a roof (to instant death, of course). Or you administer the ultimate indignity of puking green sh*t all over them in their most precious, vulnerable moments. Doing this to strangers is lovely. Doing it to your friends is sublime.
Versus is all about sapping your opponent's will to continue. The genius of the whole ordeal is that it throws things like balance and predictability out the window, and lets each session degenerate into something like a civil war reenactment with heavily-armed monkeys ... and space aliens ... and Pat Boone on crystal meth. It's fun as all hell, and I'm content that I didn't figure that out until recently.
But lately, I have rediscovered Versus. I'm enjoying it immensely now, and I expect that the warm, fuzzy clusterf*ck I'm experiencing at present will continue for quite a while. Apart from the mode's diversity - both compared to the other modes, and between different sessions of Versus - the main factors contributing to my L4D resurgence are these: (1) my gaming crew made the belated transition with me; and (2) they all bring the suck as epically as I do.
Versus mode is the ultimate griefing engine. There's nothing fair about it, and the infected team is rewarded not so much for skill at the controls, but for being devious, sadistic, and ruthless a-holes. You wait for one survivor to get soft and lag behind, then you pounce on him and rip his nipples off. Or you donkey-punch three of them a country mile off a roof (to instant death, of course). Or you administer the ultimate indignity of puking green sh*t all over them in their most precious, vulnerable moments. Doing this to strangers is lovely. Doing it to your friends is sublime.
Versus is all about sapping your opponent's will to continue. The genius of the whole ordeal is that it throws things like balance and predictability out the window, and lets each session degenerate into something like a civil war reenactment with heavily-armed monkeys ... and space aliens ... and Pat Boone on crystal meth. It's fun as all hell, and I'm content that I didn't figure that out until recently.
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