The inquisition in between

I was sick to death of Left 4 Dead. I think I still am. Playing a game four or five nights a week for a couple of months in a row will do that to you. Obviously. Night after night, safe-room to safe-room, pipe bombs and pounces, pistols and puke: it all got a bit painful by September.

I figured Left 4 Dead 2 would be more of the same, and to some degree it is. It's still all about "point A to point B," and the inquisition in between. The survivor bots are still assholes, and the game is still mostly intolerable when playing with strangers. Any game that discourages you from killing the one thing that's annoying you most has a lot to answer for.

There's light and heat in this sequel, however, and it throttles you straight away. Everything has been upgraded: the Source Engine, the level design, the sound, the vampires, the difficulty, the trees (yes, the effing trees), and it's almost dumbfounding when you start to realize how much the new array of stuff changes things. I thought I could just adapt and assimilate - applying the competencies I developed in the first game to the second, tweaking them slightly to account for the cricket bat. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Predictability between rounds - a core failing of L4D1 - has gone right out the window. Valve didn't escalate the difficulty by throwing more zombies at you, or giving them rocket launchers for arms. No, they opened up the terrain. They vastly reduced the number of accessible right-angles in the geometry (i.e.: good luck finding a corner). They created three new specials whose sole purpose is to separate the survivors with ruthless efficiency. And they made weather ... a monsoon with a mind that looks so menacingly real, you understand immediately that it wants you to die.

So yeah, L4D2 is hard. An early Spitter can have you reaching for your health pack three steps out of the safe-room. A Charger can knock you into next week. Oddly enough, though, the Boomer still feels like the linchpin of the infected attack. The consequences of being blind and covered in gooey demon pheromones are much more dire in these circumstances. These days, Shiva stacking puts you on a timer (of doom). Oh, and the Director hates you. It hates you like you kicked its food and peed on its dog. The moment you start to feel good about your progress, the Director flips the switch for Relentless Mode (TM), and things go south at the speed of stupid.

In the midst of all the evolution, the one thing to truly love about the second game is that it constantly forces you to make choices you don't want to make. Do you wait for the next ammo pile, or do you drop your ass-kicker with the laser site in favor of a lesser weapon that actually has some bullets? Do you grab the chainsaw for its (very temporary) close-range lethality, or do you stick with the magnum with its longer range and infinite ammo? Which incapped teammate do you save first, and when do you just leave them all and bolt for the safe-room? How you answer those questions - and a seemingly infinite array of others like them - goes a long way towards determining whether you stay alive for the next 90 seconds. It's intense and maddening and orgiastic in equal measures, and I usually stop playing more out of exhaustion than anything else.

There are, of course, a number of peccadilloes I could mention, but they hardly matter in the grand scheme of the Great Southern Apocalypse. In one year, Valve managed to elevate the game I used to love to a level I did not expect, and I just don't care about the rest of my gaming library right now. Good on them.

This one's not going away

Another gaming media outlet - Crispy Gamer - has picked up Ars Technica's journalistic ethics story regarding Modern Warfare 2. Kudos to Ben Kuchera for taking the lead on this, and to James Fudge for picking up the torch. I'm betting we'll hear a lot more on this subject in the coming days. In particular, I'll be very interested to see how Metacritic responds.

Here's your hooker. Like our game?

From ArsTechnica:

The gaming press had a choice: either play Modern Warfare 2 in Santa Barbara, under the watchful eye of Activision and on their dime, or give up early coverage. Many sites wrestled with the ethical implications by posting disclaimers, others simply ignored the issue and didn't discuss it in their review. We explore what happened during the review event, and ask the question: what does Activision get for all those plane tickets and hotel rooms?

Ars didn't accept the free hotel room and airfare, but enough gaming press outlets did. Go ahead and skip right to the end of the article:

Would knowing when and how a review takes place change the way you think about the final score? What's clear is that readers should know the circumstances surrounding how the game was played, and how controlled the situation was. Reviewing the game at home is one thing, reviewing it in a remote location, surrounded by other enthusiasts and the game's creators is another. There is no reason Activision couldn't ship writers prerelease copies of the game: it has been finished and packaged for some time, and the leaks had already spread across the Internet.

Instead the company decided to pay for the gaming press to come to a specific location, stay in company-provided rooms, play the game a specific way... and all this came at a substantial cost to Activision Blizzard.

What value did they get for that money? We asked Activision and have yet to receive a response.

What value, indeed? Even if you suffer from some kind of virulent retardation that causes you to conclude that these "professionals" were not influenced - even a little - by all the pampering, it would still be obvious that the Acti-vacation was designed to skew MW2's Metacritic score upwards. The whole thing creates such a massive appearance of impropriety that it doesn't matter if MW2 actually is worthy of an 87 ("generally favorable reviews").

"Playing in a room full of friendly developers and your games press colleagues with perfect connections is undoubtedly much more fun than gaming online with some of the legendarily obnoxious Xbox Live players," [one compromised reviewer] told Ars. "You'd have to be a pretty naïve reviewer to think there's no difference—and if you let that experience form the basis of your multiplayer assessment without qualification, you're giving too much credit to online gamers' behavior."

Well no shit. Any media outlet that accepted Activision's package should have their MW2 review nullified for the Metacritic calculation. It's that simple, and it's that stupid.

Borderlands DLC video

I'm a bit disappointed Gearbox went in this direction, but at least I don't have to listen to more bandit trash-talk.

Video Games | Borderlands | Zombie Island DLC Trailer HD

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Destructoid previews Bad Company 2 (some more)

If you're trying to decide if BC2 is worth all the hype (on its own merits, as opposed to simply capitalizing on MW2's stupidity), this Destructoid article is a good read. It really would be nice to play a PvP multiplayer FPS that sports interesting objective-based game modes without skimping on the shooter core. Quake Wars and Section 8 failed because they couldn't do both. BC2 has the potential to avoid that trap.

L4D2 - some windows aren't really there

But it's good for the "Long Distance Carrier" achievement:

Battlefield Moments EP2 - Arica Harbor

Left 4 Dead 2: First Impressions

I'm sure it won't be as hyped as MW2, but L4D2 was released last night. After about an hour and a half delay, I was finally able to load up the game at about 12:30 CST. I played through the first two campaigns on single player just to get a feel for them. There were a few complaints I had, but overall, I believe it has a lot of improvements over the first. Many of the changes are subtle, but they affect the gameplay significantly.

First, the maps. They are much more open this time and it's not always immediately clear where you are supposed to be going. I never got lost, but I did have to stop a few times to look around and get my bearings. For the most part, they kept the idea of marking the general path with various lighting techniques. Also, the maps seem much bigger this time which is a plus for me.

The survivor characters were surprisingly well done. I was afraid that I would be too attached to the original cast, but the new survivors have already won me over. Especially Ellis. At the beginning of the Dark Carnival campaign, he literally had me laughing out loud. The only one I didn't particularly like was Nick, but only because he's a prick. And I haven't confirmed it, but I'm pretty sure Rochelle and Zoey are the same voice actors because they sound almost identical to me.

The new special infected are a welcome addition.I have a new found hatred for the Jockey and the Charger is just a monster. The Spitter didn't make much of an impact on the games I played last night. Could be because bots don't cluster or because the maps discourage stacking, but I'm sure she'll have a bigger impact in versus.

The flow of the game is much better as well. There are almost no down times when there isn't at least a couple of infected attacking. Because of this, sitting still is even worse than in the first one. Also, the level are much more complex this time and there are several moments that will stick with you. The very first level in the hotel was incredible and there's a moment when you walk into a certain shop that is just euphoric. And like in real life, when something gets turned on or an alarm goes off, you now have to turn it off before the horde will stop coming. No more hiding in a corner and waiting it out.

There are small things that add some variety to the game as well. For example, there aren't as many ammo dumps laying around. There are however, lots of guns laying around. What this means is that if you want to replenish your ammo, you're going to have to pick up a different type of gun. No more picking up an auto-shotty and carrying it with you for the rest of the game.

There were really only three complaints that I had. The first one is minor and a personal opinion, but I thought the tank looked a little less intimidating this time. He looked more like a pink blob and a little smaller and less muscular...just didn't give me the same sense of dread I'm used to. Also, the musical cues seemed to be missing. Maybe I just missed them, but I was surprised every time a tank was in my face or a horde was on top of me and I had no warning from the change in music. The lack of music also made it seem a little less tense. My final complaint was the AI. If you thought the original bots were dumb, then you're gonna hate these guys.

Overall, a very good experiance and a very nice improvement over what was already an excellent game to begin with.

MW2 for the PC: British sales suck

From GamesIndustry.biz:

With first week UK sales reaching 1.78 million units, it's no surprise to find that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has entered the UK sales chart at number one this week.

...

Only the controversial PC version of the game could be considered a disappointment, entering at only number five in the individual formats chart. The PC version accounted for just three per cent of overall sales, compared to 57 per cent for the 360 and 40 per cent for the PlayStation 3.

No reliable word on the North American figures yet. I'll keep you posted.

UPDATE: VGchartz says they have "exclusive" - though "preliminary" - data showing that the PC version accounts for just 5 per cent of sales worldwide. We'll have to wait to see what Black Friday brings.

Borderlands: get weird

I've played through Borderlands twice now, and I'm messing around with a new character I hacked together (with Gibbed's Borderlands Save Editor). The game is billed as a role playing game, but the story and characterization elements are so thin that it's a bit difficult to take the claim seriously. That's not a problem, mind you: tuning your weird abilities to inflict maximum nut-ball devastation is its own reward. That early realization got me thinking, and I came to another as I started my second playthrough: the four characters you can play aren't the real stars of the show.

Along with the majority of the NPC's in Pandora, the player cast members have almost no personalities to speak of. Most of the voice-overs are repetitive to the point of being tiresome, and the only motivation seems to be "kill things to acquire things to kill more things to acquire even more things." There's so much stuff in the world, though, that the formula kind of works. With upwards of around a bazillion weapons and other kinds of gear, looting takes on a life of its own, and finding that next screwy shotgun that turns bandits into gooey pools of giblets is all the incentive you need to grind out the next mission. The experience point and class customization systems just add layers of beef - and cheese - to the murderous sandwich. The stuff you acquire makes you what you are, and at the end of the day, you're little more than the sum of your gear.

So, the real personalities in Borderlands are the weapons. Some of them set the bad guys on fire, some liquefy them with acid, some fry them with pretty blue static discharges, and some cause the guy next to them to explode, too. Sometimes, your bullets fly off in a spiral pattern, and sometimes, your grenades disappear right after you throw them, only to reappear in a rather inconvenient spot (for the bastards that are trying to ventilate your dome, that is). Quite a few of the weapons have their own pet-names: the "Vicious" this or the "Genocide Stomper" that. One shotgun's description pays homage to Sam Raimi's Army of Darkness. Since that's the greatest movie ever made, you can conclude that the rest of Gearbox's inspirations are equally licentious.

Borderlands is just barely a first person shooter, in the sense that skill at the controls doesn't make much of a difference. Kills are far more a function of pulling the right tool out of the toolbox, and unleashing whatever advantage it brings to the table. Your toys seem to want you to be reckless and inelegant, and more than a bit daft. You really do have more fun that way.

*Tangent Warning*

Although everyone else seems to think that the game is best experienced in the co-op mode, I don't agree. I have a playlist that includes tracks from Tool, the Doors, Thrice, Stevie Wonder, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rage Against the Machine, Radiohead, The Cure, and Elbow, that I cobbled together just for this game. It's a weird mix for a weird game, and the parts fit together with all the logic of a fever dream.