On Surviving Zombie Games: Left 4 Dead
Ah, Left 4 Dead. The podcast has sung it’s glory, and most of us have played it by now. Those of you who elected to buy something else that week…I pity you.
Now, for those fortunate souls who have the game, they may be encountering a problem. Notably, staying alive and healthy while fighting off hordes of cannibalistic mutants. Fortunately, I’m here to offer a series of bullet points designed to keep you mostly alive during the course of your gaming. They follow.
1. Stay with the group: In Left 4 Dead your most valuable weapon is the three teammates working with you. Not only do they help pick you up after you get sodomized by a hunter, but they can do other useful things, such as:
-taking hits
-opening doors and finding hordes of undead
-being exploded on
-being eaten by the witch while you shoot it
2. Seriously, stay with the group: Remember how the first to die in a horror movie is always the douche who wonders off by himself? Don’t be that guy.
3. Aim for the head: No, these aren’t Romero zombies, but they still generally dislike being shot in the face more than the leg. Head shots save on ammo, which keeps you from running dry in the middle of the finale and trying to fight off a tank with your peashooters.
4. Crouch: Crouch a lot. If you think you’re crouching enough, crouch more often. Crouching does a variety of things. First, it keeps you out of the line of fire when swarmed by zombies or when someone’s trying to shoot past you. Second, it improves your aim drastically. Finally, crouching targets can be harder to hit, which may be all the edge you need against a hunter or boomer in vs. mode.
5. Blow up everything that you can find. Explosives are all over the world of Left 4 Dead, as they should be. And lighting things on fire or exploding them cuts off avenues of attack for bad guys. The game throws a lot of grenades, gas cans, and propane tanks your way, it would almost be rude to not blow them up.
6. Learn what weapon complements your level. Sure the assault rifle can be great for most situations, but in the cramped corridors in No Mercy nothing beats the automatic shotgun with it’s huge close-range modifiers, but the same shotgun becomes worthless at distance. Likewise, one survivor with the hunting rifle can make a huge difference in the wide open spaces you find in Blood Harvest ant Death Toll and can shoot through enemies to take down several at once in a crowd, but does poorly in run ‘n gun situations.
7. Don’t chase achievement points. 90% of Left 4 Dead’s achievements are very easy to get, and you’re going to snag 600+ points or so in the first week of normal play. Don’t get your teammates killed trying to get those extra 20 points. Want crOwnd? Or Akimbo Assassin? Go for it on single player. Dying because your teammate refused to pick up a real gun sucks.
8. Get on the damn mike. Left 4 Dead is not a game to avoid chatting in. You need to cooperate with your team, and they need to hear your call out for help. Besides, the game is way more fun when you can hear the guy playing Louis scream like a little girl as the hunter eats his spleen.
9. Don’t be Louis. This is a horror movie. The minorities always buy it first. Honestly now.
There you go. A batch of pointers to keep your alive and shooting zombie faces in Left 4 Dead. At least until you shoot the witch and get torn to pieces.
Why would you do that?
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Tags: left 4 dead, Zombies
December 22nd, 2008 at 1:40 pm
I had to laugh at the Don’t be Louis comment. All of the teams I was on this weekend all fought over NOT being him.
“No way, I don’t wanna be Louis…YOU be Louis!”
“Not, me….YOU be Louis!”
Maybe it’s subliminal, but invariably, he who played Louis got more hoard attacks than the rest of the gang. Quite funny…
On a similar note, the girl (Zoey) seemed to get LESS hoards on her; in tradition that the strong female architype almost always survives.
December 24th, 2008 at 12:22 am
The only exception to 9. being if Zoe gets her tits out. Admittedly I haven’t seen this happen yet, but it’s sure to be one of the first mods we see.
1. and 2. are definately very important. And also a good early indication of if you are in a good team. If you’re getting spread out – and as a consequence getting wiped out – it’s good time to quit.
I would also add:
10. Check you’re fire. Some people have apparently never played with friendly fire on. It’s a two way street – watch where you’re firing, and don’t run into someone elses field of fire when there’s a target in front of them.
Of course there’s always the odd ‘incident’ (right, Mo?). I recently “Mo’d” (Molotoved) half my team, but in my defence I though they were retreating faster.
And there’s the time I accidently killed a teammate after boarding the C-130 at the end of dead air.
If the last 2 paragraphs don’t scare you, friend me up at http://steamcommunity.com/id/twintiger. The public groups are getting worse, and I’ve never been a big fan of multiplayer games on steam until now (never got into TF2).
January 11th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
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