Left 4 Dead

As someone whose sole experience of Doom was four minutes about three months ago, I am always on the look out for that most magical of things: the best shotgun in gaming. The one in the original Half-Life has long been the holder of this accolade, although recently it has been challenged by the steam-powered, whirring-gears contraption in Bioshock (it shoots lightning!) and Stalker’s hilariously deadly sawn-off. In Left 4 Dead, Valve have reasserted their dominance: the starting pump action shotgun is easily the best shotgun I’ve ever used in any game, ever. Technically, the auto shotgun is a more efficient zombie-killer, but it doesn’t go BOOM kchkchk BOOM, nor does your flashlight swing wildly upwards with every shot, so in terms of sheer physicality the lower-level weapon wins. And Left 4 Dead is all about physicality (actually, it’s about many things, but physicality is important, so let’s run with it). Earlier today I played through the whole of the No Mercy campaign using only dual pistols, in a misguided and ulimately unsuccessful attempt to earn an achievement*, and there’s nothing quite as awesome as whacking a zombie in the face with the butt of a pistol and then emptying a clip into their chest. They don’t just die. They stagger back, interrupted mid-sprint, twitch and spasm with every impact, and finally fall backwards. They – their bodies, at least – react exactly how they’re supposed to react. And I defy anyone not to giggle with glee the first time they headshot a leaping hunter and watch its harmless body fly past them into a wall.

Giggling with glee is a relatively common occurence in Left 4 Dead, considering it’s a game about the hopeless struggle of the last few survivors of a planet-wide outbreak of zombie rabies; I’d say its the third most common response on voice chat, after Swearing Repeatedly and Genuine Heroism. Except in Versus mode, of course, which is pretty much just one long nefarious cackle from beginning to end, at least from the Infected’s point of view. For the Survivors, it’s more about knowing that you face not only the creeping malevolence of the AI Director but also the far more overt malevolence of other human beings, and what is a pretty bloody desperate situation in the co-op campaign suddenly becomes more desperate still. The dread is mitigated, though, by the fact that you switch sides at the end of each map; Valve should take an idea from Introversion and call playing as the Infected ‘Retribution Mode’, or possibly ‘Let’s Screw Some People Over Mode’. Had a horrible time as the Survivors? Covered in Boomer vomit and Smoker saliva? Well then, you’ll be glad to know that now you’re a Hunter and it’s time to fuck them up. All of the Infected classes are like the Spy in TF2: it’s all about knowing that, somewhere in the world, someone is slapping their keyboard in frustration because of you. And that’s why you cackle.

So, just like when you spark up a spy that’s inches from backstabbing a fully-charged Medic, actually winning a map as the Survivors in Versus mode is one of the most awesome experiences in gaming. Not quite as awesome as it is to completely screw up someone’s day as the Infected, perhaps, but it’s still high on the hypothetical list. It’s the feeling of knowing that, goddamnit, not only was the horribly evil Director trying to murder us, but four random strangers were as well, and we only went and won.

However, Left 4 Dead also manages to make losing – almost winning – fun in a way few games do. You remember that bit in Nova Prospekt in Half-Life 2, where you set up the three turrets and have to hold off waves of Combine soldiers while Alyx buggers about, doing nothing much other than telling you that more are coming? You remember how utterly infuriating it was every time you died? Maybe that was just me. But Left 4 Dead puts you in that situation all the bloody time – every campaign ends with a gigantic finale where you must hold off an infinitely respawning horde of zombies, as well as dozens of boss zombies, while waiting for rescue to arrive. The No Mercy campaign finishes with a finale on the roof of a hospital, where you must survive long enough for a helicopter to come and pick you up; and the first time I played it, I was knocked off the roof by a Tank shortly before the helicopter turned up.  It wasn’t annoying or frustrating at all – it was hilarious, and even more so when the rest of my team made it to the helicopter and a message appeared on screen: ‘In Memory of MaybeNextTime’. And then the credits roll.

Whoever at Valve it was that decided to wrap the whole campaign up in this action movie veneer is an absolute genius (I am getting a bit tired of thinking of everyone at Valve as a genius, but it can’t be helped when they make games like this, can it?). Going through an entire campaign with three other people is a pretty serious undertaking – it’ll usually take between forty-five minutes and an hour on Normal difficulty, and you’ll go through a lot – and to be dumped back into the lobby straight after being rescued would be horribly anti-climactic. Instead, you get this rundown of all the things you’ve done in the last hour – Hunters Killed, Damage Taken, Molotovs Thrown – in the style of the credits at the end of a film. It’s always satisfying – a campaign on Left 4 Dead is something memorable and significant, full of moments to recount at great length on a barely-viewed games blog, and to have a game actually recognise and record how many crazy-rabies victims you shot in the face is a brilliant touch; it’s like the game is saying to you “Yeah, that was awesome, wasn’t it?”. More games should do that.

The only complaint I can think of is that, it being a co-op game, Left 4 Dead becomes a lot less fun when you get lumbered with a tosser on your side. It does a good job of encouraging everyone to stay together – all of the boss zombies, even the Tank, can be easily defeated if everyone’s together, but they’re the player’s worst nightmare one on one – so if someone is forging on ahead they’ll probably end up dead soon enough, but it still can’t auto-detect when someone’s being a whiney stereotypical online egotist and get them to shut up. We can dream, I guess. Still, it’s not that big a deal – Left 4 Dead is about survival and shotguns and four friends against the horde, and at its best it’s just incredible: flames, explosions, constant gunfire, someone screaming for help over voice chat, zombies everywhere, the Director chuckling as he throws a Tank into the mix. It would be astounding if it was single player. Throw in three other people, and, even if one of them’s a bit of an idiot, it’s the best online experience to be had right now.

*Don’t worry, I wasn’t that guy, the one that ruins the game for everyone by trying to earn an achievement. “But I want to headshot the Witch!”, etc. I was playing with the bots. Also, I rule with dual pistols.

Fallout 3

Fallout 3 has the best tutorial/character creation bit that I’ve ever seen in a game – which I’m sure everyone will agree is high praise indeed. It’s spread out over sixteen years of your life, which is just genius: you make yourself, properly, making choices from the age of one, rather than being lumbered with somebody that’s already lived half their life, doing a quick plastic surgery job and randomly upgrading the astonishingly few skills that they’ve managed to accrue over the years. Playing through a handful of major events in your character’s early life lets you start defining your personality straight away, and even makes the tutorial bit less annoying – you get told all about the delights of WASD while learning to walk, which is a hell of a lot more reasonable than being taught how to move around when you avatar is a full grown adult.

So, a fantastic start, at least on the first run through: what else is there to say about Fallout 3? There is a problem, which is this: the bad things in Fallout 3 are extremely easy to spot and describe, whereas the good things are apparently so big that you just don’t notice them until one of the bad things comes along and disappoints you. When you’re alone, wandering the wastes with a small department store’s worth of equipment in your pockets and a hand-crafted-from-junk weapon in your hands, listening to tracks from the 40s – this is when Fallout 3 is at its best; amazingly, and brilliantly, Bethesda have managed to make an environment that is supposed to be grey and uniform really quite beautiful and fascinating. Wandering around the Wasteland isn’t exactly pleasant – this is a far more hostile world than that of Oblivion – but it is always rewarding, even if the reward is only pretty screesnhots. If anything, it manages to make you feel more free than Oblivion ever did, because the world is more chaotic, more unstructured and far, far more bizarre: beating to death a Fifties ‘This Is What The Future Will Be Like’ robot with a baseball bat while listening to Bob Crosby is an experience I won’t soon forget, and that was within my first few hours.

My character in Fallout 3 is quite unlike any of the characters I’ve ever made in an RPG; an unambiguously good, endearingly stupid combat expert with an unhealthy fascination for gun components and sledgehammers, that once developed an addiction to mental stimulants while trying to open an Easy lock. She bumbles through the world, unparallelled in the field of assault rifles, frag grenades and, er, swords that are on fire, but endlessly outclassed when it comes to tricky things like ‘Speech’ or ‘Science’. She always attempts to convince people to be lovely and peaceful, and is almost always far too stupid to convince them; and suddenly the naive, slow girl with the trilby and the slightly bluish hair reveals just how slow and naive she is when it comes to shooting people in the face with a shotgun. Her path through the Wasteland is littered with good intentions and severed limbs.

In other words, she’s my favourite RPG character since her namesake in Mass Effect, although she’s completely different from that alien-seducing, journalist-punching cynic. In Mass Effect, it was my choices, combined with, er, good animation, excellent voice acting and well-written dialogue that made the character. Fallout 3’s voice acting and dialogue … is better than Oblvion’s, in my opinion, but it’s all relative. What makes my Fallout 3 character is very, very simple: statistics. Melee Weapons 100, Small Weapons 100, Speech 17, Science 15: she’s defined by what she can do. She’s the kind of character that will fight her way through hordes of irradiated monsters only to find a computer terminal with Easy encryption blocking her way, but she’ll usually find a horrifically violent way around it. Well, not horrifically, exactly, more necessarily – as I’ve said, she’s a lovely person, just unable to convince anyone else of that fact. The Perks that you choose from each time you level up, or just get given as a result of something you’ve done in the world, also help add to this uniqueness: my character drank huge amounts of water from a pool surrounding a 200 year old atomic bomb, then, perhaps unsurprisingly, developed a genetic mutation. That was the point when she became a proper character, not merely an avatar: statistics, a handful of Perks, and – alright – some of the dialogue options had somehow managed to craft a genuine personality in my blue-haired lady of the Wastes.

The bad things, that I mentioned several hundred words ago? There’s the dialogue and voice acting, which I find passable at best, although the dialogue gains some plus points for allowing you to respond to a request for help from a seven foot tall power armoured commando with “Fuck off, boy scout”, and the in-game radio is quite entertaining, if only because I was repeatedly referred to as the Messiah. Worse is the animation; I abandoned my usual RPG habit of playing in third person so as to avoid watching my character floating down stairs or running in that really stupid way, but sadly that doesn’t stop the NPCs from doing it too. Finally, something feels a bit … off about the combat outside of the brilliant and gruesome VATS mode; I don’t know if it’s weirdly unresponsive controls or a deliberate attempt to make you use VATS as much as possible, but I found it annoyingly difficult to hit things in real-time. It’s strange to find my by now well-honed FPS skills a bit lacking, but it’s not really a massive issue: the action points that you use up in VATS restore reasonably quickly, so you can soon be merrily picking and choosing which specific body part you want blown off and letting the computer do all the tricky bits. And, maybe it’s just me, and I’m an idiot.

But the good things about Fallout 3 are just huge: the entire setting is just astonishing, and absolutely everything in the game world – the clothes, the choices, the 200-year-old washing powder – ties into and builds on its vision of a post-apocalyptic ’50s America. I found myself desperate to see as much as possible, because so much of what I discovered was joyously bizarre or atmospheric, but also desperate to finish the game and start again as an evil character, because, man, some of those evil dialogue choices were tempting. As has probably become obvious by now, I haven’t played either of the first two games – I tried once, but the isometric view and turn based combat, coupled with my complete lack of any kind of manual, was too much for my modern gamer sensibilities (actually, I’ve just noticed that GOG.com has a version with a manual, so maybe I’ll give them another go some time).  I have no idea if it lives up to the legacy of the Fallout name, although I do try to disagree with Angry Internet Men at every possible opportunity. What I do know is this: Fallout 3 is a bloody brilliant Role-Playing Game.