Left 4 Dead is not a zombie game. These are sprinting, screaming, slavering people you're killing here.
They've contracted a mutated strain of rabies, but it hasn't made them slow or stupid, it's just made them murderously angry. They don't shuffle toward you in hordes, they run at you in crowds, snarling with rage. You've never seen anything quite like it.
And the noise - imagine the sound of a riot, but a riot where everyone's in agony and hates you. You hear it faintly at first, a distant thunder, but you can tell straight away that it's a lot of people. By the time they come, pouring in from every entrance and banking round corners at blistering full pelt, the cacophony is unbearable. This isn't a zombie game, but it is a horror game.
There are four five-level campaigns to shotgun your way through in this disgustingly bloody co-op shooter, and up to three friends can join you in the slaughter- the AI will control any slots not taken by players. Two of the campaigns snake through the city, via hospitals and office blocks, to climactic helicopter rescues on the rooftops. The other two wind around the countryside, where the huge open areas make cutting down the crowds a very different challenge.
Throughout, other players can jump in to take control of 'boss' creatures, each of which has a particularly nasty way of incapacitating you, and currently the game doesn't even tell you whether the boss you're facing is a human or AI. But while the maps are pre-made and the bosses often controlled by players, what you actually encounter as you fight through the maps is determined by Left 4 Dead's most important yet invisible feature: The Director.
The Director is an artificial intelligence that controls the number, type and location of the Infected that pour in to swamp you. Its objective is to create an emotional rollercoaster. The perfect survival horror game should hammer you with enemies again and again until you can't take any more, then hammer you a little longer, and finally let up for a while. Close shaves, desperate last stands, 1‑health miracles and the out-of-ammo 'click!' are always the best moments in gaming, and with the Director, Turtle Rock have found a way to produce them every time.
It doesn't just count how many baddies you killed, it monitors your emotional state, taking into account what it feels like to be knocked to the floor, have blood splattered in your eyes from a point-blank headshot, lose a friend, get strangled, pinned down, vomited on, trapped, delirious with pain. Not to ensure these things don't happen too often, you understand. No, it just wants you to go through them all before it lets up.
Left 4 Dead is all about those classic moments, and it's uniquely suited to them. The traumatic misfortunes the Director tracks are mostly things your friends can save you from. You can cut a team-mate down from the noose-like tongue of a rooftop boss Infected as he gasps and spasms, offer your hand to a friend who's blasting away at the hordes on his back because he's too injured to stand by himself, and even pull a buddy up from a precipice they've oh-so-nearly fallen off. If you don't reach them in time, they slip from their elbows to clinging on by their fingers, then dangling by just one hand, before finally dropping to their doom. It's brilliantly cinematic.
The Director is harsh, but it's rare to die from the bloodthirsty crowds. No, it's the bosses that kill you. Survival depends as much on keeping your head as your health, and it's the boss Infected that can blind, strangle and trap you. When one player's down, it's all too easy for your team to fall apart. The others can help him up, but stopping to do so usually means failing to notice the other boss lurking in the shadows. Soon you're down two men, and at that point you're in serious trouble.
The most terrifying of these bosses is the Hunter - not to be confused with Episode Two's robo-alien. He's just a guy in a black hoody, except that he can leap 60 feet in a second. If you turn your back on him for a moment - and it's hard not to given that he's invisible until you shine your flashlight directly at him - he can jump at you with a howl that makes your blood run cold, and you're utterly helpless as he scratches at your face. I physically flinched every time this happened to me. "So you jumped, in a room full of people with the lights on," mocked writer Chet Faliszek. "We play this at home now, and when that happens..." He trailed off ominously.
The Hunter is tough to play as, though: it's rare to get a Survivor alone, and your only way of escaping fire is to pull off a spectacular but tricky Prince of Persia-style wall-jumping technique. If you just want to hop into someone's Left 4 Dead game and give them a hard time, try the Boomer. That's the hideous fatty whose primary attack is to blow chunks of semi-digested human flesh on his victim, and then detonate devastatingly in his face with a shower of corrosive bile when shot.
Your victim has three or four awful seconds to realise how totally screwed he is before the Infected get wind of the nutritious vomit. They pour in, in their hundreds, ignoring everyone else and piling on this one sick-blinded, poisoned survivor. As the dead Boomer player, you get to watch in spectator mode as your pretties utterly eviscerate the guy who killed you, and nothing is quite so morbidly gratifying.
With sticky ends like that around, you don't have to be told to stick together in Left 4 Dead. But some aspects of playing well as a team are less obvious, and the game teaches you those more directly. If you do find a Hunter eviscerating your friend in time and shoot him off, you get a big green shield icon - a 'Defender' merit. Help a near-dead friend to his feet and you're a 'Savior' too.
Collecting these 'Greens' becomes a matter of pride, and everyone's report card appears at the end of each level to show who the best team players were. It means that instead of everyone competing selfishly for the most kills, they're competing selfishly to help each other out, which works out well for everyone.
But nail a Boomer as he waddles towards your team-mate and you're likely to get a bright red Boomer-blasting demerit: the resulting explosion does masses of damage. Clipping your friends with your fire, running in front of their fire, and using a medkit when someone else badly needs it will all earn you further red marks.
Once you've played Left 4 Dead for a while, the urge to shout "BOOMER!" every time you meet a fat person is excruciating.
"The most common thing people say to each other after a game is 'What the fuck were you doing?'" admits project manager Erik Johnson. Demerits don't lead to any in-game penalty, but they do go on your Steam Community stats for all to see. And Steam will kick or ban you from the game entirely if it's obvious you're doing it on purpose. After all, there's really no excuse for griefing as a Survivor. That's what playing as the Infected is for.
zom·bie /ˈzɒmbi/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation –noun 1. (in voodoo) a. the body of a dead person given the semblance of life, but mute and will-less, by a supernatural force, usually for some evil purpose. b. the supernatural force itself. 2. Informal. a. a person whose behavior or responses are wooden, listless, or seemingly rote; automaton. b. an eccentric or peculiar person. 3. a snake god worshiped in West Indian and Brazilian religious practices of African origin. 4. a tall drink made typically with several kinds of rum, citrus juice, and often apricot liqueur. 5. Canadian Slang. an army conscript assigned to home defense during World War II.
rote /roʊt/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation, –noun 1. routine; a fixed, habitual, or mechanical course of procedure: the rote of daily living. —Idiom 2. by rote, from memory, without thought of the meaning; in a mechanical way: to learn a language by rote.
au·tom·a·ton /ɔˈtɒməˌtɒn, -tn/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation –noun, plural -tons, -ta /-tə/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation. 1. a mechanical figure or contrivance constructed to act as if by its own motive power; robot. 2. a person or animal that acts in a monotonous, routine manner, without active intelligence. 3. something capable of acting automatically or without an external motive force.
seems like you could very easily call the rote, mindless, automaton enemies in this game zombies. thus making this a zombie game. the word zombie has more than one meaning. it can be used to describe the behavior of someone, and usually the behavior that is described by the word zombie fits the description of the hordes in this game. sorry, but when you pound the whole "this is not a zombie game" statement like that I cant help but sign up to post to inform you that you're wrong.
the very fact that the developers themselves have called them zombies should be enough for you.
To be honest, I wouldn't have been surprised if the dictionary definition technically fitted Left 4 Dead's enemies: that wasn't my point, I was saying that the word has connotations that are inaccurate here.
But the definition you quote seems to prove my point. Their responses aren't wooden, listless or rote - as I say at some length, they're incredibly fast, intelligent and versatile. Their actions aren't fixed, habitual or mechanical: they adapt fluidly to the scenery and your actions, chasing you over obstacles you create and tearing through doors.
They have an incredibly active intelligence, and that was my point: don't imagine brainless automatons because these are the opposite. They're people, made angry.
Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court, 30 Monmouth Street, Bath, UK BA1 2BW England and Wales company registration number 2008885
