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Left 4 Dead is a co-operative, survival horror, first-person shooter video game. It was developed by Turtle Rock Studios, which was purchased by the Valve Corporation part-way into development. The game uses the Source game engine, and is available for Windows-based personal computers and the Xbox 360.

The game pits four Survivors of an apocalyptic pandemic against hordes of aggressive zombies. There are two game modes: a four-player, co-op Campaign mode, and an eight-player Versus mode. In both modes, an AI, dubbed “The Director”, controls level pacing and item spawns, in an attempt to create a dynamic experience and increase replay value.

The game went gold on November 13, 2008, and was released on November 18, 2008 in the United States; and on November 21, 2008 in Europe to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the release of Half-Life. A five-minute trailer was released on Halloween. A playable demo was made available on November 6 for pre-purchasers and on November 11 for the general public, and was closed on November 18, 2008. The demo contained the majority of the first two chapters in the “No Mercy” campaign, and was playable in both single and multi-player co-op.

Left 4 Dead was well received with an aggregate score of 88% on Game Rankings and 89% on Metacritic upon its release, with praise given for its replay value, focus on cooperative play, and movie-like experience. Similar to Team Fortress 2, Valve intends to support the game with downloadable content.

Gameplay

Left 4 Dead is a first-person shooter but makes use of the third-person perspective during certain events or player actions. In Campaign and Single-player mode, the player takes control of one of the Survivors; if four human players are not available, then the remaining Survivors are AI-controlled bots. They play through the levels fighting off the “Infected”—living humans who have been infected with a mutated rabies virus to which the Survivors are immune.

The game is focused on cooperation and team play; colored outlines of teammates are visible through walls to help players stick together and coordinate their movement. If a Survivor falls off a ledge, then they may automatically hang onto it and can only be helped up by another Survivor. If a Survivor’s health is depleted, then they become incapacitated and can only be revived by another Survivor, at which point they continue playing with a low amount of health that decreases over time. If a Survivor has been incapacitated and revived twice without tending to their wounds, then they will experience distorted black-and-white vision, and the next incapacitation will kill the player. If a Survivor incurs enough damage while incapacitated, or is not eventually helped up by teammates, then the incapacitated player will die. If a Survivor is killed, then they will respawn in a closet or other enclosed space after a period of time (except during key points in the scenario or in Versus mode), but must be freed by another Survivor to rejoin the team. Otherwise, the player must wait until the next level. Survivors can share first-aid kits and pain pills and help each other heal. Left 4 Dead has friendly fire that cannot be disabled, increasing the need for caution around other Survivors. On the Easy difficulty level, friendly fire does not harm teammates but still registers as having occurred.

The Survivors communicate by voice commands that are accessed by quick menus, and some sound off automatically when performing actions such as reloading or spotting Infected. Over 1000 unique lines have been recorded for each Survivor. Additional communication of player actions is conveyed through character lights. Also, weapon-mounted flashlights and muzzle flashes help the players in determining whether their companions are shooting, performing melee attacks, reloading or moving. Due to control issues and the likelihood of players using a LIVE headset, the Xbox 360 version of Left 4 Dead omits the quick phrases feature.

The game is experienced through four campaigns that take place in various urban and rural locales. Multiple visual in-game hints, including license plates, park signs, and markings on airport equipment, imply that these locations are in Pennsylvania. Each campaign is divided into several chapters marked by safe rooms, which are checkpoints where players can heal, re-arm, and revive players who were killed. Specifically, the four campaigns are: “No Mercy”, an urban setting; “Death Toll”, a small-town and countryside setting; “Dead Air”, an airport setting; and “Blood Harvest”, a woodland and farm setting. The levels are essentially linear, with distinct beginnings and ends, but there are a number of alternate routes to follow with more supplies, helping to create a sense of non-linearity. In the final chapter of each campaign, the players must defend a position from an onslaught of Infected until rescue arrives. Each campaign typically lasts between 45 and 75 minutes depending on the difficulty level.

Survivor characters

There are four playable human characters in the game: Francis (voiced by Vince Valenzuela), a tattoo-covered biker; Zoey (voiced by Jen Taylor), a college student and horror movie enthusiast; Louis (voiced by Earl Alexander), a Junior Systems Analyst in his company’s IT department; and Bill (voiced by Jim French), a former Green Beret and a Vietnam veteran. Early plans were for players to be randomly assigned to characters but in the final release, players can choose any character—provided that the character has not already been selected—or be randomly assigned an unselected character.

Survivors are armed with various firearms. Each player starts the game with a M1911 pistol. It has unlimited ammo and is the only weapon that the Survivor can use when they are incapacitated. When a second pistol is found, the player can dual wield them. Regardless of what weapon a player is using, a melee attack can be used. At the beginning of each campaign, the player can choose between an Uzi submachine gun and a pump-action shotgun. As the Survivors progress through a campaign, more powerful weapons can be found: the M16A3 assault rifle, Benelli M4 Super 90 combat shotgun, and Ruger Mini-14 rifle. In addition to firearms, a player can also carry three other items in their inventory: improvised grenades (either a Molotov cocktail to create a wall of fire or a modified pipe bomb designed to attract the Infected to it, with a blinking light and alarm attached to it); a first-aid kit, which heals the Survivor on which it is used; and pain pills, which provide temporary health and can be handed to teammates for later use. Also available are environmental weapons, such as gasoline cans, oxygen cylinders, and LPG tanks, that explode when shot. These can be picked up and moved by the survivors, however while carrying an object they cannot use their pistols or primary weapons.

Infected characters

The “Infected” are the Survivors’ foes in Left 4 Dead, and they appear to be partly inspired by the infected from several modern films, including 28 Days Later. The Common Infected encountered during the game are fast and agile, weak individually, but may be overwhelming in numbers. They occasionally attack en masse, referred to in game as a “Horde”. In addition to the Common Infected, there are five “Special Infected” whose mutations grant them special attacks that make them much more dangerous: the Hunter, an agile Infected that can pounce on Survivors from a great distance; the Smoker, an Infected that ensnares Survivors with its long tongue at a distance and, upon death, releases a cloud of smoke; the Boomer, a bloated Infected whose vomit and bile (which may be released at will or upon death) blind the player and attract the Horde; the Tank, a huge, muscular Infected that is the most powerful and difficult to kill; and the Witch, a passive female Infected that, when provoked by a loud sound, light, gunshots, or a Survivor approaching too close to her, will attack her provoker. The victims of some of these attacks require assistance from a teammate before they can regain control. Each of the Special Infected, as well as approaching Hordes, have a distinctive sound or a timely musical cue, making their presence easily recognizable by players.

More Information

• Developer(s)  Valve Corporation, Certain Affinity (Xbox 360 version)
• Publisher(s)  Valve Corporation
• Distributor(s)  Electronic Arts (retail), Steam (online)
• Designer(s)  Mike Booth (director)
• Writer(s)  Chet Faliszek
• Composer(s)  Mike Morasky
• Engine  Source
• Platform(s)  Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360
• Genre(s)  Survival horror
• First-person shooter
• Mode(s)  4 player Cooperative multiplayer, 4 vs 4 Versus multiplayer

Links

• Left 4 Dead official website
• Left 4 Dead on Steam

Continue reading »]]> Although they share Shaun White’s visage and a snowboarding theme, not much else ties Shaun White Snowboarding: Road Trip to its PS3/Xbox 360 counterpart – and that’s a good thing. While the more powerful console version looks arguably better, obtuse controls and a misleading map make exploring it feel like an uphill trek. For now, the underpowered Wii provides the best Shaun White experience.

As your close personal friend in the game, White has you racing to meet up with him and his friends as he jets Carmen Sandiego-like between exotic mountain locales around the world. When you first arrive at a hill, you can only compete in one event — it feels limiting at first, but the barrier to clearing each event’s low enough that you can easily progress through the main game thanks in large part to the excellent controls.

Whether you’re using just a Wii Remote or you’re lucky enough to shred on a Balance Board, the game’s responsive and consistent in pulling off tricks, spins, and jumps. Twisting the controller gently makes you spin through the air as you fly off cliffs, and quick flicks while holding A or B pulls off the more impressive stunts. After quickly acclimating to the different move combinations, you can consistently pull off exactly the tricks you want to do every time. I never felt like it was the game’s fault when I crashed: I knew it was because I’d committed to a stunt too late or was trying to land an obviously off-balance trick.

Grinds are a little too easy since you hop on rails automatically, but chaining them together with rail tricks feels satisfying and surprisingly natural. Overall, using just the Wii-mote feels a little more accurate, but the Balance Board provides a more realistic snow-shredding experience. Actual snowboarders might feel just the opposite, but if you don’t have a board already, this game gives you the perfect excuse to pick one up.

The single-player offering’s fairly short, but it’s got plenty of extras to unlock if you perform well in events, including new characters. Instead of changing snowboards, Road Trip lets you select a guy or gal from your roster that’s best suited to the challenge. That’s pretty normal, but what the game does differently (and effectively) is throw in the abilities of your cameraman. You have to select a second character (who will tag along and film you from behind); they power you up with a special ability as you fill your Respect Meter — accomplished by nailing tricks and collecting crown tokens scattered across each track. It might feel like a gimmick at first, but the longer you play, the more you rely on those abilities to boost your own skills just enough to surpass your previous best score.

Some of the powers are what you’d probably expect — speed boost, higher jump, etc. But others, like temporarily blinding your opponents, are designed squarely with multiplayer in mind. Multiplayer’s terrific (local play only, mind you), as the friendly controls make it easy to drag a group of friends into the game with you. You can go through a separate story mode cooperatively, compete head-to-head, or trade off taking turns in assorted events. Multiplayer sessions only allow for one Balance Board, but who has more than one anyway? It would’ve been better to tie the multiplayer and solo story modes together, but the game’s short enough that it adds a little extra life to the title.

Shaun White will probably draw comparisons to the Wii’s other snow-topped mountain experience, We Ski, but Road Trip throws out that title’s kiddy aesthetic for a cool anime look with a great licensed soundtrack. The game does so many things right, it’s almost hard to believe that the same company developed both this and its PS3/360 counterpart. I only hope that more companies will put the same time and attention into making their Wii ports such excellent (and in this case superior) standalone experiences.

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Continue reading »]]> Since launch, residents of Little Big Planet will no doubt of noticed a few oddities in the game. Like, for example – why their Play, Create and Share scores remain at zero. Where are the scores for all that hard work and play!?

News that the “Play, Create, Share” scoring system will be reactivated soon enough, since it was de-activated for a long while, leaving folks wondering why.

Sam_Protagonist, Senior Community Development Manager posting on the Official PlayStation EU forums, shed some light on the feature earlier this week…

It’ll be good to see it up and running in the game, although whether or not it will backwardly add all your previous scores for time spent playing, creating and sharing looks pretty unlikely.