19 November, 2008

Game Journal: Left 4 Dead

I don't care for people. It's a blindness. There's a certain spark, a mix of empathy, passion, and thoughtfulness. And if they don't have it, I can't see them. They're empty shells. I hate myself for being near them.

I played Left 4 Dead's versus mode today.

At its best, I was working well with fun people. In one particular incident, I was playing a hunter and had pounced on a survivor who had gotten out of position. Life as a hunter is generally very short. And when I saw one of the other survivors heading my way, I figured my fun would soon be over. Instead, one of my fellow infected, playing a smoker, grabbed him with his tongue from a distance away.

And there we were. Me ripping into someone. Him strangling someone. It was our most excellent moment together, and we were on voice chat enjoying every second of it. There was another time where one smoker kept pulling a survivor off the same ledge, one they had to cross to progress. So their friends kept having to come back to save them. It must have been a nightmare for them. But we couldn't stop laughing. How long could we possibly keep doing it without them getting a clue?

WARNING: What follows is pure boomer bile.

At it's worst, I was wasting my time waiting for people to fail to organize games, or worse, trying to support people who didn't deserve to have me on their team.

If that sounds arrogant, you're paying attention. But when people play on difficulty levels they have no business playing on, trying to hog kills instead of work together, making jokes that aren't interesting enough to be called insipid, and just generally being worthless companions, my tolerance is completely spent. It takes all the restraint I have just to keep from shooting them in the back.

Seriously, there were games when every time one of them would run into my line of fire, I wanted to pretend that I hadn't anticipated it and mow them down. Or someone would say something so stupid or insulting that the only reaction that made any sense was to plug them between the eyes, then keep shooting them on the ground until they were out of the game. I only did that one time, and that was to a guy who was so dumb he thought that shooting me with his pistols was funny. #(*$ that guy. Right through the hole in his head.

People with no microphones (or who won't use them) suck. It's a team game. You will often see things the team needs to know about. There were some good players who would type out vital information. Of course, by the time it came up, we were already screwed. Then they would blame the team for not "listening". #%(& those people.

The people who only want to play as the bad guys suck. They immediately kill each other if they have to be the survivors so that the round ends and they can go back to having their fun. Hello? What about my fun? #*^% you.

Automated matchmaking sucks. Multiple times it puts us on servers running on calculators or gives one side of a versus match horrible connections.

The way I feel right now, (#&$ everyone. I need to sleep and regenerate my tolerance.

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