It was a cool reminder for me to hear the Valve splash motif when the demo starts up. It’s been a while since The Orange Box and this is irrevocably linked in my mind with Half Life 2, so when I hear it I’m already expecting Gordon Freeman to show up. It’s a bit like no matter how many episodes of The Wire I watch (appropriately I was playing as Coach, who will bang your mom), when I hear and see the HBO ident, I expect to hear the intro music for Curb Your Enthusiasm. Now I’m imagining Gordon Freeman running around City 17 committing social faux pas and making it worse with a crowbar and headcrabs.

If Curb your Enthusiasm is a show about people’s differing social conventions, then Left 4 Dead 2 is similarly about trying not to upset your teammates. As much as it’s about shooting hordes of fast paced zombies as they bear down on you, it’s just as much if not more about looking after the three people at your shoulders. In the thick of it, it’s pretty easy to get carried away hoofing vicars that you neglect the safety of your teammates and rip through them with whatever automatic weapon you’re currently toting.



One of my friends was playing the demo, so I jumped straight into her game. She tweeted earlier in the evening that she was going to try it, and hoped that she didn’t get nightmares. I am certainly gonna have nightmares tonight, about being shit at video games. Having never played Left 4 Dead until this very demo, I had no idea how difficult it was. It also didn’t help me, or my allies that my mic headset is busted right now, which made me a bit like Rob Lowe in The Stand. Deaf, mute and devastatingly handsome, if a little annoying.

Ordinarily when I write up demos, I try to describe things as I see them. Study the intro, critique the menus, and point out the obvious and the not so obvious. I didn’t really get that chance with L4D2. You see, it kind of drops you right in it, and then doesn’t let up. After an hour I found that a good way to recover was to press start and choose “Take a Break”. This brought me into spectator mode, and the AI took over my character. Being able to jump in and out like this is nice for toilet breaks, beer breaks and lying on your side and crying breaks. It wasn’t that I was bored, it kinda felt like it, but it wasn’t until I sat out for five minutes that I realised what it was. I was exhausted.

Those first few rounds, where I deduced we must have been playing on the Bastard Hard difficulty, I felt like the useless dude holding everybody back. They had to constantly get me back on my feet, as I bumbled about trying to figure the controls. When I managed to get my shit together, I realised just how much I had been holding them back, and even no words were spoken between us, the resentment was palpable. I felt guilty every time I used a medpack and my teammates were themselves circling the drain. I felt like I owed them. I don’t usually feel like I owe people in real life. Let alone in a video game. Let alone in a demo.

With the amount of opportunities to save my compadres from the unrelenting zombie horde I found myself falling over my teammates in an attempt to revive downed allies, either with some harsh words (“You telling me that scratch was keeping you down??”) or with a handy disposable defibrillator. The satisfaction of helping your buddies out with medpacks is that when you’re on the fine-dining end of a big plate of zombie mixed grill, they may swoop in and return the favour.

Or they may not, because for all the buddy-buddy, I got your back, you got mine camaraderie, at the end of the day everyone is trying their best to take care of their own shit. If that means that by the time you’ve dragged yourself to the ammo drop all the medpacks are gone and your so-called allies are looking pretty well fed, you can rest assured that when the shit inevitably hits the fan, they will be chewing off the end of that health picking your sorry ass out of the zombie juice and dusting you off. As painful as it can be to constantly be looking out for the other players, it’s a damn sight easier than running the gauntlet with a man down.

So the experience of playing with friends was completely overshadowed by playing with douchebags in a quick match fixture. Despite having near 100 health in the park, getting hit by a hunter was game over for me, because the other players weren’t too interested in helping me out. It also didn’t help that at the first checkpoint, someone closed the door before I made it through, and every time I opened it, the jackass on the other side closed it immediately. This went on for about a minute, which in the Zombiepocalypse, is a really long time. The exact same thing happened when we made it to the truck, but this time with two people on the outside. It culminated in the other player inside the truck shooting the doucheplayer, and when we got in and managed to finish him off, the fourth guy revived him, but not me. WTF is up with that? When we finally managed to kick him, he just came straight back in to pick up where he left off.

Left 4 Dead 2 strikes me as a game of social niceties. I had a lot of fun playing with the guys who stuck together, helped out every chance they got, and understood that part of the reckless charm of a good co-op game is just trying to get shit done, even if sometimes that means you have to hog the last medpack. Considering I was micless, they were pretty sporting when I bumbled around a corner on my own to disturb witches. Playing with douches utterly derailed the whole experience for me, because this game simply does not work with a deathmatch, every man for himself, teamkilling mentality.