I was asked recently by my girlfriend what would I rather give up movies or video games. She had no intention of forcing my choice upon me and removing the sacrificial media from my life as it was just a harmless game of would you rather but none the less I paused for some considerable time while I pondered the options.

On one hand video games have yet to disappoint me to the depth that movies have but that itself is just down to the sheer saturation I have placed myself in with regards to the silver screen. I have been watching movies my entire life and not in the casual way. I love the medium and I love it done well and while 90% of the output is dismissed out of hand or viewed and then dismissed its that 10% that captivates me and keeps me coming back for more.

Video games I love also as a medium and  I am far more forgiving of its faults than I am with movies, I can walk away from games I know are bad with memories of what I found enjoyable while movies I found enjoyable I often take nothing from but the things I know are bad. I am a critical person and while playing a game I will unleash that criticism through screams and shouts of infuriation but when the princess is saved and the day is won I can still find time to look back on what I loved about the game and take just that. Wet, Wanted, Dark Void, Brutal Legend are all so so games when all is said and done but each one has mechanics, or story ideas, or styles of game play, or level design I can see favor in.

Which is why the idea of choosing one medium over the other was like my very own Sophie’s choice or Kobayashi Maru. Ultimately my choice was movies over video games for one very simple yet crucial reason. Most blockbuster kind of movies I would rather experience in game form, I would take Uncharted 2 or Modern Warfare 2 over the majority of the action flicks and I would take a Resident Evil or Left 4 Dead game over most horror. with games getting better written every iteration there is often as much comedy in a half decent game as I am likely to find in the 4-5 good scenes most film comedies average. I looked to some of my favorite films like Fight Club and the Godfather and in my head deconstructed them and remade them as video games and while not perfect reproductions I felt their narrative could be transferred to a video game format.

So why pick movies? I cast my mind back to the films I had enjoyed this year, Up In The Air, Away We Go or Rachel Getting Married. None of which would work in a video game format then I looked further back to Almost Famous, Jerry McGuire, High Fidelity and Brokeback Mountain or further yet to Singing In The Rain, Litle Shop of Horrors and other films of my youth. While games can equal the action, tension and comedy of movies there are still emotional experiences they cannot master, and more to the point I wouldn’t want them to.

I don’t want to play as Kim quicktime eventing my way through an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, I don’t want to explain to Penny Lane she was traded for a case of beer via a dialogue tree and I don’t want to point and click my way through airports as I try and reach 6 million air miles.

Thankfully I don’t have to choose as both coexist quite peacefully but I do wonder if games will ever turn the tide and what they would have to do to make me willing to sacrifice the emotional climax of a great movie.

The history of consoles can be marked with people declaring what will never work on a console only for the tables to be overturned and time and time again the console reaches those very heights. For a long period of time hearing a comment such as ‘yeah consoles can be fun but they will never match the graphical immersion of the PC’ was a pretty common thing, now look around at Heavy Rain, Modern Warfare 2, Final Fantasy 13, Uncharted 2 and countless others and tell me if that stands true. Once upon a time the very idea of a console FPS coming close to the pc experience, playability or competitive edge was laughable, today its by far the top selling genre on consoles.

There are still a few stalwart gaming genres and standards that the pc lays claim to, one of the largest has to be considered the MMO. I know there have been Phantasy Stars and Final Fantasy’s that have tried, I am not saying they don’t exist on the console but can they really be considered in the same league as the PC MMO giants.

The times however in the words of Dylan are a changing and what consoles can and can’t do gets reset weekly and while there isn’t exactly a WoW killer lurking in Q3 the building blocks are certainly beginning to fall into place. To truly maintain an MMO to even a fraction of the scale and durability of a game like WoW there are 3 factors that are the cornerstones to build from, the ability to interact on a large scale, the ability to cultivate community and the replayability to maintain that communities drive. While no one game on any console truly possesses all 3 of these factors the last 6 months have heralded 3 giant leaps in the right direction.

Interaction on a Huge Scale – M.A.G.

Stop rolling your eyes right now! Whether you are for or against the game the principle and groundwork it is laying is pretty interesting for the discussion. Not only is it offering this scope of huge battles the other thing MAG brings to the table is the faction element, not to dissimilar from Horde vs. Alliance. While MAG’s success ultimately rests on it maintaining a high number of players offering those players a virtual war that there involvement in effects is almost a stroke of genius. With most online shooters in the end there is no loyalty to anyone beyond your character and your friends; it’s about personal glory rather than communal victory.

Community Cultivation – Modern Warfare 2

It helps that Modern Warfare 2 sold really well I will give you that, but look across the internet and you will find clan websites, recruiting drives, videos of peoples favourite moments, guides, charters and a community that would never want to admit it but isn’t 1000 miles away from that of a WoW community. The biggest hurdle in creating these communities is that a friends list and party system cannot compete with the internet at your fingertips. While the enthusiasm is there the tools to create these communities are not up to speed yet but heading closer everyday.

Replayability – Borderlands

Borderlands is at its core a localised MMO lacking only character customization and crafting. The thing it does better than a lot of other games that may be considered more replayable is loot, and cool looking loot is king. The trick that draws you in and keeps you playing when you have already hit the level cap is the knowledge that the loot dropped can keep getting better and better and better. The bad guys evolve, adapt and change in subtle little ways to keep it fun but it is the ever growing quest for the elusive better gun that really keeps you coming back, not so different from hunting down tier ++ armour. Looking at the latest DLC the Armoury of General Knoxx also offers what can be considered the first console raid boss with the final mission being constantly replayable.

You bring these three games together and throw in the ability in game to maintain and manage clans/factions/squads/ guilds or whatever you want to call it and maybe just maybe you would have something that could bring the PC MMO experience to the console.

With games like Champions, DC Universe & The Secret World heading to the consoles soon and the rumours flying around about Activision considering the idea of bringing subscription model gaming to the consoles it can’t be long before this juggernaut of a gaming genre makes a serious play for the millions of console users and if they can build upon the above I for one will be open to them.

As long as they don’t suck.

I want to start by saying I am really enjoying EA’s Battlefield Bad Company 2, the only previous battlefield game I have played was the browser shooter Battlefield Heroes so I was not going into this game pre disposed to love it, it was not even that high on my rental list. I have now done 100% of the single player and am climbing the ranks in multiplayer and loving it all the way. What disappoints me however are the things I feel DICE should have included and the lessons they could have taken from their competition.

Modern Warfare 2

Undoubtedly the biggest fish in the FPS pond right now and a constant target for wisecracks through BFBC2’s single player experience so what could they have learned here? Well I like many found the most addictive and gripping part of the MW2 package to be the special ops missions, 23 well crafted levels that encourage you to use different weapons, techniques and game mechanics that I spent as much time on as I did the single player. I cannot fathom why as soon as MW2 hit DICE did not start working on their own version of this mode, it completely fits the idea of the bad company being given missions that require their unorthodox style. Imagine if you will 4 player co-op special ops with missions crafted to offer varying game play, they showed a whole heap of game mechanics in the single player that could have been used but when you include what different classes could bring to it and finding the optimum way to work together in a squad of friends (or have AI members of bad company drop in if you don’t have 4 friends) its easy to get lost in the awesomeness BFBC2 could have brought to this.

Fingers crossed DICE are worth the credit I give them and are already working on this for DLC.

MAG

Bad company 2 has already drained a whole heap of MAG players away from its servers but what I would have liked to see them take is the factions idea. With something similar in Battlefield Heroes it strikes me as weird it wasn’t included as MAG’s potential in my opinion was the idea that the little battles were leading to something and part of something bigger. There is something very throwaway and self focussed about this and Modern Warfare 2 where you are really only looking out for yourself and levelling yourself up. Given the option of picking a side and knowing that winning is about more than one round I think would really extend the multiplayer and sense of community offered in this game.

Uncharted 2

What do you mean you forgot this game even came out, let alone had multiplayer? Uncharted 2 is one of the few games I have played where succeeding in single player gives you a leg up in multiplayer for more than just practice. In BFBC2 it seems its main role is to give you something to do while the servers are down. I completed the game, I got all the Mocom stations, I found most of the guns, I did airborne on hard and have the achievements to prove it, couldn’t I have been given a shiny gun (even if it works the same and is just shinier) to prove it and out bling my less single player focused friends!

Once upon a time in the world of gaming it seemed the lines between game types were easier to see. Within the first 5 minutes of a game you knew what you were playing, shooters looked and played like shooters, RPG’s looked and played like RPG’s and casual games… well casual games didn’t exist they were just called games back then. Today when you look across the gaming landscape it seems such distinctions have become blurred and now you can be several hours into a game thinking it as one thing and all of a sudden it dawns on you that it is actually something else, sometimes instead of being what people thought it would be, other times as well as. This is not a fault of games nor is it something that lies on the shoulders of the gamers, if anything it just seems to be a sign of the gaming times.

Almost every triple A title that comes out seems content not to limit itself to just one play style instead you get games that contain elements from any workable angle jammed in there. It started small with just the inclusion of level types being enough to satisfy this need, resulting in every game you play having the inevitable duo of the driving level and the turret level (in some cases combined into one). Slowly however it has taken over and games feel the need to have RPG elements, shooting elements, tactical elements, platforming elements, driving elements, sandbox elements etc.

Its not a bad thing and this buffet style of games design has produced some really good games, the problem is that the majority that do this by including so much ultimately take away from their product. A recent example could be the lesson of Brutal Legend a game that I for one enjoyed thoroughly but was not met with positive responses everywhere. A lot of the criticism with the game was that it tried to do so much and most people would have preferred if it just took 6 of things it was trying to do, whittled them down to 2 and then put all their energy into making those 2 things really good. It’s neither the first nor the last game to suffer from this syndrome of rather than hitting for 10 on one level, hitting for 6 on 5 levels. Personally I have found Assassins creed to suffer from the very same thing and rather than being one great game it is half a dozen poor to good games.

What we as the gamer get out of this is that rather than choosing our own adventure we choose our own involvement. When a good game comes out that has all these features we can decide how involved we are, do we immerse ourselves in the RPG side of WoW? do we immerse ourselves in the shooting of Mass Effect 2? do we power level through borderlands? Allowing different players on different playthroughs entirely different games a luxury not often found when simpler games roamed the earth.

Like any look at the progression of games designing it’s a hard to decide which side of the wall to fall on, while I dislike the idea of good games becoming average games due to over reaching I love the idea that one game can not only offer different storylines but different gaming experiences based entirely on how you choose to immerse yourself in it.

It’s not a question that ever bothered Socrates, Descartes, Bill Hicks, Grover or any of the other great thinkers of our time but it is one that concerns me.

The first person shooter genre has seen much development both in style, game play and execution since it first debuted but ultimately the fodder for which you will be shooting each time has remained largely the same falling into 4 main categories (Nazi’s, demons, aliens and zombies) with the occasional branch into sub-categories (alien demons, Nazi zombies, aliens that metaphorically resemble Nazi’s, demons that command zombies etc). It’s quite obvious why these 4 are such popular targets, all can be killed without much moral judgement on the shooter because all 4 are easy to recognise as evil without need of explanation.

I found it amusing in Uncharted 2 that when you find the expedition in the mountains killed by the very person who sent you to find them before even question his moral standing and whether or not he would join the list of people wanting to betray you a book is opened to reveal that the victims were all Nazi’s, so its okay they are dead. You don’t need any detailed back-story to show them being evil, you need not worry about walking a moral grey area and any feelings of sympathy for the departed are able to be written off.

The trouble is I have been killing Nazi’s for 14 years now, I have spent longer in digital battle with the axis of evil than we were actually at war for and I have little desire to constantly return. Undoubtedly we will again because by all accounts World War 2 was the last war where evil good an evil can be fairly defined and that the soldiers you’re controlling can be displayed as unquestionable heroes. Not to dismiss any brave men and women fighting but it would be difficult to convey a Vietnam game as a straight up good vs. evil fight and completely ignore the well documented disenfranchised feeling of the soldiers. Even modern combat is easier to show as patriotic and heroic as to serve is for most a choice they make willingly.

So while Nazi’s may need to phase out of video games they are not so easy to just replace with another war.

Zombies have had a good run but the universal consensus seems to be that killing the unread is going out of fashion (not to me though, I still love me some zombie killing) and may of reached its peak have infiltrated so much of gaming in the last few years. Zombies are again a good shoot em up villain because 1) you can do fucked up things with them. 2) They are technically dead so it’s not like killing actual people 3) its not about good or evil. The problems with zombies is that they have evolved and while they were once the reanimated dead brought to life through magic they have  become something more scientific in nature.

Modern zombie games will through around terms like outbreak, plague, virus and sickness so while once upon a time I was fighting of dead bodies given sentience I am now shooting flu victims in the head. The other problem to fall at the feet of the undead is sheer over saturation, there is literally no way I can think of yet to kill zombies that I would want to do anymore. Between left 4 dead 1 and 2, dead rising 1 & (soon to be) 2, Dr Neds zombie island, Resident evil, Deadspace (necromorphs my ass, they be zombies) and half a dozen others every possible way I could want to kill a zombie has been done.

So what’s the future?

What will the FPS & TPS of tomorrow have me shooting?

With Modern Warfare 2 breaking records and Battlefield Bad Company 2, Medal of honour & Spec Ops the Line all due you could put up an argument that terrorists are going to be hot.

Mass Effect 2, Aliens vs. Predator, Halo Reach and the unannounced yet clearly obvious that it’s coming at some point in the next few years Gears of War 3 Maybe it will be a return to the alien filled shooters of the early nineties.

Maybe Dark Void will spark a fire in our hearts and the idea of killing AI driven machines out for our blood will return en force.

Or maybe there is something entirely new that I have yet to consider like werewolves, mimes or Care Bears.

At the VGA awards there were a handful of trailers, some generated a lot of positive buzz very quickly while others received quite negative reactions. Arkham Asylum 2 is one very much in the former category, the positive buzz that hit the internets happened almost instantly. It’s not a surprising thing; the first game was both critically and commercially successful and is hovering around the top choices for a lot of people’s games of the year. While the huge November releases makes everything pre MW2 seem forever ago I would like to point out the reason that it can be considered for GotY is that it came out in August. 4 months before the trailer for the sequel came out.

The reactions have pretty much been of the ‘Hell yeah! Bring on more Batman’ variety with people proclaiming how much they loved the first and how they cannot wait for a second. It’s fair and understandable; the first was a great game and definitely GotY contender. However the set up reminds me of another game

Critically successful
Commercially successful
GotY contender
Lots of potential for DLC with little released

While I am not a complete idiot and realise there are some major differences between the two properties being one is a single player experience with little replay value, the other a multiplayer experience with a lot of replay experience this trailer couldn’t stop me thinking about Left 4 Dead.

Mainly what I have been thinking about is the complete opposite reaction that the games fans had when a sequel is announced, even though Valve waited more than twice as long before announcing a sequel.

Batman

‘I loved the first so much; I can’t wait to play a second’

Left 4 Dead

‘I loved the first so much, why would I play the second’

Batman

‘I can’t wait to do some new predator challenges, those rocked’

Left 4 Dead

‘I can’t believe valve want me to pay for more of the same’

Batman

‘I am so getting this, I can’t wait’

Left 4 Dead

‘I am going to boycott this; I can wait for it to drop down to 10 bucks’

 The big difference is that Rocksteady don’t have a community they just have fans of their first game while the negative responses to Left 4 Dead 2 all came from the ‘die hard’ Valve community. One Valve has nurtured, given special treatment to, thrown free upgrades at, created fan services for and listened to for many years. My question is why?

While I know in the end the sales for Left 4 Dead 2 didn’t suffer and the boycotters lost their resolve so the argument is academic. It doesn’t change the fact that Valve at the start of the marketing for their game suffered blow after blow from a community they have been nothing short of godly to when compared to other Publishers. The people who have been given reason after reason to support this company turned on them.

 Yet how many of the people in the boycott probably gave a little cheer when they heard the words Arkham Asylum 2?

Everyone loves a list; it offers all the information of an actual piece of writing but in individual bite size chunks so you can ignore entire paragraphs that are about things you are uninterested in without taking away from your reading experience. So have a list and feel free to ignore as much as you choose, this one is my best and worst of 2009.

Films

Best – Moon…no Star Trek….no Moon…no District 9…no Definitely Moon…fuck it I give it to Sci Fi.

2009 was actually a strong year for film while also having some huge hulking monster piles of rubbish. Some of my favourite films of the last few years have come out but overall it’s so hard to pick a favourite one but the genre is clear. 2009 was the year that sci fi pulled its head out of its ass and started to make some movies again. In recent years you wouldn’t have been alone in feeling that things like, aliens being done well, space battles being awesome and sci fi plots being intelligent had gone the way of the neo geo. Luckily three films stood out in a year of great sci fi and have shown us the light. Wait what do you mean giving it to 3 films is a cop out? Fine its Moon…or Star Trek…Or District 9…oh fuck it.

Worst – The Boat That Rocked (Pirate Radio to some)

Until Saturday this would have been the disgrace of a romantic comedy ‘He’s Just Not That Into You’ then Lovefilm sent me this piece of complete tripe. The characters aren’t likeable, the plot is non existent, the jokes aren’t funny, the moral is indecipherable, the music is barely noticeable and this film has nothing but a shiny purple button on its sleeve as the usual heart of a Richard Curtis film is nowhere to be seen. It also has possibly some of the worst characterisation of women I have ever seen in a film; it seems that all women are just easy to bed sex objects with no real opinions or ambition. Avoid this movie!

Games

Best – Modern Warfare 2

Stop scowling and listen to me, I was not drawn in through hype and never played COD 4. I honestly did not have more fun playing a game this year (outside of original L4D) than I did playing MW2 which at the end of the day shouldn’t that be what games are about? Yes I loved Batman but as a game I found it had bigger flaws than those of MW2. I am not going to gush about it but the fact that it is a month later I have completed it twice and I am still playing it and not the multiplayer should stand for something.

Worst – Prototype

This game should have been great but instead provided me with what can only be described as negative fun. There are too many flaws to note in a paragraph and if you check back over my blog here you can probably see them noted elsewhere. So without getting repetitive let me just say – awful, really really awful.

Books

Best/Worst – Every Last Drop

It turns out I only read one book this year…don’t know how that happened! So the award for best and worst book goes to Every Last Drop. It is the fourth book about Joe Pitt a vampire private detective working in New York, treading the lines between the overruling clans.

They don’t sparkle
They do kill people

This is not twilight, this is a dark noirish take on vampires living today mixed with the pulpiest inspired detective stories (for the first two at least).

Biggest Letdown

9

As a film I was left feeling very disappointed, without a doubt this was one of the films I was most looking forward to this year. What’s saddest about the whole thing is that the world they create is fantastic, the creatures are awesome, the voice acting is pot on, the action is the best you will see in animation, the pace of the movie is quick, and the characters are just the right amount of quirky. The plot however is so completely dire, ridiculous, clichéd and full of holes that it is near impossible to leave the film not feeling letdown. You can’t even palm this off with the kids film excuse as some of the settings are so macabre (in the first few minutes you see a dead baby) that this is not for kids. Also it would do to mention that Where The Wild Things are and Up totally kick that excuse in the nuts and send it home with an ice pack.

While now may be the time for a look back at the last 12 months of gaming I only bought my Xbox in June so really all I can present is a look back at the last 6 months and the games I have played in them. So if you consider this a review of the year from someone that only really took part in the latter half of it.

June – Prototype

There are games that start slowly but build to a crescendo of fun once you learn to love them, there are other games which start of fast paced and immersive and stay that way for 8+ hours of great game play. Then games like prototype show up, they start high fast and frantic but the longer you play and the more you immerse yourself they reveal a shallow, frustrating, under developed core. Prototype could have been a truly great game but instead its focus on futile side quests, grind achievements, lacklustre plot and game dynamics that make you repeat the frustrating rather than revel in the celebratory left me as player rather angry. The truth is I ruined this game for myself but lets face it, if I hadn’t tried to chase down the achievements, complete all the side quests, played through the single player campaign or tried to explore the sprawling Manhattan world – why would I put the disc in?

5/10

July – Catch up month

Only having had the Xbox a few weeks I spent July playing catch up on titles such as Dead Space, Mirrors Edge, Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, Too Human, X-men origins: Wolverine, Assassins Creed & Spiderman Web of Shadows. It was probably good I did that as very little worth playing was released in July.

August – Batman: Arkham Asylum

Without doubt one of the best titles I played this year which rewrote the book on how games like this should be made, in fact this game would be my game of the year if 70% of the boss fights didn’t revolve entirely around throwing a batarang in someone’s face and dodging. It shocks me that a game that was able to do so much right provided possibly the least interesting and most repetitive boss battles I played this year. A small tarnish on an otherwise superb game.

8/10

September – Beatles Rock band, NHL 10, Wet, Halo 3:ODST

This was a good month firstly you have what is in my opinion one of the finest examples of a rhythm game released that almost made me want to buy plastic instruments (in the end I played it at my brothers house and while I just wouldn’t play it enough to buy it my opinion of it remains a high one).

9/10

Secondly NHL 10, now I don’t follow hockey but this game sucks you in and makes playing a sport you know nothing about a whole heap of fun, decent graphics and good game play with a well structured season mode (which does not in spite of certain reviews editors opinions make it an RPG).

8/10

Wet on the other hand was a game with grand ideas that just get a little on your nerves, everything feels fun for five minutes but you will find yourself eventually turning the music, reel effect, sound and then text off. Despite this I did enjoy Wet and was able to take from it all the things it was instead of getting caught up in all the things it wasn’t. The game won’t change anything or provide anything new but if you can look past it and put yourself in a mindset that doesn’t expect every game to turn the genre on its head there is fun to be had in this game.

6/10

Talking of not changing anything I am brought to September’s final offering ODST. I am by no means a Halo Fan but my best friend is so every game I get brought into his co-op world. Bad facial capture and more of the same game play aside I really enjoyed this game and what was done with it. I liked the story and while I recognised the Halo universe it did feel to some extent a different game to my experiences with Halo 2 & 3.

8/10

October – Brutal Legend

I was not sold a false bill of goods with this game, I followed the game with semi interest but not fanaticism and the game I played was the game I thought it would be from the first trailer. Too many reviews were tinged with resentment for everything the game wasn’t or the false hype that they themselves had placed on it. Yes it tried to be too many things, yes the multiplayer is jankey and yes it didn’t change the face of gaming. What it provided was a fun, funny, well told story in a well imagined world that really used the music and the metal culture to provide a good gaming experience. It was never a game designed to  just be rushed through, it was a game designed to make you want to experience and enjoy the world. This was no false bill of goods, I got exactly what I wanted.

9/10

November – Modern warfare 2, Left 4 dead 2

I already wrote a blog detailing Left 4 Dead 2 so let me just say its good, I prefer the first but it’s a game in its own right ignore the DLC Protesters and see for yourself.

8/10

I had never played a Call Of Duty game I knew of them, and being that I visited the internet at least once between the beginning of time and November 10th I was well aware of Modern Warfare 2’s release. I played it going in with a basic knowledge of the first game and little else and from mission one to my final knife throw I enjoyed every single moment of this game, it was frantic and exciting and massively immersive. With great graphics, a completely barmy plot and a marketing machine in the tens of millions this game hit with the force of a blockbuster movie and I enjoyed it more than I really expected I could. Yes it looks Michael Bay at his worst which makes for a terrible movie but a great game

9/10

I should start by saying I was a big fan of the original, not in a dress up like Bill at conventions or scream grabbin’ peels when I went to a pharmacy kind of way but as a gamer I found Left 4 Dead an incredibly fun, immersive and replayable experience. I was not one of the people who thought this sequel was to soon or that the original hadn’t received enough support or would even consider the boycott a logical idea, I was all for more Left 4 Dead and have spent months waiting for the game. 

The trouble is that Left 4 Dead 2 does not feel like a sequel it feels like a whole different game. 

The joy I found in left 4 dead was in the suspenseful crawl through levels, the closing doors behind you, the scavenger feel of finding a home made pipe bomb or pain pills in a bathroom, the conservation of ammo and the survivor mentality of 4 people holding a position against wave after wave and these 4 people who I came to love and hate (I’m looking at you Bill!). The game valve have followed up with is not the same kettle of fish, this is an action game. 

I don’t mean that all of a sudden you are playing Zombie May Cry but the subtlety of the first game has been replaced with a chaotic manic pace that feels designed to get the adrenaline pumping (or being shot into your chest), the ammo is free flowing with weapons and stashes appearing 2-3 times each chapter rather than 2-3 times a campaign and the stay close and survive mentality has been replaced with mad dash crescendo events that actively encourage you to split up and run for it. 

That’s a strong theme in this game especially if you look at the new special infected (the jockey, spitter & charger) all designed to prevent you grouping together or the crescendo events that require you to run about collecting things or turning generators on and alarms off. This game is not about standing your ground and fighting off the hordes until they relent, mainly because the hordes don’t relent, they will keep coming and keep coming in waves that if you don’t stop you will be overwhelmed. This has strong effect on the group because it is no longer about surviving its about escaping and escaping means when a team mate falls you don’t pick them up. What Valve have created seems to be a very single player multiplayer experience. 

This is another hang up for players like my girlfriend who has racked up several more hours than me on the original with a silver account playing with the games AI. So much of this game requires you to do specific things that the AI won’t, they won’t pick up coke bottles or turn off alarms, not something that came up in the first game as all the campaigns were quite achievable single player, here I am not so sure. 

I would also be remiss if I didn’t point out the level design, in the original you had all the horror movie stereotype scenarios spread over 5 chapters offering varying experiences on all the campaigns. No campaign did just one style, in one campaign you could fight your way through apartment buildings and streets, followed by train lines and sewers, fight your way through an infected hospital and a rooftop showdown. Most people have favourite chapters and most hated chapters some even in the same campaign because of the variation in level design. Here however the levels feel even more linear with the chapters all containing the same themes and styles that you never feel the separation between chapters, it all just feels like one long level. 

Everything above you have just read may sound like I dislike the game but I don’t, I think the game is really good. I love all the new touch’s that have been added, the ammo upgrades and uncommon infected, the new characters are great and Ellis is hysterical to listen to with running gags to boot. As a game in its own right Left 4 Dead 2 is a really good game with so many nice references from Shaun of the Dead to Army of Darkness that is loads of fun to play. The new scavenge mode is a great multiplayer mode and it has achievements that are genuine fun to go after instead of grind quests. The melee weapons offer immense enjoyment (if not much in variation) and overall I don’t regret or begrudge any time I have spent playing this game. 

I really like the new challenges it sets you in the game as events, I think if this had just been clones of the format from the first it would have gotten very stale very fast and you have lots of little side things to distract you from besting Moustachio to rescuing Gnome Chomski that really add to the strength of this game. The graphics are superb and the music makes it such an immersive experience that this really is a standout triple A title that could hold its own against the other triple A titles in its release window. 

I would also like to address the boycott I mentioned briefly at the beginning because basically they are wrong. If L4D2 had been irked out across a 6-12 month period as DLC it would of felt out of place with the original game so much and you would of paid more than you would for a whole new game on a console. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this is a different game that deserves its own game, in fact I would argue this is more a game in its own right than Gears of War 2 was. 

There are lots of good positive things about this game that make it a really good game that provides a really enjoyable experience. The trouble is that while the changes have provided a more adrenaline fuelled rush of a game they have lost the initial X factor that made the original so special and while I will be playing this a bunch for the next 2-3 weeks I think my love affair with its predecessor will remain quite firmly intact long after I have stopped playing L4D2. 

A sequel not as good as the original, whoever heard of such a thing?

With part 2 I want to deal mostly with controls for games and will be using the Xbox controller as my muse.

 6. Camera Control.

The right stick has no place being used for anything apart from camera control, it has been tried and tested and done until it needs to be done no more and is much a part of modern games as any control can be. It’s not for combat or looking a little right or left it is a 360 degree camera control. And while we are on the subject of cameras when you design your game and decide early on that the person controls the camera and needs to look at things to target do not add a fixed camera boss! Thirdly auto camera can just be dropped altogether, I have lost track of the times I have died in games because I am running on direction, the camera automatically pans round and I change direction altogether, it’s just annoying and should be stamped out

7. God Buttons. 

Press A to run, Press A to jump, Press A to open doors, Press A to climb ladders, Press A to jump head first into the path of an unkillable bad guy when you meant to open a door but didn’t have the angle by less than a degree. I understand that you want to make your game as easy to pick up as possible but you create more complications than you solve. There are 36 basic button commands (after taking out the right stick for camera duties) and that is before you implement any combos so you have so little reason to just make one button do 50 things. 

8. Running & Crouching. 

I am not saying that all games should have auto run but in the majority of the games I have played I choose to run first and walk about 8% of the time as is probably the majority if you did a poll. So why make a character walk as standard and run on command, switch these around for god’s sake. As for crouching I really don’t mind what button you use it can be left button, right trigger, left thumb stick or any other button but if you are going to make me walk through countless air vents just auto crouch and save us both a few seconds (yes I am quibbling about seconds but I am allowed to its my blog). 

Okay that’s enough for controls more to come in part 3