Like Rogue

I like the idea of proceduraly-generated content in games. Especially where that's the main focus the game is built around. Every room being completely different and having different monsters and items and such every time. Sounds exciting doesn't it? Each experience a little different from the last? So why are so many people who try to pay homage to those games so bad at it?

What I'm seeing in the games that say they're inspired by "Roguelike" games is unflattering and sloppy. Without fail, games like Spelunky and Binding of Isaac mistake giving the player nothing to work with as "challenge", or "difficulty". It's not challenging in BoI when there are dozens of treasure chests and treasure rooms I could use to upgrade my character to stand a better chance... but the game doesn't give me any keys to unlock them. It's not "difficult" when Spelunky makes it so I need bombs to progress when I don't have any. Or making you find treasure to get money to buy items, and then not putting in any shops, anywhere.

That's not challenge or difficulty. That's being a lazy, cheap-ass game designer.

I only got this far because the game was suddenly very generous with its' powerups early on. Luck should be a factor in a roguelike game, but it sucks the fun out of it when it's all about luck, and nothing I do to improve will have any say in what happens.

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Valve: "Sweat Box"

Valve tests Left 4 Dead to see how much you're sweating during play, as if that could be useful information in any context. Is this related to that Director stuff, where the game makes itself more difficult depending on how "stressed" you are(despite the fact that it has no way of knowing that unless you literally hook yourself up to it)?

Let's say they used this sweat information in their games, and it would alter itself depending on how much sweat you've accumulated. What if they're just playing on a hot day in a room without air-conditioning? What if they're playing in the winter? Instead of designing encounters around nebulous, unrelated bodily functions, why don't they base the in-game difficulty on how much health and ammo your team has? What else have they got planned? Will they patch the game so that it spawns a Smoker every time I really have to pee? How is this making their games better?

This is why Left 4 Dead sucks out loud. You can't make the game harder or easier depending on how stressed out you think I am. But you can use the same information I'm using to determine how stressed I should be. Things like Health, how many team-mates are still alive, how much distance I have to cover to get to the safe room, whether or not I have first or second-tier weapons, whether I have a lot of pipe bombs or molotov cocktails or none, etc.

You wouldn't believe how many times I was playing this game limping, on my last hit point, with only one team-mate left alive, both of us down to our pistols, and the game decided I wasn't "stressed" enough. So they put a Tank in front of the safe room.

These idiots are not seeing the forest for the trees.

END OF LINE

~A.H.

Left 4 Dead Fan Film

Enjoy it now, before Youtube is destroyed by a supremely greedy and retarded bill in the U.S.!

END OF LINE

~A.H.

Left 4k Dead

See, I've always thought the concept of Left 4 Dead was a solid one, it was just really, really, really badly handled by Valve. Thankfully, one of the guys behind Minecraft took the same concept, and made a much more harrowing experience out of it.

And it's 4k in size. Turns out all of the polygons in the world can't cover up the smell of shitty game design.

END OF LINE

~A.H.

Waluigi

Of all of the characters fans could have hacked into Super Smash Bros. Brawl, why HIM?

Okay, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. There was a nude patch out for the Boomer in Left 4 Dead before they made one for Zoey. I don't approve of either, but that's not the baffling part to me. I just have a hard time wrapping my head around the order they chose. How can people have priorities that stupid?

END OF LINE

~A.H.

Trends

I remember one time I was at a friend's house, and we played Halo 2 online. We joined a custom game where they were playing by rules they made up. It was called "Zombie". I don't know if it started there, or was carried over from a different game. It was based on honour rules. If you died by the enemy's hand, you had to manually switch over to the enemy's team, and now must face your former comrades. Like how after you've been bitten by a zombie, you become a part of the same mindless horde that took you down.

People liked this enough for it to be a built-in game mode in Perfect Dark Zero and Halo 3. No more having to go in and change teams by hand.

Then Gears of War 2 had the "Horde" mode, where victory is impossible and the only real goal is to see how long you can last against waves of increasingly dangerous opposition. The end is inevitable, the goal being to see how long you can cheat death. People liked this enough, so Left 4 Dead put in "Survival" mode, and Halo gave us "Firefight".

Then games like Dark Void gave us Jetpacks(although they were around during the Duke Nukem and Tribes times, they were out of vogue until recently.) We liked those, so now they're back apparently.