Looking back over the games of 2008 there were a couple of stand-outs with one sticking out like a sore thumb, or should I say a severed thumb. Left 4 Dead is fun to play in campaign mode with 3 buddies as you take on thousands of killer zombies or in versus mode where you can become one of the "boss" zombies and try to stop the survivors.On the surface it's a brainless (pun!) shooter but when you get into it you need to really think about your strategies in order to survive, especially when you start playing on the harder difficulty levels. You need to stick together as a group, or in pairs at the very least, as the tables can turn in a second as a Hunter can take you down and rip you to shreds in an instant.
Then when you get into a versus game and you play as the infected your strategy flips from survival to ambush. Again working as a team here really makes a difference. If you go off on your own the survivors can easily fend you off but if you team up with the 3 other infected players you can take out all 4 survivors in short order. One of my favourite tactics is to have a Boomer vomit on or explode all over all 4 survivors (the bile attracts the horde). Then while the horde is attacking the survivors the 3 other infected players can attack.
One of the best aspects of the game is that you're not a super-human shooting machine or a futuristic warrior that just powers through the opposition. You get a real sense of being in peril and can even die during campaigns (you're magically resurrected if time permits as another survivor trapped in a closet). Without your teammates you're not going to last long and you breath an actual sigh of relief when (if!) you escape at the end.L4D runs on a suped-up version of Valve's Source Engine and it runs really well. I was scooting along at high framerates at 1600x1200 with everything set to maximum but don't let that make you think it looks bad. While some of the textures are obviously low res the overall look of the game is dark and moody and in some places quite scary.
The screenshot here is of our little team of survivors posing in front of one of the many zombie movie fanboy references. This one is a lawnmower with lots of chopped up zombie bits as seen in Peter Jackson's Braindead... watch the click on YouTube if you have the stomach for it.
It seems as though I'm not the only one who thought L4D was a great game with the title winning more than 25 awards so far. Well done Valve, now how about some more maps?
While I'm talking games, I finally finished Fallout 3 over my Christmas break. Just over 40 hours of gameplay took me through so many environments, missions and landscapes in this crazily detailed post apocalpytic world that it's hard to believe it was all one game.I played it on my PC after struggling to decide which platform to use as it's primarily a first person shooter and I had a blast. It ran like a train at 1280x1024 (yes, I still use a 4:3 monitor) with pretty much everything bumped up to maximum.
The best thing about Fallout 3 is that it was set in a refreshingly different world to all the other games around at the moment. It also didn't take itself too seriously with plenty of little jokes here and there including a crashed UFO complete with dead LGM and alien laser pistol.
Fallout 3 was a well realised and highly polished game, especially considering what it might have turned out to be if it had been finished back in 2004. It loaded up amazingly fast although it did have a tendency to hang on my system.
The best thing about it was that I actually finished it. I spent easily twice that time in Oblivion (Bethesda's previous game) and was stuck trying to complete the main story line.
