Left 4 Dead demo impressions

YEAH!

This game’s good! The demo’s been out for a couple of days and, despite a few issues concerning lag and the availability of dedicated servers, I’ve been having a blast shooting things with other people online. I won’t write much more – there are dozens of previews online, plus you can download the demo yourself and find out how you like it – but I’d like to briefly mention a thing or two.

The game is meant to be played cooperatively with other people. Forget those dumb bots. Also! Go for the advanced or expert difficulty to experience a relatively challenging levell of resistance from the mindless undead. Harder games are much more interesting, as tactics and co-op coordination really come into play.

The whole “Director” thing kind of reminds me of crazy Blast Processing-like marketing talk. In practice, you do notice differences from one game to the next. The AI controls the sound effects, music and visual effects to set the mood. It also rearranges the placement of health items and weapon caches and manages the flow of enemies. It works well (and by that I mean unobtrusively), if a bit cruelly sometimes, but doesn’t deserve its own special name.

Things absent from the demo  that I expect to find in the full version are: a) branching paths through the levels (the couple of levels on the demo were linear) and b) the ability to play as the Infected, which should be tons of fun.

I’m glad this game turned out well.

PS: I watched Ice Age 1 and 2 yesterday. They were fun! I stole the picture above from the second movie.

This and that and my birthday

Time for another one of those posts where I jump from one thing to the next, ranting about meaningless, mostly personal matters that don’t interest you. Broken down in categories for your reading convenience!

Full motion zombies!

FMV games: A sad chapter in the history of video games. The advent of the CD-ROM led not so much to improved graphics or sound, but to crappy and compressed full motion video and games so ridiculous that they can easily be included in most “worst of all time” lists. You know these kind of games, you used to play them back in the mid-90s and while thinking how awesome they were.

In any case, FMV games became synonymous with CD games in the early days of the medium and were known for shitty acting, lousy gameplay and money you could’ve instead spent on a quality SNES game. On consoles they were mostly rail shooters. On the PC side of things, FMV was used extensively in adventure games, up until the end of the decade and, in some cases, beyond.

An example from my own troubled childhood would be Black Dahlia for the PC, released I believe in ‘98, which came in 7 or 8 CDs. Can’t really remember. But stay away from it, unless you’re in the mood for some frustrating adventure game puzzles and a Dennis Hopper desperately in need for a career resurgence.

Note: NEC’s PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 was the exception to all this. Not only was the CD-ROM add-on put to good use most of the time, but many of those games wouldn’t have been as good in HUCard format. I also have a greater tolerance for 600MB used for a decent CD-quality soundtrack rather than choppy low-res cutscenes.

Sega CD and Sega 32X: An even sadder case. Sega CD was an add-on released for the Genesis (aka Mega-CD and Mega Drive, respectively, outside the US). It played shitty FMV games. Most of them were so laughably bad they were actually enjoyable. Some, such as Night Trap, became cult hits for reasons unknown. Others, such as Hideo Kojima’s Snatcher, were surprisingly good compared to the rest (altough the game was a port of the PC Engine version, and so not really made for Sega-CD).

The 32X was a mistake. It latched on top of your Genesis and let you play “32-bit” games. Erm, whatever. Most people decided to wait for the PlayStation/Saturn/N64 instead. Perhaps the most outrageous thing about this system were “Sega CD 32X” games, which required both add-ons to work.

Corpse Killer is one of those games. A remarkable product of this forgettable era of video games. Remarkable not because it’s good, which it probably isn’t, but because you shoot fucking zombies. From what little footage I’ve seen of the game – I haven’t played it yet – it looks as if the video is actually of higher quality than its contemporary FMV games, which unfortunately doesn’t say much.

This game seems to have that unmistakable low-budget-zombie-movie feel to it, which makes it all the more enjoyable to people like me. I expect a campy plot with outrageous characters and even more outrageous zombies. I don’t really care about the actual gameplay, so I shouldn’t be terribly disappointed.

I’ll let you know what I thought of it when I’m done playing it.

Mother 3! In English!

The team from Starmen.net have finally released their labour of love: an English translation of the much-anticipated but never-released-outside-Japan sequel to 1995’s Earthbound. That would be Mother 3. You can find the patch here and should really play this game.

I’ve been following the translation project closely for the past year or so and the work these people have put behind this is phenomenal. Surely enough, the first chapter of the game, which is all I’ve had time for yesterday, plays almost exactly like a professional localised version would. Minus the censorhip, of course.

I’m going back to Mother 3 now, but before I go, I feel like I should thank the team for their time and effort and congratulate them on their excellent work.

8bit killer

8bit killer is a freeware indie first person shooter. It can be described as a the love child of early Wolfenstein 3D clones and the collective unconscious of NES gamers. And if this dialectical process doesn’t result in the synthesis of awesome then I don’t know what does.

I translate – freely, since I don’t speak Spanish – from the homepage of creator Locomalito:

8bit killer is a first person shooter with the appearance of an 8-bit Nintendo game.

Textures of 32×32 pixels, palette of 64 colours and 1-bit sounds in a post-apocalyptic world dominated by a creature from space. The music has been created by the brilliant RushJet1. The story, characters and scenery have been inspired by movies such as Mad Max and Escape from L.A. and games such as Contra, Megaman, Bionic Commando, Metroid, Wolfenstein 3D and many others…

What’s remarkable about this game, apart from its beautifully retro graphics and energetic chiptune music, is the fact that, despite the nods to a whole lot of things from the 80s, it still manages to be a work of its own in the end. This is a tribute to retro games done right.

You can download the game here.