Dirigible of Pain

So while I was preparing for another close combat scenario, Overlord Johnson of The Secret Lair and KJToo.com sent me a report on his own experiences with a selection of simulations. The report is concise and lacks his characteristic sarcasm, but I felt it was good enough to share with you, my crew.

You are instructed to read the following. The next set of close combat will be utilizing one of the following simulations. If you are not up to speed with the technology when the simulation is run, then you will be used for the live fire exercises later in the week. Enjoy the report!

Here’s my breakdown of KILLING FLOOR vs. LEFT 4 DEAD (1 and 2):

-TIME COMMITMENT-

You’re going to spend about an hour (minimum) to an hour and a half or
more running through a single L4D campaign, broken into five chapters,
each with its own map.

KILLING FLOOR like a classic multiplayer FPS, rotates through a map
list. The game is divided into 4 – 10 waves of zombie per map, with
time between waves to shop for more ammo and/or bigger guns. The time
between waves is defined as part of the difficulty; playing on
“Beginner”, you have 2 minutes to find the trader (she moves with each
new wave) and complete your shopping; playing on “Normal”, that time
drops to just one minute. Once a map is loaded, there is no additional
load time between waves. Play a Short game (four waves) will take
about 10 – 15 minutes per map.

-SOLO vs. MULTIPLAYER-

Both games are designed to be played primarily as co-op multiplayer,
but can be played solo as well. I can finish L4D campaigns solo on the
“Easy” setting without a problem; I’ve got about a 75-80% completion
percentage playing solo at “Normal” difficulty. I can run through
KILLING FLOOR maps (Short or Long) on the “Beginner” setting without
dying 90+% of the time; I have yet to complete even a Short, 4-wave
map on the “Normal” difficulty setting while running solo.

I’ve not yet played KILLING FLOOR multiplayer, but I’d like to. The
various classes/perks intrigue me, and I’d like to see how they work
together in cooperative gameplay.

-ENEMIES-

L4D has six zombie types: normal + 5 special (Boomer, Smoker, Hunter,
Tank and Witch); L4D2 adds 3 special zombies (Jockey, Spitter and
Charger), plus some uncommon zombies (Mudmen and Clowns, for
example).

KILLING FLOOR has about eight zombie types: Clots (your basic,
lumbering, grabbing variety) and a bunch of special types, including
Stalkers (they cloak), Crawlers (damned spider-zombie hybrids), acid-
spitting Bloats, Gorefasts, Sirens and a couple of others. The final
wave of each KF map starts with just The Patriach (father of all
zombies; he cloaks, has a machine gun and a rocket launcher, and
heals), but if you don’t take him down quickly he can spawn others.

The zombies in KILLING FLOOR always know where you are and are always
actively trying to get you. Then again, there may be as few as 18 of
them in a given wave, so they can’t afford to be standing around
leaning on a wall; if there’s a zombie alive somewhere on the map, it
is trying to kill you. In L4D, there are zombies EVERYWHERE, and a lot
of them are just standing around waiting for something to happen. This
means you have a lot of opportunity to blow a zombie away without it
ever attacking, but it also increases the chance that you’re going to
duck around a corner and bump into seventeen walking corpses. Based on
my experience, the average campaign game of L4D will feature between
1,500 and 3,000 zombie kills, or roughly 300 to 600 zombies per “map”.
KILLING FLOOR will (unless you tweak the settings; I believe you can
control the maximum number of zombies per wave) have anywhere from 18
- 36 zombies per wave, so even in a Long game you’ll be killing less
than 500 baddies.

-GAMEPLAY-

KILLING FLOOR is a straight-up FPS with zombies in it. There’s not a
whole lot of imagination going on: you’ve got big guns, some
explosives, and waves of zombies. The terrain isn’t as useful as it
should be (I can’t jump up on that woodpile and then onto the roof of
the barn? Why not?), but some of the maps are pretty cool nonetheless.
There is a whole door-welding element that I like, which allows you to
control the environment to a degree, preventing (or at least delaying)
zombies from entering an area through certain doors.KF also has a
“Perk” system that allows you to essentially choose a class and get
benefits (“Perks”, get it) based on the class. Each class/perk can be
levelled up by performing activities related to that class. Want to
get better perks from the “Sharpshooter” class? Headshot more zombies.

L4D doesn’t bother with classes; all benefits are derived through
superior firepower and player skill. The sole exception to this is the
addition of adrenaline shots in L4D2, which allows you to briefly run
and shoot much faster than normal. There’s nothing you can do to
control the environment in L4D, but the game does have far more
complex (and satisfying) terrain modeling, which makes you feel like
you’re playing in a much more open, three-dimensional world.

KILLING FLOOR is geared more toward the BATTLEFIELD 1942 crowd; while
L4D maxes out at four players in cooperative modes, I believe KILLING
FLOOR is good for eight players, possibly more. Both games have
competitive modes as well, but I haven’t played around with them
enough to render any kind of opinion or even accurate information.

Popularity: 42%

So Lady Vandermore and I have been playing Champions Online for just about six months now, and both of us enjoy it for much the same reasons.

• We don’t always get to play for long stretches of time.
• We don’t always get to play every day.
• We like being able to finish things when we do play.

I must note, that neither of us have played many MMOs since the days of EQ and Guild Wars. I enjoyed EQ for a while until the grind got to me, and Guild Wars was fun for the two of us until we had explored all that we could and then also lost our copious free time we used to enjoy. We are not MMO’ers in the normal sense.

We got interested in Champions Online for two reasons:

1. We have both played the Champions RPG and Hero System, and we enjoy them both. Though taking days to create a character is long behind us, we have fond memories of it.
2. When we played the Halloween events, it was free!

Since we are waiting for Star Wars: Old Republic to come out, Lady Vandermore thought it would be fun to have Champions Online as a filler game until is came out. It served that purpose well, until we started running out of content. Then we started to get a little tired of it as we had less and less to explore and more and more repetition. We nearly quit except for one reason: our role playing guild.

While the game was still mostly fun, it wasn’t pay every month fun for us. Then Lady Vandermore found our guild. It’s a roleplaying guild as I have mentioned earlier, and since we had already made up characters in our own heads for the characters that we were playing online, joining a roleplaying guild just made sense.

It’s not quite what I miss from tabletop roleplaying, but in some cases it is superior to them. It allows for an evening of roleplaying with the visuals that we always had in our heads (though it’s a little limited on the special effects) and also ends when we need it to, ready to pick up again when we have the time to jump online again.

They’ve recently added some more content, and I’ve explored that as well. It’s been fun to do, but since I have maxed out my level I don’t feel the need to do the quests in the game. In fact, I feel that I should save them in the hopes that they will open up the level cap. So I have a bunch of content waiting for me if I ever get bored with the roleplaying, and hunting down my nemesis in game (the one part of Champions Online that I am still actively pursuing).

It’s been a fun game, and I see us playing it for a while yet. When Star Wars: Old Republic comes out though, I don’t know that it will stay on our list of games to play. Unless of course, the roleplaying is just that darn good. Plus, how can you go wrong with a master villain like Dr. Destroyer who obviously takes after myself. He has such good taste in helms.

Popularity: 63%

So I recently picked up Borderlands. I know, I know, it’s been out for some time now. I’ve been playing Champions Online with Lady Vandermore of late, and while I have wanted to play Borderlands, I didn’t have anyone consistent to play it with and I wanted to play it with a full four players.

So when the latest weekend sale on Steam came out with it for half off, I went on a crusade to find those people. I was able to get three others from one of my face shooting gaming groups to go in on the four pack with me. So all told, it was about $19 each to get the game. Not bad for a nearly new game to share with three friends.

So one of the Overlords, Kris, from The Secret Lair and KJToo.com, and I were the first to fire it up. He had already been playing in single player, since he evidently has faster internet speeds than I do for the Steam downloads. We both jumped into a multiplayer game proceeded along the mini tutorial with the Claptrap robot leading us into town. I was playing the Tank character, and he was playing the Siren, iirc. We had just gotten into town and hadn’t even met the first human NPC yet, when I needed to sign off and do some things in the physical world.

Overall, the experience though brief, was so far shaping up very well. Getting the hang of moving and shooting wasn’t hard since I have played FPSes before. The trick was getting used to the reduced accuracy since I was level 1 and my guns sucked. That would change as I played more.

Later that afternoon, the other two players were able to play and all four of us got together for some good face shooting. Shooting bandits, usually mutated, and skags, creatures that look sort of like dogs with bark for skin, is what you start out doing. We didn’t get very far during our first two sessions, still getting used to the game. Our most recent session has unlocked the vehicles for our use, and those of course for me have become my weapon of choice, running over various mutants and skags.

We’re still playing, and I look forward to our next session. I recommend getting it if you have some friends to play it with, though the leveling and quests can quickly get out of sync if you have a player or two keep playing their group character as a single player. Since the leader of the party is the only one who can select the quests, and if they have already done the quest they can’t do it again, if they out level you and finish quests you haven’t gotten then you are out of luck. That’s so far the only real down side of the game that I have seen. I’d be cool to have more of a free-form leveling mechanic, or at least the ability to redo older quests if you have a character who hasn’t done them in the group.

The game is definitely for me and fits the minorly multiplayer online role playing game niche that I always crave. This game and Left 4 Dead feels really good to me, but Borderlands also fills my need for computer role playing game with a leveling mechanic. If any of my perceptions change, I’ll be sure to let you all know in a future post.

Popularity: 91%

Zombies, gotta love them.  They are a source of a near endless fount of pleasure and pain in the horror genre. From tacky B movies, to block buster hits…and of of course who can forget hours of running around in various video games blasting through hordes of the undead army with a 12 gauge shotgun of justice?  Left 4 Dead is one of those games, but it’s not for everyone. Let me elaborate, with perhaps a little bit of bias.

I’m one of the many who enjoy the zombie genre of gaming, I’ve waded my way through seas of the undead in games dating back to Doom to more recent titles such as Resident Evil 4 and Dead Rising. So of course I had to run out and buy, or actually in my case download from Steam, Left 4 Dead.

Now first off I would like to say that if you are looking for an epic game with a engrossing storyline and pivotal plot points then Left 4 Dead is not going to deliver for you, I’d suggest looking into Fallout 3 which my friend Vandermore has recently reviewed.  However, if you’re looking for a pulse pounding game that will have you bent over your keyboard gritting your teeth and furiously clicking away abusing your mouse, or gripping your Xbox 360 controller so tight that your knuckles turn white then look no further.

There’s no explanation, no reason for this outbreak, no in depth background to the four playable characters. In fact all the characters have the same basic qualities with nothing extra to offer other than flavor in looks and personality, but to me that is part of the charm.  And to be honest, the amusing little jabs the characters take at each other, and the random muttering they utter to themselves when the find weapons such as “Ooohh, this looks dangerous” makes up for the lack of story.

Now you’re probably reading this asking yourself why should I spend my hard earned money on this game, it sounds awful. Well I have just one thing to say, action. Pulse pounding, blood pressure raising, gonna need a change of shorts, action. Within the first five minutes of game I had dozens of zombies throwing themselves at me growling for my flesh, with me screaming a few choice words at my monitor and being damn thankful that I popped the extra money for a gaming mouse that could take the abuse that I’m about to put it through. And this where I actually believe that the lack of story actually helps this game, no dramatic story about how you are this lone gun man with this traumatic past trying to wrestle your demons and right the wrongs you’ve committed.  No, you’re just in Sh!t and you’re trying the best you can to get out alive…and save the other three that are with you along the way.

If you’re a fan of action or the zombie genre, this game is certainly for you. There are at least four hours of solid game play through it’s four scenarios, and of course the endless possibilities for online playing as well. My only complaint I have at this point is that four boards seem awfully short, and unless you are an action junkie or someone who just likes the gratifying splat of zombie goo, that’s really not offering much. But to be fair to Valve, I love this genre so much I’ve gone back and played each campaign twice and I find myself trying to unlock all of the achievements.  Knowing Valve however they will address this like they have with Team Fortress 2 and add new campaigns at a later date.

Though not for everyone, Left 4 Dead will deliver for the demographic it’s aiming for. And if you give this game a try you might find yourself sitting there yelling into your monitor at a zombie that just tried to take a bite out of your arse “How ’bout a face full of Shotgun instead!? BLAM!” I know I did, and yes thats a exact quote.

Popularity: 76%

So recently I have been playing Fallout 3. I have been hooked on the series since it’s unofficial progenitor, Wasteland (with Michael Stackpole – http://www.stormwolf.com – as one of it’s designers) caught my eye and stole my hours as a youth.

I’ve been a fan, but never actually finished Fallout, or Fallout 2. I dabbled in Fallout Tactics, but didn’t get much into it either. Fallout 3 though, it’s pretty much perfect for me. First person shooter, with the option to slow things down with V.A.T.S. when I feel the need, or just want to watch the cinematic glory of a something being blown apart by my combat shotgun, or stapled to a wall by my railroad gun. Exploration, the go anywhere, do anything, real life sort of feel, but with the option to fast travel if things start to get tedious humping around all over the place. Roleplaying, it’s there, better than most computer games that I have played, though still not anywhere near an actual role playing session, it is still definitely fun. I recommend buying up your Speech skill to get better options.

I usually play on the steam locomotive on my way in to the citadel. So I only have about an hour to play at a time, and with this time constraint, I am not feeling lost or that I can’t play it. You are able to save pretty much anywhere, and at any time. So things that take a while can be broken down into smaller chunks. However, when I have had hours at a time to play, just like in my youth, they dissipate into dust of the wasteland leaving me only memory, beautiful, blood soaked memory. I also like the “random” encounters. If they are random, I can’t tell, and that makes them awesome. The wasteland should be dangerous and fairly unpredictable, but once you get to know what to look for, you can handle it. The game does that well.

There are a few things that aren’t bad, but sometimes detract from the game. The biggest, is the computer cracking. I am not sure if the Science skill does anything with cracking computers, other than let you get into harder terminals. I think I have seen that the number of passwords you have to guess at goes down, but I am not sure. The thing that detracts, is that you have four guesses, but if you can’t get it in that, it locks you out, but if you log off before then, you get another four guesses. So I end up spending three cracking attempts, logging out, making three more. The character matching hints that it gives after each guess are slightly helpful, but sometimes when I do get the password, it seems like the hints that it was giving had nothing to do with the password at all. So before I detract from the game more by making this larger than the actual review, let me say that the cracking is optional for the most part, and it does not occur often enough to annoy. There, that’s that. I won’t talk about any other negatives, because frankly, I don’t have any others worth mentioning here. Sure there are some, but they pale in comparison to what the game does right.

The one thing I would really like to see in this game, and others like it, is what I call Limited MMO play. That’s where one person would host a server and up to, say, 32 to 64 people max, would be able to share the play in the world. I would love to play it multiplayer at the lan parties I hold.

While getting sustenance today, I spotted something, and that something fit so well into my hunger for all things Fallout, I had to get it. I don’t know if some marketing genius knew that Fallout 3 was going to be big, or if it was just a huge coincidence, but I don’t really care. I had to get it anyway. So I did.

It’s faintly orange pop flavored, not orange juice, but orange pop. It’s not bad at all, it’s actually a step up from the Red Bull and Diet Rockstar that I have had. It’s also 0 carb, or at least the version I got is. So if you want a drink that fits the theme while you play Fallout 3 to the wee hours of the morning, afternoon, or night, then check it out. It at least looks cool on your desk.

Popularity: 66%