Games of the Year - Left 4 Dead 2

All opponents in computer games are basically zombies, with a greater or lesser degree of sophistication. Dan Pinchbeck sums this up quite nicely in a piece about behavioural programming. Trigens don't go into water voluntarily in Far Cry, and if they do go into water they die. So two simple instructions control their relationship with water. Am I in it? If so, die. Am I not in it? I will avoid going into it. This makes it harder to make zombies frightening in games, in my humble etcetera, because zombies are not that many animation points lower on the scale than most computer NPCs and quite a few people on XBox Live (I kid because I love). Most of the baddies in Borderlands and Torchlight, to take two recent mentions, behave much like zombies - they move in roughly a straight line towards the player and try to hit them. Other bad guys stand off and attack from a distance, but exception that proves etc.

Tom Chatfield, at a talk at the RSA last week, responded to a question about the role of games in developing artificial intelligence by pointing out that games which seem to have very sophisticated AIs are in fact often just very comprehensively playtested - the computer-controlled characters are ghost imprints. They don't think, they just do what players have done in their situation. Zombies don't really get even this level of challenge association, because once a zombie starts behaving tactically, it stops being a zombie.

In their native format, the slow movement and intractable desire for flesh that characterises movie zombies is frightening because it is so unlike the human characters, whose conversion into more zombies or kipple is therefore a high stake. It's harder to communicate that in an interactive medium, where slowness becomes a weakness to be exploited as much as a mood element - it may be coincidental that one of the only really frightening uses of slow, shambling zombies in games that I've encountered was in Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, where a combination of bad contact recognition, limited textures and genuine atmosphere (I fixate on V:TMB because it is at once one of the best and one of the worst games ever produced. But anyway). Nobody in a Living Dead film gets to run in a tight circle around zombies firing a shotgun into them. At least, not for very long.

Left 4 Dead, the first few times I played through it, actually was frightening, in part because the mass of zombies that blocked your vision if cornered felt authentically crushing but mainly because of the beautiful construction of the world. It's a Romero world, effectively - everything is abandoned, the signs of failed attempts by individuals to escape the plague or by the military to take a stand against it are scattered around, and the graffiti on the walls of the safe rooms are by turns amusing and saddening. Creating a living world is obviously one of the great immersive challenges of games, but Left 4 Dead deserves credit for creating a world that is very recently dead. I was actually a little disappointed when the world-building of the two games (and I should really be talking about the sequel here, also) started to draw a picture of defensible zones and CEDA (FEMA in an ill-fitting wig), or at least some sort of government, having its arse in gear. Collapses are more fun if they are total. Once the situation and the dialogue became familiar, though, it stopped being scary and started to be funny, which is not actually a bad curve for zombies (a little like corpses, a little like clowns).

But anyway. Zombies as enemies. What Turtle Rock Studios did to make them interesting, which was an act of considerable genius, was give its zombies more flexibility of movement than the human survivors. The survivors can. admittedly, manage door handles, but the zombies can climb and fall long distances without harm, which means that far more of the map is open to them than the survivors, and the humans have to labour under a queasy awareness that they are describing a linear path through a map their enemies can treat as largely open.

And what enemies. The detailing of the individual zombies in Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 is an impressive world-building nugget - the TSA employees in L4D's airport scenes are particularly delightful, but, really, this game is about the special infected, and the way two different kinds of team play are encouraged - the survivors watching each other's backs, and the zombie players looking for perfect ambush points, to apply their unique talents. I think the most love I have felt for another human being in a gaming environment may have ben for the chap who held in place just long enough for me to snag him with my tongue and pull him off the top of a rise. Not only was he fatally injured, but the first of his rescuers misjudged the depth of a jump and broke both legs, and the remaining two were easy prey. I felt so participatory - it was like voting in my first general election or similar.

And where Left 4 Dead 2 really outstrips its predecessor for me¹, what makes it an unboycottworthy² piece of content rather than an expansion pack, are the new special infected. In the first game, despite the many variations of angle, environment, response, the basic activity o the mouldering side of the game was always about the same. Try to blind as many of the survivors as possible using a boomer³, then take advantage of the confusion to leap on and immobilise any who can still see while a horde of undead redshirts pile onto them. If the boom is unsuccessful, have the hunters sell their lives as dearly and as quickly as possible, have the smoker stalk and harry and wait for the boomer to respawn. By adding new types of monster, Valve haven't made life easier for the either side, but they have introduced some forced variation into the gameplay (even if that often runs to "spit acid over fallen human" rather than "vomit zombie-attractant bile onto fallen human").

Left 4 Dead was the best multiplayer shooter experience I'd encountered up to that moment (well, at least since Alien versus Predator, but that's going back a very long way) and Left 4 Dead 2 took that over without straining. Compared to something like Killing Floor - itself by no means a terrible game - its minimalism, focus and sophistication don't so much shine out as emerge from the dark doorway behind you and eat your cheek off.


¹ Many have pointed to the presence of melee weapons as a major fun-enhancer to Left 4 Dead 2, and although laying a crowd of zombies low with a plangent guitar is indubitably a laugh-riot, it hasn't really changed the way I play. Essentially, given the choice in real life between a gun with unlimited ammunition and a cricket bat, I'd go for the gun.

² The Left 4 Dead 2 boycott was very much like the boycott of South Africa, except totally ineffectual and not aimed at ending apartheid. A group of enthusiasts undertook not to buy a game that had not at that point been released, as they felt it was being released before the original game had been fully supported with patches and downloadable content, and that if the original game were to be fully supported it would contain all the whizzy additions trailed in the sequel. Valve made noises about how keen they were to support the first game, explained why the second game was an improvement, declined to offer a discount to those who had expressed their refusal to buy the game when it was impossible to buy it should they decide to buy it. The founders and original leading lights of the boycott now profess embarrassment about how it turned out, but even that is a remarkably principled stand given that everyone else is embarrassed about every stage of the process.

³ It's really unlikely that you've made it this far without knowing, but Left 4 Dead's special Infected - the super zombies playable by humans - are the Boomer (a sort of Mr Creosote figure whose explosive emesis blinds players and attracts zombies), the Hunter (a ne'er-do-well in a hoodie who pounces on the unwary and pins them to the ground) and the Smoker, a wheezing, tumour-ridden warning to our youth with a long and sticky tongue. The sequel adds the Spitter, a disquietingly pigtailed acid projector, and the Jockey, whose general lack of utility (he grabs people's heads and tries to steer them away from the main group, and is both hard to attach and easy to remove) is balanced by the unalloyed joy of the havoc wreaked when inattention or chaos lead to a survivor being danced off a bridge.