I have been playing a bunch of Survival Mode on Left4Dead, and sucking at it a lot. That’s not entirely accurate, it’s more the groups I am with are not coming up with the Golden Strategy that we need, as well as the AI Director just going out of his way to make sure there are seven smokers all waiting in a nice orderly line across the map, eager to chain-pull me as far away from the others as humanly possible. Honestly, there is no more disruptive Special in Survival.
Hunters are a nuisance, but if you are staying close to each other that’s all they are, by themselves. Boomers are exactly how they are in the Farmhouse finale, something that blots up your screen for a few seconds, but the horde is coming anyhow, so there’s no real difference. Tanks are surprisingly easy to slap down, actually, because you can have three people jsut focus fire on them while the fourth eitehr shoots the tank as well, or autoshotguns the horde off the other three.
But smokers, man. They just come in and ruin your Christmas. About the three-minute mark, their Nokia push-to-talk network switches on, and they are all over the map, coordinating attacks and standing in clusters, so when one gets shot the other is there, tongue at the ready to keep you right where the first one dragged you. Reverse bukkake at its finest.
This is why I have been using a weapon I almost never use in Campaigns or Versus, the hunting rifle. I generally don’t like to snipe, except for the occasional AWP-whoring in Counterstrike. But it’s mandatory for at least one sniper to be in the group of four in Survival, and their role is to snipe the smokers and hunters as they stage their attacks, whenever possible.
Unless of course you have no long lines of sight, and then you are pretty much screwed anyhow because soon you will have tanks on you with no warning. For example, the Farmhouse. We got Gold (and then some) by setting up in the attic of the barn, with two people on one side of the hay bales and ammo dump, and two on the others. We never once had a problem with smokers, as they only came up the ladder in line-of-sight of at least three people. Hunters? not till later, they appear in the hole in the roof for easy dispatching as well. It was only until we had multiple tanks that we hit a problem. Well, less of a problem and more of a dying.
The other thing I have been doing is trying out the free weekend for City Of Heros, which I played for a while when it first came out. The game had several problems, but it still stands out as the smoothest MMO launch I have ever participated in. I’ll have some stuff about it soon, but so far it’s kinda fun to revisit the old characters.
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