Bay 12 Games Forum

Fascism only goes with nationalism because there's no other body it can represent. I don't think the pure definition of fascism automatically means nationalism. You can promote the ascension of the wealthy and the influential at the expense of others without some undying love for your country.

It's just that all fascists claim to be nationalists because they need nationalists to support their agenda. And nationalist values can promote a fascist point of view when it comes to other people.

Valve has that luxury with Portal 2 because they're publishing it. L4D and L4D2 both suffered from the "put it out naow" syndrome. In L4D's case, I believe it's because they wanted to move on with their deal with EA, and couldn't do it until they put L4D out. So they did. Sans two versus campaigns that should have been there from the start. ****. I still get pissed just thinking about it.

As for fun...fun is subjective. Some people find the Sims fun. Some people find Bejeweled fun. Some people find Solitaire with a lot of graphics fun. (Some people find DF fun.) Whether or not something is 'fun' isn't a good question...there is the internet and someone is always going to claim it's fun. The real question is "How fun and for whom is it fun?"

For example, a friend asked me if Arkham Asylum (on Steam at a discount this week) was 'fun.' I said yeah, sure, it's fun. How fun? About 15 hours worth of fun before it becomes repetitive and tedious, just like all games. It was a good experience to have, but not one that I would scream at people to run out and have. I'm so tired of one-shot experiences in gaming, and I'm tired of paying a premium $60 dollars for what amounts to a 20 hours movie experience. Screw that. I want to get games that will stay with me for a long time. So when I ask people if it's fun, what I mean is "is it really fun?" I've been through probably 10 games in the last month alone, and while all were fun on some level....I'm not playing any of them at the moment.

You really should have given it a try. Versus is totally different than campaign because of the human opponents. No more one hunter, one boomer, one smoker trying to hurt you....more like coordinated attacks where the front two get jumped by hunters, the smoker grabs the guy in the rear, and the boomer pukes on the middle guy and everyone else, and you're all ****ing dead. The fact you're playing levels you know is a blessing...because it's the only thing that saves you from getting pillaged by the other team.

Like I said, L4D versus is really, really intense. You know the whole "the director is going to get us?" Replace director with "the other team" and it turns out to be true. In versus, if you sit still, the other team will just respawn, hitting you every 45 seconds to one minute, whittling you down until people start dropping.

L4D versus has the intensity that the director tried for and failed to emulate completely. Planning your strat as the infected, hunting people down...that mad dash for the exit when you're the only one left....yeah. L4D versus was by far better than the campaign in almost every way. Just don't ever play it if you get easily frustrated...because you will get the **** frustrated out of you by the other team.

I've had epic 30 minute games where we literally had to fight tooth and nail against the other team just to pass a single section. I can't recommend it enough if you've never tried it. If Valve had supported L4D the way they had said, I would STILL be playing L4D versus today.

L4D versus may be some of the most intense FPS game play ever. Maybe it's the fact it's only 4 vs. 4....but the level of planning and coordination you need as the infected to dominate is pretty high. And against a good infected team, actually finishing as survivors is a white knuckle affair.

Sadly, that was only about 1 in 3 games, with the other two having a totally inept team playing against you, or rage quitters.

I still pine for some L4D versus occasionally. I really didn't like how worked up the game got me though....or how much you could start to HATE your own teammates when they failed to hold up their own end.

The director was really good at pushing you right to the brink of failure, but not actually killing you.

I dunno, once I played enough to understand the director, I was less than impressed. It's never been as complicated as Valve made it out to be. It's not even really a concise piece of code. It's a series of scripts and timers, that's all. At least in L4D anyways. Stay in one chunk too long, game checks your party status and difficulty level, spawns zombies. Pass a certain threshold, spawns zombies.

The real panic in L4D set in because people treated the AI director like a person. People would rush through levels afraid 'the director' would get them if they stood still too long. We eventually discovered that in campaigns, you can outlast anything the director throws at you if you take your time, and everyone stays alive. Once we did that, the game was significantly less tense...and levels took about 30 minutes longer.

Re-doing the same section for 2 hours isn't fun at all.

This is what eventually killed campaign for me. The normal difficulties weren't hard enough...and the higher difficulties resulted in redoing said section for 2 hours. I like a good challenge, but not even I had patience for that. Especially when it's your team, not you, that causes you to fail.

It would be interesting if, when you've maxed out, the military plans to nuke the whole city, and you have a few days to get to a defined exit point to "Win" the game. Sort of like DOOMRL. Or perhaps two modes, one where that happens and one where you just play on in perpetuity.

My biggest problem is zombie apocalypse survival games is that they're most fun at the beginning and in the middle...but then end always exposes the "what now?" problem.

I take it you're a bit younger then? Valve has a long history, and used to be considered an independent, underdog developer. They originally won over hardcore fans with CS because it was a barebones, purist FPS that did tactical combat before major companies put the graphical shine and glitz on it. Valve was like that pair of skater shoes that was really awesome, but you couldn't find in any of the major shoes stores. Playing Valve games meant you had some sort of real nerd cred.

They got a lot of fans with HL2, which gave people a thoughtful sci-fi story with their shooter.

Portal showed that Valve was capable of thinking in non-traditional ways and producing a fun, non-traditional game with unique features.

They got a ton of fans when they bought TF, revamped the **** out of it, re-released it as TF2 and have provided ridiculous levels of support for the game since. Seriously, I don't think ANY game has had the level of support and the amount of updates as TF2. And it's all been free.

They created Steam, which, based on your experience, you either love or hate. I love it, simply because when I'm ready, I can get newer games for far cheaper.

L4D was where the company started to change though I think. Their budgets went through the roof, their target market became everyone and major publishers finally started taking them seriously. They had to. Steam by then was going full blast and Valve couldn't be disregarded anymore. They had become players in the industry.

I had never even looked at Valve until L4D. So I had none of the fanboi-ism going in. I would BE a Valve fanboi today if they had supported L4D like they promised. When we asked "Is L4D going to be like TF2, and get supported and updated regularly" the response was "It sure is!"

My ass. And even the stuff they've done with L4D2 has amounted to paying for cinematic campaigns. Lying *** mother-****ers.

I do respect Valve for one reason though, their design. Parts of L4D aside, almost every Valve game does something unique with standard FPS mechanics. In Portal, the Portal gun. In TF2, the classes and all the various ways they allow you to bend or break the rules. In L4D, it was mainly the hunter and the dynamics of wall jumping. Very few people do that well; most do some kind of special effect or vision mode or something that only slightly changes game play. Valve tends to go into the mechanics of the thing and make a lot of changes, so you end up with a lot of variation within the same game.

I think that's on just about every mod user's wish list. Probably on a few mod maker's too. The scope of changes Toady makes though makes it hard to code something that predict his next insanity.

Oh I have a great love of religion and dogma and mysticism and all that. Mormons just run with a particular brand of crazy I can't get in to.