I am done with this game. I just can’t bring myself to play Left 4 Dead anymore.

Although there’s much I love about the console version of Left 4 Dead, the overall experience becomes tedious with its limited campaigns and success hinging on map memorization instead of the player’s skills.

The focus on map memorization is a problem, especially in a game where survival is meant to be improvisational and incidental to your situation. How are you supposed to feel danger when you know the map inside and out? You can get a good grasp of what to do and how to make it through by memorizing the map. With only four campaigns at your disposal, variety is very limited. Players only need to play the campaign a few times to grasp the few nuances in each map. You could raise the difficulty, but as anyone knows, raising the difficulty just means that the computer becomes practically invincible. Increased difficulty should present you with modified challenges, and not just by increasing the number of enemies, their health, and the damage they inflict.

Versus mode proves to be no better. Map knowledge is, once again, more important than any of my skills. At first, it feels like a great design decision to limit survivors’ ammo, weapons and abilities. But once you play as a survivor, you’ll start to notice that those design decisions bear limited consequences. Often, you’re concentrating more on running from start to finish than trying to keep tabs on your ammo. As an infected, your best bet is to memorize map locations with your teammates because the scenarios play out the same way every time. The maps don’t have much variety when it comes to how the survivors walk, so it’s rare that the survivors can surprise you.

The most agonizing aspect of versus mode is being on the losing team—it only takes a few minutes to know whether your team will lose the match. Faced with that knowledge, you’re forced to play a frustrating uphill battle for at least another hour as you watch your team fail again and again. On top of that, teams are often so unbalanced that you have no chance of having a close match if you’re assigned random teammates. You could theoretically solve that problem by only playing with friends, but who has seven friends online at the same time, who also want to play Left 4 Dead?

The newly released Survival Mode removes everything that is good about the game and reeks of last minute value adding. Once you pull the start handle, non-stop waves of zombies are flung at you. You have lots of equipment surrounding you, which provides you with the option of setting up a defense. You often don’t live longer than three minutes, so why bother wasting your time? There is no safe place to hide like in the other modes. Teamwork has been left behind as well—most of the time, you’re left to fend for yourself.

That being said, Left 4 Dead does bring interesting new features to the genre. Not many first person shooters feature a limited arsenal to create a tense atmosphere. The presentation is flawless in recreating a b-horror film. I love the posters because it makes me feel like I am actually participating in one of those films; and I love bonding with my friends over the end credit statistics. The bot players are some of the best bots to ever assist you. Their help is magnetically at your side. They have amazing aim and always run to your side when you need it. They pick you up when you’re down and heal you when you’re hurt. They’re the next best thing to a Nintendog.

I played Left 4 Dead enough that those features no longer matter, and once that happened it became another first person shooter. It reminds me of some of the first games that I played in the genre, such as Quake 3 Arena, Counterstrike, and Unreal Tournament. Once you get past their unique features, they all boiled down to the same experience. In the beginning, you’re a shooting target; and only playing hundreds of hours on a single map will improve your chances of surviving a little longer. Eventually, you reach a point where you can finally kill somebody out of skill instead of luck. I stopped playing when the game asked me to spend hundreds of hours memorizing maps to reach the next competitive level.

I don’t want my complaints about Left 4 Dead to sound like the product of a sore loser. I truly believe that there’s a balance missing from this game. Play shouldn’t depend on memorizing prime map locations. These games should be about incidental learning, like finding a great sniper point by chance. There should be a dynamic between you, your teammates, and the game.

Newer games strive to balance this game play. For example, the variety of weapons in Gears of War 2 change the dynamic of the game even if you’ve played the map before. Gears of War 2 also offers a ghost camera for a dead teammate to assist. You start rooting for your teammate instead of berating them. Left 4 Dead leads you to beat yourself up for being a detriment because being down a team member means losing.

I don’t think the new zombie mode in Call of Duty: World At War is going to win any awards, but some of the features make it more exciting than Left 4 Dead. You feel the thrill of the zombies breaking into your shelter. You and your teammates are united in the front because, instead of concentrating on running and gunning, you’re individually tasked to keep the undead from breaking into your stationary stronghold. In Left 4 Dead, zombies are like blades of grass you mow down with your guns, while Call of Duty: World At War forces you to take aim at your zombie assailants to bring them down; it’s a subtle difference that makes a larger, fearful impact.

I’m left wondering why this game is so popular when it’s so frustrating to play. I have long since snapped out of the game’s reality after playing rounds and rounds of versus matches. I was deluded to think that this game was different. Once the novelty of the experience wears off, it’s no better and no different than the hundreds of other first person shooters before it. I’m not interested in this kind of frustration intruding on my video games. Like a Hunter who misses his target, the game never has a chance to survive its mistakes.

N.B. This review is based on the Xbox 360 version of the game. While the PC version isn’t exempt from the same issues, easily available modifications to the game greatly changes how the game is played and ultimately enjoyed, a luxury not easily available in console games.

Image by SlushyMan

In 1989, I became the proud owner of the Japanese version of Super Mario Brothers 3. I remember it very vividly; it was a creamy mustard yellow Famicom cartridge. It came in the typical card-like box of Japanese games. I became the talk of my class. “How did you get it?” “Can I come over and play it?” “Is it AWESOME?”

Yes, it was a great moment that kicked me into an obsession with video games.

It was only the second time I had been to Hong Kong; the first time I was only six and it was all a bit hazy. This time, I had just turned nine. Hong Kong had become a bustling shopping mecca. I was also able to spend more time to see the sites and experience a culture far different from the Midwest. One day, in one of the giant super stores that sold everything, I laid my eyes on a red and white dream machine: the Nintendo Family Computer.

Having only vaguely heard of this machine through tiny articles in the backs of video game magazines, it was a special moment. I became a quivering mass of excitement. I knew I HAD to have the machine. I barely even opened my mouth before I heard the words shoot out from my mother’s lips, “No way we’re getting one of those.” For the whole month I stayed in Hong Kong, I agonized over the machine. My face obviously read, “I want a Famicom and I will die if I don’t get one.” Nothing had ever empassioned me like this.

It was one day before we were flying home. As I sat down for one of my favorite snacks, a friend of my mother’s popped by to say hello, whilst carrying a mysterious package. as if I had a thousand candies. I calmly asked about the mysterious package. “None of your business!” “Just kidding, you can take a look.” I could swear a light had shone in from the ceiling right onto the shiny white box. It was as I had suspected; I had my very own Famicom.

I knew I would be the kid everybody wanted to hang out with because I had the system nobody else had. I owned Super Mario Brothers 3 before most journalists had even played it. When it was prominently featured in The Wizard, everybody wanted to play it. They wanted to see the level that was featured at the end.

I had preempted The Wizard. The fame was palpable—it was as if the choir was singing for me. For that school year, I was The Wizard.

In case you need a refresher, here’s the grand finale of The Wizard.