T w e n t y S i d e d

Left 4 Dumb, Part 21. It’s the beginning of the end, now.

I’ve realized that one of my great joys in writing is finding cracks in an existing plot and coming up with “clever” explanations to cover them. During DM of the Rings, I explained the seeming nonsense and inexplicable changes of the Lord of the Rings movies. In my book, I filled in plot holes in System Shock. A lot of my humor is based around finding gaps in someone else’s writing (real or contrived on my part) and then justifying it in unexpected ways. I really, really wanted to do that for Left 4 Dumb.

The one thing that prevented this was that I just couldn’t get screenshots using the in-game environments. I use Garry’s mod to set my scenes, but Left 4 Dead uses a newer version of the source engine and GM can’t load the levels. It was possible to get the character models out of the game, but I was still stuck using levels from Half Life 2 or Team Fortress or other Valve games.

What I wanted to do was to go through an existing campaign. This would have provided a familiar story arc to hang everything on, so that I didn’t have to waste panel space setting the stage. Like DM of the Rings, the story would have supported the comic instead of the other way around. This would have left me free to make fun of individual areas and set pieces. It also would have made for better screenshots, since I wouldn’t have been fighting to keep explicitly Half-Life themed scenery out of every other shot. (I never really thought about that aspect of Valve level design until now, but there are very few spaces in the game that don’t have Half-Life specific elements in them. Graffiti, combine infrastructure, posters, not to mention the stuff that would clash with L4D, like pseudo-Euro signs, buildings, and automobiles.)

Below is a bit of what I wanted to do. Note that this is just a synopsis, not a series of jokes. This won’t be funny, although maybe you’ll be able to see how it could have been funny. Maybe. I dunno. Read it and find out, I guess.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Left 4 Dumb: The Master Plan”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

A little over two years ago I talked about how gaming and exercise could be combined. At the time I was thinking you would need a big piece of exercise equipment to plug into your console. I still think it would be a good idea, and I’d personally still buy it, but now that I’ve tried WiiFit I see that combining the motion-driven action gameplay with the WiiFit board would be even more elegant. This week’s column at the Escapist is about that idea, and why I think it’s a winner.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.