I’m a bit torn on this stream. On one hand, it was amazing to return to this game after so many years. This game is a joy. On the other hand, I’m really frustrated with my moment-to-moment decisions while playing.
See, even though it’s been at least seven years since I played, I still have huge parts of the game memorized. I spent a lot of the stream running on muscle memory and auto-pilot. The thing is, that’s completely inappropriate behavior when you’re playing with a newbie and a couple of bots. You can see this in the subway when I get separated from the group. I run over to the ammo pile because everyone always runs over to the ammo pile because why would you go anywhere else? But of course Paul was just moving as felt naturally and wasn’t thinking, “we need to sprint to the next subway car because this tunnel makes us really vulnerable to ambushes and we need to get away from the witch”.
So then a wave of zombies showed up, and instead of running back to the group like I should have, I backed into a corner like you would in a normal game. I sat there for a second, seriously expecting the rest of the group to pile in around me. By the time I realized that this expectation made no sense, it was too late and we were all swarmed.
Now, in this instance it worked out. I died and we got to show off that part of the game and how death worked. But I kept behaving like that the entire stream. The moment I stopped actively thinking about it, I reverted to the usual behavior and resumed sprinting through levels, only to turn around and realize I’d ditched the team. Again. The whole point of playing with Paul was to take a sightseeing tour through the levels and point out the interesting details, and my constant pushing ran directly counter to that. And I couldn’t stop doing it.
I guess it didn’t hurt the stream, but I was really frustrated with myself for not being able to break old habits.
Also, the game feels very different compared to what I remember. Tanks go down in seconds. Witches seem incredibly rare. Waves of zombies seem rare. We hardly ever faced more than one special infected at a time. Maybe I’m remembering the higher difficulty levels, but I seem to remember Tanks being an ordeal even on normal. Maybe the game has been patched? I dunno.
Anyway. It was still a good time, despite me constantly playing in a way that undermined what I was trying to do. Maybe I just need to give it another try. But Paul also suggested Factorio multiplayer, and that might be fun too. We’ll see.
In any case, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to stream this week. My sleep schedule is madness. I’m living on a 26 hour schedule and sleeping 6 hours a night. This happens to me sometimes. It seems like it would be nice having the extra hours of productivity, but I’m actually pretty confused and scatterbrained when this is going onNow that I think of it, maybe that explains why my concentration was so bad in L4D.. It’s entirely possible that I’ll be sleeping during my normal stream time, and I’d hate to make plans and then stand you up later.
Anyway, thanks for showing up and hanging out.
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.
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