{"id":2801,"date":"2009-03-31T08:58:50","date_gmt":"2009-03-31T12:58:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=2801"},"modified":"2009-03-31T08:58:50","modified_gmt":"2009-03-31T12:58:50","slug":"stolen-pixels-77-go-4-broke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=2801","title":{"rendered":"Stolen Pixels #77: Go 4 Broke"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s comic<\/a> is a about the developer commentaries on Left 4 Dead. That is, it is a commentary on the commentary. Making matters worse is that any comments you leave here will be commentary on the commentary on the commentary. Somewhere near the end of this hall of mirrors is a joke. I hope you are able to find it. <\/p>\n

Sadly, the comic isn’t nearly as funny as the process of making it this time. I fired up Left 4 Dead and started a single player game. Then I entered some cheats to allow myself to fly around the world and take pictures of the city. I was hovering at rooftop level and lining up a shot of the street. As I sat there debating how much of the sky I wanted in my shot and thinking about what angle would look best, my teammates suddenly appeared right on top of me. I saw them for just a moment before they fell out of frame and the yellow alarm icons appeared telling me to HELP LOUIS UP! HELP ZOEY UP! HELP BILL UP! <\/p>\n

I didn’t know it, but your companions will apparently teleport to your position if they can’t figure out how to navigate to you. They had joined me mid-air, and them plummeted to the pavement below. <\/p>\n

Another interesting note is that they never truly died, no matter how long I let them sit there. Normally a companion will perish from the game if you leave them incapacitated for too long, but there seems to be some special rules governing the behavior of the world in the first level. Special zombies and hoard rush events will not happen until you leave the roof area where you start the game, and it seems like the behavior of incapacitated survivors is changed as well. <\/p>\n

This means that I couldn’t get the yellow alert icons to disappear. I had to go online and find cheats to boot everyone else from the game to keep my teammates from teleporting to me and then skydiving to their deaths. It was annoying in a hilarious sort of way. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s comic is a about the developer commentaries on Left 4 Dead. That is, it is a commentary on the commentary. Making matters worse is that any comments you leave here will be commentary on the commentary on the commentary. Somewhere near the end of this hall of mirrors is a joke. I hope you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[166],"class_list":["post-2801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column","tag-left-4-dead"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2801"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2801\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}