{"id":42328,"date":"2018-03-31T19:52:28","date_gmt":"2018-03-31T23:52:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=42328"},"modified":"2018-03-31T19:52:28","modified_gmt":"2018-03-31T23:52:28","slug":"shamecast-left-4-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=42328","title":{"rendered":"Shamecast: Left 4 Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;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&#8217;m really frustrated with my moment-to-moment decisions while playing.<\/p>\n<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/XpgxvBC_idc\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=XpgxvBC_idc'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>See, even though it&#8217;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&#8217;s completely inappropriate behavior when you&#8217;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 <em>everyone always runs over to the ammo pile because why would you go anywhere else<\/em>? But of course Paul was just moving as felt naturally and wasn&#8217;t thinking, &#8220;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&#8221;. <\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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 <em>I couldn&#8217;t stop doing it<\/em>. <\/p>\n<p>I guess it didn&#8217;t hurt the stream, but I was really frustrated with myself for not being able to break old habits.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;ll see.<\/p>\n<p>In any case, I&#8217;m not sure if I&#8217;ll be able to stream this week. My sleep schedule is madness. I&#8217;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&#8217;m actually pretty confused and scatterbrained when this is going on<span class='snote' title='1'>Now that I think of it, maybe that explains why my concentration was so bad in L4D.<\/span>. It&#8217;s entirely possible that I&#8217;ll be sleeping during my normal stream time, and I&#8217;d hate to make plans and then stand you up later.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, thanks for showing up and hanging out. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;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&#8217;m really frustrated with my moment-to-moment decisions while playing. Link (YouTube) See, even though it&#8217;s been at least seven years since I played, I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notices"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42328","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=42328"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42331,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42328\/revisions\/42331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}