2008 Game of the Year, Day 3: The CG Awards
And on the third day Uncle Crispy created a winner, and he saw that it was good.
12/23/2008 6:14 PM | 2 Comments | Page 4 of 13
Scott Jones
Status: Coffee makes me feel 4-percent sexier.
Kyle Orland: No game evoked more raw emotion for me than this one, which is why it gets my top slot. Part of it was the excellent atmosphere created by the groaning zombies and the run-down locales (and the unseen Director), but most of it simply came from the people I was playing with.
L4D's multiplayer design, especially its Versus mode, finds a perfect balance between the every-man-for-himself twitchiness of most deathmatch games and the stick-together camaraderie of co-operative play without missing a beat. The future of team-based online multiplayer is right here.
Ryan Kuo: Valve's hippest, most self-aware game yet draws metaphors between gaming and acting, and suggests that the human relationships formed in multiplayer are simply a result of the developers' (and Director's) machinations. As such, the emotion I feel most often isn't camaraderie or desperation, but tragedy. Still, the level design -- naturalistic, slyly letting you find the way -- is Valve's best to date, and the Survivor/Infected dynamic in Versus mode feels timeless.
James Fudge: Others have highlighted how amazing and engaging the multiplayer is in
Left 4 Dead. While I agree wholeheartedly, what makes Valve's game so refreshing for me is the narrative conveyed through the action, character interactions and the creative way the AI is handled in the game. Your AI adversary is highly unpredictable, using the openness of the world to its advantage, cutting players off and overwhelming them at every turn. As fellow Survivors, the AI is helpful, provides audio cues to warn you of impending danger, does its best to help fend off the endless waves of Infected, and occasionally pulls your ass out of the fire. The story is, after all, about saving your bacon, and it's so full of emotion, desperation and survival that it is every bit as good as anything George A. Romero could imagine for the big screen -- or perhaps better.
Read on for First Place...
