At Ground Zero on Dead Island

My first brush with Dead Island was probably the way most gamers first saw it through the intensely gripping and heart wrenching trailer which seemed to carve into my soul. Never had a game trailer made me cry before Dead Island. It seemed that Dead Island was going to be a bit more than the your run of the mill zombie survival game but I wasn't going to hold my breath.

There are plenty of games out there within the zombie genre that always seemed to fall short of making me feel like an actual survivor of a zombie apocalypse. Left4Dead came close but, after a while, the horde of zombies coming begins to feel incredibly predictable and loses its fear factor. Not to mention that it's highly unlikely that one would find stockpiles of infinite ammo and guns just randomly laid about in a real zombie apocalypse. Left4Dead 2 fell even more short. In Dead Rising, it was all about the scavenging while skirting through mass numbers of frequently slow to respond mass zombies. It's hard to be afraid of something that moves at a snail pace and you can see from the start. You know what you're getting into when you start moving through a crowd of zombies. You've already steeled yourself to move. Dead Island, however, is different. It's chilling.

After the now familiar opening cutscene, you find yourself alone in a darkened hotel with peculiar sounds all around you during the tutorial. Immediately, you have a sense that you are very much alone and you are. The tutorial, like so many games, is single player only. Survive those few minutes and you will be rewarded with the company and solace of your friends. The game has an excellent built in constant VOIP. Normally, the lack of "push to talk" would be pretty irritating but, unless you have a friend with an ill configured mic, the uncensored vocals of your teammates can dramatically add to the mood of the game whether it be the hilarity of you and 3 of your friends collectively channelling their inner street thug to curb stomp a zombie or hearing a teammate get startled into a unabashed yelp of fear by something in the game.

Dead Island is creepy as hell. One would never imagine that a beautiful tropical island resort with its sunny skies could be creepy but it is. Dead Island does zombie survivor horror very well. Everyone knows that the best way to overcome a fear is to face it. This is the flaw with Left4Dead, its sequel, Killing Floor, and Dead Rising. You walk out, see the mass hordes of zombies and face your fears before venturing out. In Dead Island, the zombies are not generally out in the open except for in pockets on the road. Most of the time, you don't even see any right off the bat. After 36 hours as the Xian character, I've learned to chop off a leg of every dead body I see because you never know when one of them is going to rise up silently behind you and it doesn't take long to fall to zombies on Dead Island either. The resort may initially be good times for all but by once you reach the city, the game is just scary.

One of the common complaints about Dead Island is the lack of story driven plot. I find this humorous because the characters that we are all playing are zombie apocalypse survivors. We're not supposed to know what is going on and this adds a definite element to the game. Again, the built in VOIP adds to this effect by allowing players to freely comment on whatever story progression occurs. As we're listening to the fellow promising salvation to us on the radio, each one of us ends up discussing whether we even trust the guy. If the same thing were happening in reality, we would be most likely having that same discussion. When there are cut scenes involving our characters, I sometimes almost wish they weren't happening. Playing in first person allows a player to 'become" the character that they have chosen to play. A cutscene where one's character is behaving in a manner that we would find discordant with how we would personally respond tends to lessen the immersive experience. Thankfully, the cut scenes in Dead Island are infrequent, allowing the players to develop their own personalities for their chosen character through the constant interaction of players via VOIP.

Dead Island isn't perfect. In fact, there has been a couple bugs that Mike and I have experienced that would have normally caused us to stop playing the game entirely until a fix was released. For both of us, obscene crackling kept popping up throughout the introductory movie and persisted when actual game play began. Both Mike and I have Logitech headsets, which could be part of the issue, and turning off the Dolby 7.1 seemed to correct a great deal of the crackle issue. Normally, a sound issue like that would deter me from playing. I am autistic and that makes me pretty sensitive to noises like loud crackling. I experienced a similar problem with Serious Sam HD and it actually kept me from playing the game until they came up with a fix. Not so with Dead Island, I was involved enough to grit my teeth and wince during crackles simply to keep on playing.

The other normally fatal bug was when Mike's computer blue screened and the save file for his lvl 34 Sam B was irreparably corrupted. Normally, this would have been an instant kiss of death for the game. Putting over 36 hours into a game only to have all one's work into a character destroyed is pretty irritating. Both he and I have had that happen with games in the past and we simply stopped playing them out of spite. Again, not so with Dead Island. The game is simply that good. Dead Island does allow a player to create a character of a suitable level for whatever chapter they are on so the pain of this happening is somewhat lessoned but it's still rather harsh to lose all of one's work, especially the weapons and access to the various weapon mods.

There is, however, a significant glitch in Dead Island that can be used to help restore one's lost weapons. One can copy weapons by throwing them at the same time as dropping it. This creates an exact duplicate of the weapons, which can then be stored in a friend's Jin storage. This way, should the unthinkable happen, those awesome weapons that you found and modded can still be yours regardless of a corrupted save file. Hopefully, Techland fixes the issue with corrupted save files before they correct the weapon duplication bug. Be nice, Techland!!

If you're looking for a good zombie survival game that puts you at ground zero of a zombie apocalypse than Dead Island is your game. You're not going to find infinite guns and ammunition here. You're not going to create preposterous weaponry like the drill bucket in Dead Rising 2. You're going to be scavenging for food, drink, weapons, and ammunitions just to simply survive. You're going to be scared and that's just as it should be.

Elitism

I've been playing League of Legends a lot lately and, truth be told, it's because I don't want any repeats of what happened after I won the Gamespot tournament. It wasn't pretty back then and people do tend to learn from experience. So, you could pretty much say that I've been hiding out in a game that is pretty much fun except for the fact that if you are stuck with random trolls, you can look forward to a solid 45 minutes or more of non-stop harassment. Good times! Actually, it sucks. I would love League of Legends if I had the option to politely exit a match without risk of being penalized for being a human being who wants to play a game for fun and not be tortured for the next hour of my life.

Gamers play games for a variety of reasons but most would say that they are playing them to either escape any real life stresses or to simply have fun. What most of us would consider fun would be playing the game as it was meant to be played without being verbally and nonsensically berated by some jerk that you've never met in your life. It's actually worse though to be stuck with people that you presumed to have some sort of friendship with and end up being just as bad as the random troll. Then, you're stuck with them, long after deciding that they need to be removed from your friends list, for 45 minutes or more. Good times! No.

I was running League of Legends through Steam for a few days and a good number of friends asked me what my name was in it to add me. I thought that was cool. I do actually enjoy playing a variety of games with my friends and not just TF2. Let me say, it's been really utterly eye opening. Because I've come into the game late (it's been out for a few years), most of the people that I know are already at the maximum level. Some of these friends decided that, because I was a "noob", then it was proper for them to swoop in to "teach me" how to play LoL. Mind you, I've been gaming for 31 years now and I've never once needed anybody to teach me how to play a game in all those years. I prefer to dive in and blunder along until I figure it all out. I don't know if it's autism or if that's just simply the way I learn but prattling off a bunch of data to me is like me trying to learn something from what is essentially white noise. These friends, however, mean well and I respect them for that. They want to be helpful and that's cool.

Yet, not all of them are like that. There has been a few that, for some unknown reason, seemingly want to impress me. Like sticking me as a level 5 in a PVP match with two ranked level 30s only to be matched against three ranked level 30's and then I die...frequently. Then, they berate me for dying so much. It's not hard to comprehend that the difference between a level 5 and a level 30 is pretty sizable. It's not just a matter of experience with the game. In LoL, you have runes and masteries to improve your chosen champion, which slowly become available as you level. In that situation, I was like a soldier going out to fight a war with a squirt gun when everybody else had AK-47s. In matches against AI, it doesn't get any better with these sort either. Instead of pushing forward to take down the objectives of the match, they seem to be more interested in coming into the lane I'm working on to attempt to wipe out foes like I'm going to be impressed or spending most of their time simply jungling and ganking kills to raise their score with no deference at all towards the objectives. All it does is simply draw the match out to unreasonable lengths of time. I'd rather just win quickly then watch the game get slowly and inexorably unbalanced by that behavior. And god forbid I should remark on it because clearly they are more experienced than I at the game.

Experienced or not, dumb is just dumb and these people obviously have no clue who the hell I really am. If they did, they would know that I don't equate skill at a game as adding any value to any one. I measure people by their behavior and temperament. I prefer people who work together because that shows a consideration of others that "elitest gamers" frequently lack. In other words, I'd rather have 100 really great noobs at a game on my friends list than one elitest jerk. Friends lists are for friends. Why be friends with somebody who acts like a jerk to you or to others?

Friends are people who you admire for the qualities that you find value in. Adding somebody to a friends list just because they're good at a game and no other reason isn't adding a "friend". Especially if you would normally find their behavior annoying, irksome or just downright rude. I was pretty much called an elitist jerk today and yeah, maybe I am an elitist. My elitism isn't about skill or experience in any game. It's not about what they do for a living. It's about who they are inside to me. My elitism is for good people just as I would surround myself with in real life. If that makes me an elitist jerk then so be it.

A Golden Key

Oh yeah, guess who got what--BAM! Happy happy joy joy. Time to go bouncing around like a bunny about the house. I got my Valve All-Access Pass and in what has to be record Valve time. Thanks, Valve! You've restored my faith! <3