I’m not very good at FPS games. Okay, that’s a little bit of an understatement. I suck out loud at FPS games. I’m a born-and-bred, dyed-in-the-wool JRPG player, which is just about as far from the FPS genre as you can get, particularly when you consider that my preferred style is turn-based. I don’t like having to make quick decisions, particularly when my on-screen proxy and his or her team can (and probably will) win or lose, live or die, as a result of those decisions. I prefer to, you know, sit down and take my time, consider the angles, and then press a button to execute my choice. Also, my aim is terrible.
I don’t know what made me decide it would be a good idea to pick up Left 4 Dead. Zombies… are tempting to me, of course. In fact, I think “I like zombies” was about as close as I could come to rationalizing my purchase to the friends of mine who are aware of my general gaming preferences. And, of course, there was the peer pressure. I’m an incredibly soft touch when it comes to buying new games; putting me into the “consumer whore” category wouldn’t be too big of a stretch (or, let’s be honest, any stretch at all). Working in a video game store doesn’t help, and neither does the fact that my coworkers not only know about this particular failing of mine, they actually delight in exploiting it. So yeah, I bought L4D. After staring at the cover all day and listening to the guys tell me I should really pick it up so I could play online with them, what else was I supposed to do?
Okay. So I’m sitting in front of my 360 playing Tales of Vesperia, a nice, safe, JRPG. It’s not turn-based, so I’m a little out of my comfort zone, but I think I can handle it. A message pops up on my screen, and when I go to see what it is, I find a game invite… to play L4D. Sure, I think. Sure, this is why I bought it, right? To play. To play with friends! I have friends, and they want to play L4D with me! Good. Fingers trembling, heart pounding, I switch the disc and accept the invite. Or, well, I try to. I’ve taken so long extricating myself from Vesperia that the invite has gone away.
I shoot a message back to my friend that I’m good to go, and while I’m waiting for a response, I decide to fire it up and try a little bit of single-player so that I can see what I’m up against. I start on the easiest difficulty setting, on the Blood Harvest campaign. I take a moment to acclimate myself to the new game setting and to figure out how, in general, things work, and then I creep forward as slowly as I can until I see a shambling figure in the distance. I stop dead in my tracks, draw a bead, and fire. A head shot! I can do this after all, I think, and continue at my snail’s pace through the trees, pausing and shooting every time shapes pop up. I actually don’t get very far before I receive my second invite, which I immediately plug in my headset and accept, confident that at least I’m not going to embarrass myself here.
My coworker friend (who I will call Steve, because that is in fact his name) is, like all of my coworkers, an aficionado of the FPS genre, so I know I’m going to be left in the dust here, but he has promised to take it easy on me. We choose our survivors—Steve takes Bill and I take Zoey—and head into Blood Harvest, the same campaign I was just fooling around with. We’re on normal difficulty this time around, but I figure as long as I keep my head down and follow his lead I should be okay. The first thing that happens as our round starts is that he grabs his equipment and tears off into the trees as I am fumbling with the volume control on my headset. This does not bode well. I extend a friendly reminder of my incompetence as I fix the problem and finally follow along. Things go pretty well from this point on; I’m not exactly Annie Oakley, but I think I pull my own weight, and I don’t shoot my teammates *too* often. By the time we make it through the entirety of Blood Harvest, I have shown up on the bottom of pretty much every stat list that they show (except damage taken…. I’m pretty high on those), but at least I survived, and yeah, it was pretty fun. As I say, I like zombies.
The next night, Steve again invites me to play L4D, and I cheerfully accept…. But this time, our difficulty level has been raised again—to Expert. Shit. Not wanting to seem like a killjoy, I gamely follow along as we start the Dead Air campaign. I die. A lot. I do, however, gradually start to get better, and even to the point where I think I’m actually an asset to my team, or at least not a hindrance. And you know what? I actually find myself having a lot of fun with this game, even though I’m still not very good at it. I’ve been playing off and on with various combinations of coworkers and friends, and even though we’ve still not made it through Dead Air on Expert (it’s that goddamn tank, he gets us EVERY TIME), I don’t regret my purchase one bit. I don’t think I’m going to exactly become an FPS convert or anything, but I guess it just goes to show that it’s not such a bad thing to expand one’s gaming horizons, even if it does mean you get your brains eaten from time to time.
