Left 4 Dead 2 DLC - The Passing - campaign mode review

As I've written elsewhere, I love Left 4 Dead and its sequel - balls-out co-op zombie carnage.  L4D2's first chunk of DLC, The Passing (subtitled "Nobody survives forever"), has just been released for download (560 Microsoft points), a package I'd been looking forward to since it was originally announced.  The USP of this release is that it unites the survivors of the first game with those of the second. Except for one. Yes, the 'passing' of the title refers to the death of one of the original band of survivors.  At least I think it does - I suppose it could refer to the two groups passing, or the passing of the L4D flame between the two groups. Hell, I don't know - it's just an interpretation! I'll not give a spoiler to who the dead survivor is, other than to say that I guessed right at which one it was going to be...

Ellis, Rochelle, Coach & Nick look apprehensive, wondering who will be sacrificed as a ploy to flog DLC for L4D3

However, it is not the death of a L4D survivor that is the story that plays out in the campaign - that will happen in a future L4D slice of DLC (and, possibly, a digital comic). Rather, this is a 3-chapter vignette that covers what happened to Coach, Nick, Ellis and Rochelle  between the end of the  Dead Center campaign from L4D2  (where they flee a shopping mall in a NASCAR) and the start of Dark Carnival (where they kill zombie clowns - the worst type of clowns).  During this period they meet up - or pass, if you will - the original survivors, now reduced to a trio, who then provide cover for you in the evac chapter.

I've blogged about  L4D2 before and enjoy the campaign mode a lot. What the player gets with The Passing is more of the same, other than the difficulty. As I'd said even  before my L4D2 review, is a very hard game and that is part of what makes it so enjoyably satisfying upon completing a chapter. Many's the occasion where I've limped towards the evac vehicle, health dangerously low, with infected snapping at my stumbling heels.  The feeling of exhilaration on finally getting into the car/boat/copter or whatever and the credits starting to roll, particularly after a series of failures, is one of the best feelings in gaming this generation. That feeling is missing from The Passing, as it is not very challenging at all.


In previous campaigns - The Parish, I'm looking at you - I've sometimes spent as long on the evac chapter as I have on the rest of the campaign put together.  On The Passing, we completed the evac level on the first attempt with no-one even getting incapped, let alone killed, even though we made a few mistakes along the way (it is a petrol can collecting level and there was lone wolfing at times) .  In previous campaigns, that standard of play would have taken the team out early on - this time we weren't punished.  I was disappointed with this lack of challenge because without that challenge, it's just not L4D to me.  I was also surprised - I don't think it could have been intentional dumbing down (like, to skip to another series, Super Paper Mario on the Wii), as this DLC package is only of interest to those that liked the, bloody hard,  parent game.  Weird.


There are a few minor gameplay tweaks in the package - an extra melee weapon (a golf club), a new gun (M60), the obvious extra achievements and, probably the most major tweak as far as the campaign is concerned, an extra uncommon infected, the 'fallen survivor'.  This latter addition, as the name suggests, is a survivor that has succumbed to the zombie plague and, unlike all other infected, when they see you they run in the opposite direction.  They also drop items - health packs, molotovs etc - if you manage to catch up and kill them.  Again.


I'm not a big fan of the other game modes in L4D2.  Playing as a special infected (spawn, get killed quickly, wait, spawn, get killed quickly, wait) isn't my idea of fun.  I did try the new mode included in the DLC, 'Mutation', which, as I understand it, is intended to be a regularly updated  mash-up of other L4D2 game modes.  When I played it was a mixture of 'Realism' and 'Versus'.  I didn't find it much fun but if you like either it may be for you.


All in all I found this quite a disappointing slice of DLC, certainly when compared to the DLC from the first game, which I really enjoyed.  It also didn't compare favourably to the recently released 'Desperate Escape' DLC for Resident Evil 5, which I thought was excellent (and will blog about soon).

Retro corner - Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (Gamecube)

I received Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door as a Christmas present shortly after  it was first  released some years ago.  I completed it at the time and thought it was one of the best games I'd played in years.  Engaging characters and locations, excellent graphics and spot-on gameplay, coupled with a genuinely funny script.

Such is the speed of the  progression of games technology, games that were thought ground-breaking when released, or of having eye-popping graphics, a few years later can play like the Burnley back four and look like Shane MacGowan after a night on the town.  I think videogames' speed of change is unique in popular culture - it took years before people realised the Charlie Chaplin's films were dreadful, for example  - and there's always the risk, when returning to an old favourite, that it's not actually that good.  I loved Gran Turismo on PS1 when it was released (an engagement present from my wife!) and the graphics blew me away; going back to it today is like someone has thrown grit into your eyes.

I've recently played through Paper Mario TTYD again, this time in tandem with my daughter, and there was no such problem as it had stood the test of time very well, both with the graphics (which look better, to me, than those in the Wii update, Super Paper Mario) and in gameplay (similarly, better than the update).

Paper Mario TTYD is an RPG with turn-based battles, itself a follow up to the N64 game Paper Mario (and kind-of a progression from  Super Mario RPG on SNES).  It also shares a lot in common with the 3 Mario & Luigi games on GBA and DS.  RPG staples such as amassing experience/levelling up, equipping status-altering items (known as 'badges' in the game), wandering monsters and accumulating party members are all present but with none of the po-facedness often present in RPGs.

Mario finds out the hard way that Peach is a Twilight fan

The 'Paper' of the title refers to Mario's (and everyone else in the gameworld) status as, well, 2D paper characters in a 3D world (appropriate, given Mario's 2D origins, I suppose).  As the game progresses, Mario gains powers (or 'curses', as they are referred to), to utilise  his 2D shape to turn into, among other things,  a paper dart, a tube and a boat.  Each curse allows Mario to reach previously inaccessible areas.  Additionally, as the game goes on, Mario collects a motley band of characters to join his party, each with unique powers (only one fights alongside Mario at any one time though) that need to be used to solve puzzles and also to access new areas.

It probably won't come as a surprise to read that the story revolves around Princess Peach being kidnapped.  Not by Bowser though - the big bad this time around is called Lord Crump, who has an army of X-Nauts but, to be honest, if you read that as 'Bowser' and 'army of Koopas', you would have a good idea of their role in the story. Bowser does appear, sometimes as a (giant) playable character,  as a kind of comic relief.  And 'comic' is the right word to use - as I said above, Paper Mario TTYD is genuinely, laugh out loud, funny.  Whoever did the translation from the Japanese original did an excellent job.

Rogueport - you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.  No, wait a second - that's somewhere else

The game is a bit of a slow starter - there's far more 'Press 'A' to continue' than active gameplay in the first hour or so - as the storyline is laid before the player.  This revolves around the Thousand-Year Door of the title and how it imprisons a demon who, a thousand years ago,  despoiled Rogueport, the town that acts as the game's hub.  Lord Crump wants to open it and Mario, aided by his band, wants to keep the demon locked up.  This being a Mario game, this involves  collecting stars, with both sides trying to get  the seven available.

Both my  playthroughs took around 48 hours - this is a long game - but is well worth the effort.  As I said in my introduction, this time around I played it with my daughter (following up our play through of the N64 Paper Mario on Wii Virtual Console) and she thoroughly enjoyed it, often badgering me to play it with her (on occasion, waking me up to do so). After initially being upset - there were tears -  that Paper Mario TTYD had different party members than its predecessor, she quickly became engrossed in the story and in the new characters.  Like any Mario game though, don't be put off by the cartoon visuals - it is not an easy game - and a young child would have difficulty in playing it solo (I did all the battling).

It didn't sell many copies back in the day - an RPG on a not particularly successful console isn't going to set any sales records in Europe - but it is reasonably simple to pick up a copy on eBay, usually for around £20.  As with all Gamecube games, it can be played on the Wii and is easily better than 95% of all games released on that console to date (and I'm being charitable to the Wii with that proportion).  After all, what would you rather spend £20 on - Paper Mario TTYD or Just Dance?

No, Iceland - we said send us your CASH

I've always quite liked Lava levels in games - Mario's had a few, in platformers and karts, as has Crash and Ratchet & Clank. They can have lovely, intricate lighting effects and an attention-focussing 'imminent death-ness' about them.

Lava and, particularly,  ash, in the real world, however, royally suck.  This weekend I was due to fly to Belfast for a Gaming Weekend with a friend. I think I've said before that, as good as Xbox Live multiplayer is, it is no substitute for trash-talking, junkfood-eating local multiplayer.  In the olden days, local multiplayer (aka playing with your mates after school) was the only way to play videogames with friends.  These days (the 'new-den days', as my daughter calls them) Xbox Live multiplayer is undoubtedly more convenient  and my opportunities for the local variety, other than with my daughter (and smack-talking a 7-year old would probably be considered bad form) are few and far between.

So, this weekend, after weeks of planning,  we were all set up - 

The best laid plans........

Only problem - an Icelandic volcano that hadn't erupted for two hundred years. All flights grounded in UK airspace and my bags resolutely left standing in my hall. I blame Bowser - he was always a fan of lava.  Arrgh.

A packed bag, never to be used.  Can you feel the pathos?

So, we had to resort to Xbox Live and the Splinter Cell Conviction co-op missions, where we learnt that I truly suck at stealth games.

Back from the Dead

Yes! My Xbox 360 has been returned by Microsoft.

It took under three weeks - not bad considering the Easter weekend fell in the middle of that period. The console has the same serial number as before but the whole thing smells of 'new', is pretty much dust-free (not the condition that it was in beforehand) and I've had to reintroduce my controllers to it, so I wonder if Microsoft have had a rummage around its innards and replaced some of them.   Last time it failed, I was given a different console (new to me, if not necessarily new).  As long as it works now (and for a long time to come) I don't really mind.

And I exchanged gamer tags with the UPS delivery driver - given the number of 360s he must collect, his Friend List must be full of his parcel pick-ups!

ZX Spectrum travel card holder!

My Oyster (touch-in - touch-out London Transport payment system) card holder fell apart a couple of weeks ago and I found the ideal replacement, pictured below, in the adverts at the back of Retro Gamer magazine.  Transport for the 21st Century (though that is a bit of a stretch for parts of the Tube network), delivered by technology from the 1980s!

Available through www.retrogt.com.

Feel the power of its 3.5Mhz processor

For all your small plastic card holding needs

Red Ring of Disaster

My Xbox has bought the Red Ring of Death farm.  Again.

I purchased an Elite on the day of release in August 2007, to go with my new HDTV delivered two days before (at the time, the Elite was the only model with an HDMI port).  It first RRoD-ed in April 2008, having choked on Call of Duty Modern Warfare (I had a similar feeling - I'm not a fan of the series).  Just before I bought my 360, Microsoft extended the 360's warranty to  3 years for a 3 red light failure (still only 1 year on anything else that drops off the clown car that is the 360).  Had MS not made that move, I would be well outside my warranty period.

Off to Frankfurt in a cunningly disguised Amazon box - my 360

Back when it failed last time, the repair process, from pick up to return,  took about 4 weeks to complete but Microsoft said 2-3 weeks this time (and the UPS driver that picked it up - and he should know - reckons they generally take only a week).  One bright side of that first failure was that I turned to Resident Evil 4 on GameCube, one of the best games I've ever played.  This time around, I've started playing God of War III on PS3, a reply of  Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door on GC (via Wii) and the SNES classic Super Mario Kart on Wii Virtual Console - great games, all.

I don't want to turn this in to a whine against Microsoft (though I fear it will head off down that path), as the internet  is full of those and slagging off the 360's build quality in particular.  I love my 360 - I think it is the best console I've ever owned, with some of the best games I've ever played and certainly the best controller I've ever used - and I think we are currently in what will be looked back on as a golden age of gaming (I also have love for my  PS3, Wii and DS too; PSP, not so much).

The sad, empty, space where my 360 used to be.  I dusted specially.

However, the failure rate of the 360 is abysmal - I know of people that are on their fifth console - and what is worse  is that it is still an issue nearly five years after it was released.  You could possibly excuse Microsoft for the initial failures (if you were being very charitable - it was launched in 2005, not 1975 and QA is reasonably good these days) but Microsoft's own failure to eliminate this problem is lamentable.  The failure rate has undoubtedly declined a lot from the launch models but I don't think that, after this time, any failure rate over a low single figure percent is acceptable for mature hardware.  Even Sir Clive Sinclair (hallowed be his name) managed a lower failure rate on his Sinclair computers.  In some years, anyway.  Possibly.....

When I was growing up in the seventies, televisions were famously unreliable - my family had several that malfunctioned in interesting ways (shrinking the picture down to the size of a postage stamp being my favourite).  Over time (and, frankly,  thanks to increased Japanese imports), televisions became more reliable and I can't now remember the last time one died on me.  Televisions are complicated machines but their failure rate is acceptable.  I see no reason for consoles, which have been around in one form or another since the seventies, should be any different.   One thing's for sure - whenever Microsoft prepares the successor to the 360, it needs to zero in on getting build quality right from day one.