Unofficial Vintage Game Club Zombie Survival League

Last night I had my first official outing with the Unofficial Vintage Game Club Zombie Survival League. I was accompanied by famed zombie dismantler Ben Abraham and my brother, with the questionable name: ripsh1t r0b0t.

I thought I would explicate a little about my experience and give a shout-out to Vintage Game Club and our modest Steam group.

This was my first experience with Steam so I was impressed with how easy it is to set up a chat room and invite your friends in, as well as how easy it is to invite them to an actual game. There’s an overlay that pops up while in-game letting you chat, visit people’s profiles, etc. The whole experience is smoother than X-box Live, in my opinion, though most of that may be using a mouse instead of a joystick.

I set the Left 4 Dead demo up on Expert because I’d been playing at that difficulty in the single-player portion, but the challenges seemed to scale higher with two other human players. Our first attempt we died in the alleyway outside of the apartment building under a flood of Infected. Our second attempt got further, but being the wuss that I am, I suggested lowering the difficulty a notch.

I noticed Ben doing something I hadn’t thought to do: jumping up on cars and other environmental high points to gain an advantage, which seemed clever, and my brother had the audacity to pistol whip the Witcher after being told not to by the game (edit: and Ben!). We made it through though, managing to defeat the Witcher and a Tank as well.

One feature of the game I really liked was the ability to “Take a Break”. If you need to stop playing for any reason the AI will take over in your place until you get back. Also, the game managed to freeze on me several times, but I could close and restart, then rejoin without interrupting the gameplay for others on my team.

Overall, the entire experience, Steam and L4D itself, was extremely smooth and I look forward to joining more of my VGC compatriots for runs over the months to come.