www.LenGoldenstein.com

OK, so maybe I suck at poker.  Didn’t mean to sound ranty in that last post but I was a bit frustrated.  Anyways, I’ve come to the conclusion that I feel I played it right and it’s a hand I would have won better than 4 out of 5 times.  Just happened to not be my night to win.  Sucks!

So I’ve been playing more Left 4 Dead because it’s a game that I can actually win at!  If you haven’t played it yet, it’s awesome so here is some gameplay footage I captured:

Trifecta of Terror: A smoker grabs me, pulls me off a ledge and then a flaming hunter jumps on me and tears me up.

Tank FAIL: The tankcan’t bust the steel door down and gets owned for his failure.

Rob sucks: Rob steps in front of my line of fire and goes down.  I try to help him up but I pay the price for his mis-step.

Closet standoff: Holed up in a closet fighting off an incoming horde of zombies.

Plane crash: Pretty awesome plane crashes…not that I think planes crashing are usually awesome but you get the idea.

I’m finally getting myself back in to PC gaming thanks to the poking, prodding and heckling of my co-workers.  The main catalyst was Left 4 Dead being released and everyone having fun playing it but me…  My nVidia GeForce 6800GS was showing its age of nearly 3 years and just wasn’t the big performer that it used to be.  After some research, I had my eye on a new eVGA GeForce 9800GTX+ for about $230.  I was about to buy it at Future Shop but the sales rep was a bit of a dick so I walked away instead.  Way to lose an easy sale, Future Shop.  Anyways, I found a decent second-hand GeForce 8800GT on www.usedwinnipeg.com for $80.  Pretty decent card at a pretty decent price.  I picked that up, popped it in and the gaming experience was incredible.  Graphics were sharp, detailed and the framerates were super-smooth.

The real story is how much fun Left 4 Dead is.  Although it’s somewhat of a typical shooting game, it has a fun twist that the focus is on cooperative play.  Not only is the focus on co-op but playing as a team is absolutely essential to completing the campaigns.  You and your team-mates of survivors need to fend of hordes of “infected” (aka: zombies) as they try to rush the group.  Not only will the zombies try to overwhelm in numbers, but special zombies will grab, pounce or just beat the living hell out of people who stray away.  It’s just really a fun game to accomplish goals as a team rather than the typical blow everything up kind of shooter.  Thanks to Left 4 Dead, my nights have become much longer and I think I hear zombies, witches and boomers when I’m not even at the computer.  This is definitely a game that anyone who enjoys an online action/strategy game should check out.

Go ahead and start by checking out a trailer:

If you like Left 4 Dead and want to play, my SteamID is CaptainLen