Joewintergreen

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Posts posted by Joewintergreen

  4. Posted

    I have had bad housemates, but usually not to particularly comedic effect. Last shared place I lived in, I shared with a 30 year old couple who did a decent job when I checked the place out of appearing to have their shit together, but the guy whose room I moved into had been doing the cleaning, and without him the place fell into incredibly disgusting disrepair. My room was an oasis in a desert of incredibly potent B.O.,  mould and decaying food smells. You couldn't walk without your shoes making that sticky noise, and when I went to clean the bathtub I found a Starburst Rattlesnake caked onto the outside of it, near the rim, covered in dust and dead bugs. I guess I'll never know how that happens

  7. Posted

    Yeah, Hard Rain is an amazing campaign and the saving grace of L4D2 for me. When the game was new I played online with a few guys from a forum and we all had to yell into our mics to be heard over the rain when it would get heavy, which was just an absolutely amazing thing. 

     

    I totally agree about the boomer bile! What the hell is the point of that? It's like a molotov, but only ever useful against the tank, and only sometimes, because sometimes the infected don't show up. Or, it's a pipe bomb, but it doesn't explode. Literally just a worse version of either of the original throwables.

     

    3 hours ago, Problem Machine said:

    It felt like a sequel made by ambitious people who had only a loose grasp on what the strengths and weaknesses of the first game were

     

    I think you hit it on the head there - I'm not completely sure how true this is, but I suspect that, more or less, L4D1 is Turtle Rock's game and L4D2 is Valve's riff on it, and Turtle Rock's is better. There's presumably a reason the one company has never been perma-absorbed into the other.

  9. Posted

    For me, mechanics-wise, it's kind of like TF2 at launch vs TF2 now - it feels like originally it's this tight, well-crafted, finely-honed thing that I really really enjoy, and then as they add more stuff it gets looser and looser. Mechanics individually (at first) and then emergent situations (in an ongoing way) are less able to be intuitively read. There's more weird things to keep track of, edge cases, exceptions to rules, and for me it results in consistently less of a good time. I have the same issue with XCOM 2 vs 1. 


    With L4D specifically, it's also a matter of tone and atmosphere - L4D1 isn't a scary game in that you're playing with your friends so you can't really do scary that way (just try co-op System Shock 2) but it is a tense and foreboding and atmospheric one, whereas L4D2 is for the most part this happy-go-lucky crazy zombie gore and weird situations thing. It's going for something different, more Dawn of the Dead 2004 than L4D1's 28 Days Later, and I'm not into it.

     

    Also, as a level designer, I basically think the level design and environment art in 2 are worse almost all the way 'round. A lot of it is the brighter, flatter lighting and textures and heavy fog - they cut themselves out of being able to use a lot of cool guidance tricks L4D1 had. Different teams though, I think?

  12. Posted

    I had a thought about the Woodsmen: the only two things you hear 'em say are that rad water/well verse, which I guess I assume is being spoken through these dead men by Judy or whatever evil force, and "gotta light?" on loop, which is probably less in character for a mysterious evil force. These dudes having died in a fire it occurred to me that maybe it was a gas-related incident and "gotta light?" was the last thing any of 'em said before lighting up and accidentally killin' 'em all. I think this is a cool if unimportant idea. I haven't read Secret History yet though so maybe it goes into more detail about that incident.

  15. Posted

    3 hours ago, Frohike said:

    Some puzzling phrases when Cooper talks to Jeffries:

     

    "--Philip?

     

    --Please be specific

     

    --The date: February 23, 1989"

    Jeffries skips the acknowledgement and gets straight to business. It's implied that he just needs a date to send Cooper into. It seems like Jeffries can use the same "tech" that the Fireman uses to send people anywhere at any time. I'm actually starting to wonder whether Jeffries "finding" Judy was just a lie; when BadCoop finished his conversation with Jeffries and asked about Judy he was told that he had just met Judy.  I think most viewers assumed this meant the woman who opened the door.  I think it was the entity behind the door: Jeffries himself.

     

    "There may be... someone. Did you ask me this?"

     

    This might imply that someone else had come to him with a similar request to go back to that night. Who could this be? Is Audrey traveling in the same space as Agent Cooper, maybe lurking behind the walls as she usually did. What did she contribute to the dream of that timeline?

    Little correction: Jeffries says "you've already met Judy" not "you just met Judy" so nothing to indicate it's that woman.

     

    Also, for whatever reason I interpreted "Phillip" "Please be specific" "date" as Phillip wanting Coop to be specific as to what version of Jeffries he wanted to talk to, and Coop specified Phillip Jeffries as of that date. Your interpretation seems more likely, my brain was just leaping all over the place during those episodes. What a crazy ride.