Things I Learned from "Left 4 Dead" and "Spiral Knights"

Today, I had to do something I rarely get to do. I had to play an online FPS, and an MMO. Okay, so the FPS wasn't technically online, as I was playing against people seated beside me, but it was with more people than if it was on a console, so it's a new experience. Kind of. See, to me, it played out far more like a generic match against bots for me.

Even though everyone was sitting beside me, we were in rows and our row was stupid enough to evenly space where our teammates are. There were six of us. Instead of having the left 3 as the Infected and the right 3 as the survivors, we decided to make the jolly decision to mix and match, meaning communication was difficult. Everyone mostly ended up playing alone. Oh, we tried to be teammates with one another, but it didn't work particularly well without communication. And no, yelling at each other couldn't have happened because we were in a room with 60+ other people, all of whom were also playing with their rows of 6.

We were playing at my university, for a school assignment. Sounds awesome, right? Well, it's certainly better than writing an essay. Unfortunately, being a console gamer, I'm not good with PC controls. I played terribly, although still better than the people who had never played an FPS before. At least I had a vague idea of the maps and controls, given that I'd played the game on the 360. You know what really sucks, though? Lag. I hate it, and since this is the university, we don't have computers that can handle dozens of zombies on the screen. So yeah, that sucked. At the 1.5 hour mark, we switched over to a game called Spiral Knights.

Spiral Knights was less interesting, although I believe my experience was darkened further by more lag. For whatever reason, my computer couldn't run the game smoothly with the lowest graphic settings, while the person beside me could run on default. Essentially, I wasn't even really playing the game. In the few sections where it didn't lag, the game wasn't all that fun. It was too easy, and I wasn't a fan of the combat system. I left about 20 minutes in, though, as I was bored and the lag was killer.

This was my night. What did I learn? I learned that lag is the worst thing in the world for PC gamers. And I also learned that console gaming skills are not particularly transferable when switching over to the PC.

Ciao,
Marter