Valve's Double Entendre

Crash Course poster

Today's the big launch day of Valve's much an­tic­i­pated Left 4 Dead up­date in­clud­ing the two-level cam­paign Crash Course… sigh.

I re­ally won­der if Valve has a QA de­part­ment. It seems to break in one of three ways—ei­ther it silently launches a local server (de­spite lobby set­tings), puts the server you con­nect to into a live­lock re­quir­ing a man­ual restart, or makes each player con­nect to their own local IP. It's not an iso­lated prob­lem, with their fo­rums being full of com­plaints. It makes me yearn for the days when patches weren't forced down your throat by some crap like Steam.

It ac­tu­ally works in sin­gle-player, so I tried the new cam­paign there. It uses a Death Toll theme, look­ing a lot like the level where you start in the church. In what seems to be a stor­age area, you jump from room to room or walk down the al­leys con­nect­ing the rooms. Each level is un­in­ven­tive, look­ing like one big area in­stead of smaller ones that vary to keep it fresh. Every room and alley looks the same, just a ran­dom scat­ter­ing of boxes and cars.

Re­ally, there's not much to left say about Crash Course. Given how short it is and how un­fin­ished and mo­not­o­nous it looks, I can't imag­ine my­self play­ing it much in ver­sus. Much rather be play­ing Ab­solute Zero or Death Aboard. If ver­sus ac­tu­ally worked, that is.

Posted on September 29, 2009 in Crash Course, Left 4 Dead, Valve

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