Left4Dead Week: The Befriendening

Left4Dead week will feature one short piece on Left4Dead each day this week to celebrate the full release of the game.

Several other bloggers, who shall remain nameless, are delaying playing Left4Dead until they can find some friends to play through with. The call for friends is pretty wide: if you've read any of these blogs, you'll see that they're asking for game tags in the comments post so that they can add their readers to their Steam or Xbox accounts.

I'd suggest that Left4Dead is best played with anonymous strangers. Not because griefing is fun, but because the game's cooperative mechanics brings out the best in people. You must keep everyone alive or you die. Horribly. And I've never had so many Steam friend requests as I have had with people I've played Left4Dead with.

(That's not to say I don't seem to end up taking the brunt of zombie abuse. I've yet to finish a 'movie' - a map sequence in Left4Dead parlance - without being killed between 6-10 seconds before rescue turns up. And everyone else getting away... for the greater good. If not achievements).