I could alternately call this: How I Learned to Get Shot in the Face.
After playing Catherine for our last game, I had my wife pick out a title that our readers had recommended that I own. One suggestion that she saw was Left 4 Dead, the comment noted that it was fun to play with multiple people since one can protect another. Against my better judgement on this one, I agreed to give it a shot and we then had to choose which Left 4 Dead we were going to play. We decided on Left 4 Dead 2 (because I wanted to play as Ellis) and after an explanation that the game can be quite startling, we started it up.
This couldn't go wrong at all...
We started on “Dead Center” and sure enough, the questions immediately started flying. “Why are all these zombies here?” or “How did the survivors get together?”, questions that any Left 4 Dead veteran knows really don’t have answers. I had a little difficulty answering her question since I was providing quite a bit of cover fire for her as we ran from room to room. She was quite jumpy as we encountered the infected, many times shooting me and the 2 computer controlled characters as we came to assist her as well. After she went into a random room and ran right into a Boomer she immediately panicked, “Oh my gosh, there is a fat zombie after me!” she yelled as she tried to run back to me. Unfortunately, she ran in the wrong direction and while I ran up to try to melee the Boomer I warned her to not shoot it. Well, I started to at least. Sure enough, she shot the Boomer and was covered in bile, her panic became full-on video game hysteria as the infected horde descended upon her. As she began to fire wildly around and exclaim words like “Shitfuck” and “Help meeeeeee” she also began to fire her shotgun around trying to disperse the horde. Unfortunately, she wasn’t so much shooting the horde as she was emptying her ammo into back, when I turned to get out of the way it became my face, incapacitating me. As the rest of our team came back to help, she was incapacitated as well. “Noooooo, noooooo I’m dead!” was her reaction to that, I tried to explain she wasn’t and then in a second I would get her up and we could continue. I’m pretty sure that she was still firing into poor Ellis as I got her up, since I had once again taken some considerable damage. We got to the end of the hallway and started to make our way along the outside of the building when she knocked off by something (I think a normal zombie), I am not sure how but she fell to her death rather quickly and then tossed my controller onto the couch. “I am absolutely not playing this game anymore!”
She watched me play a little bit longer, jumping almost every time I encountered a special infected. She wasn’t a fan of any of them, most of all the Witches since their sobbing made her thing that there were little kids around. I assured her that there wasn’t and showed her the sobbing zombie. She asked me to make her stop crying as Rochelle ran up and fired at a zombie running by. As soon as the Witch had torn stupid Rochelle apart she immediately came after me. My wife kept telling me to stop her as I backpedaled and tried to shoot her. Didn’t work and I died quickly. My wife laughed and said “You must really suck at this game.”
Yup, my wife, the casual troll.
After a bit of playing I asked her what she thought, “The game seems ok, I guess. I mean it is really fucking scary and I won’t play it again.”. I guess that is good?