"Left4Dead" has - ever since it's release waaaay back in 2008 - been
one of my 'go-to games'; something I'd fire up and play a brief match
when I couldn't think of what else to play. It's maintained a place on
my hard-disk (multiple disks, actually, with all the upgrades) ever
since I first got the game. Even its sequel couldn't displace it. It's outlived pretty much every other game I own - even "Skyrim"! - in the longevity of its install.
Yet... it's been running through my head more and more over the past
year: maybe it's time to hit uninstall?
I mean, technically there's no reason for me to do so. I have
terabytes of disk space and the paltry 6GB that "Left4Dead" uses is
nothing compared to the vast emptiness that is most of my "gaming"
drive. A less obsessive person wouldn't even consider it; why not
leave it installed? It's doing no harm where it is.
But I am not that sort of person. My roots lie in the floppy-disk era,
when every kilobyte counted and if you didn't need it, you got rid of
it (floppy disks weren't cheap). Logic says 'keep it, who knows what
the future may hold', but my heart says, "it's using 6 billion bytes
that might be used for something else". Plus, the uninstall is a
satisfying conclusion to a game; a quiet agreement that I've seen what
the game has to offer, and - whether my experience was satisfactory or
not - it's the end-point of that experience. Maybe one day I'll return
to the game, but then it will be as a new adventure, seen through
different eyes focused through the lens of the intervening time.
And anyway, it's been maybe a year since last I played "Left4Dead".
Still, it's been there so long, even if I never play it again, it's
absence will be noted; it will be like how you toss that keepsake
that's sat on your shelf for years, the void where it once almost
becomes more noticeable than the gimcrack ever was. How long before I
stop seeing it missing from my "installed steam games" list, I wonder?
No, I'll keep it. It's not taking up any room I can't easily spare.
Or maybe I won't. There's no reason to do so if I'm not playing it,
and it's unnecessary clutter.
Round and round I go. I'll make a decision about it, one of these
days.
I need to fire up LFD and LFD2 so see if people are still playing it
on-line.
On Wed, 14 Sep 2022 22:02:40 -0600, PW
<iamnotusingonewithAgent@notinuse.com> wrote:
I need to fire up LFD and LFD2 so see if people are still playing it >>on-line.
At least the last few times I tried it with the original "Left4Dead"
(more than a year ago), there were still quite a few servers, but a
lot of the players seemed to be didn't seem very interested in playing
with randoms, instead pairing off with friends and going off on their
own. Which I suppose is understandable - especially since there often
was a language difference; it seems a lot of Russians were playing? -
but it was a far cry from the almost instinctive cooperation of the
game in its heyday. A lot of the servers were running the competitive
versus mode rather than the co-op mode I preferred. Which, again,
isn't really a problem if that's what people like, but it made the
game's online aspect a lot less appealing to me.
So I tended to stick with offline-vs-bots, which isn't the best way to
play the game but was better than the alternative. Anyway, I usually
was just in the mood for a quick match to kill some time, so it was
'good enough'.
(Playertracker shows there the average to be about 500 people active
in Sept 2022 for L4D1, and about 15,000 for L4D2. Not surprising since
the latter now includes all the maps of the former, but I enjoyed the >simpler, purer gameplay - with its fewer monsters and weapons - of the >original)
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