Sure you do.
You’ve just arrived home, your brain is almost bursting from all you had to do at work/college/school, or your muscles are aching from that last run or walk to your house, and finally you’ve reached home sweet home.
It feels just right to rest a bit now, on your chair, with the screen at your front, the headset on your head, perhaps a snack or drink by your side. It’s almost or already night and it feels good to be a geek(or a simple videogamer if you don’t consider yourself that much yet).
You want to kill some zombies.
But you really are not in the mood for a complete and more than half an hour game. Perhaps you’ll only have fifteen or twenty minutes before your parents or yourself decide it’s time for dinner. Or perhaps you might just be a bit too tired to keep attention for that long.
So what do you do?
Let me show and tell you
First you launch Steam and the Left 4 Dead(or just click the L4D shortcut if you have and use such a thing), a skill which you should already master. Press enter twice to skip both the Valve screens and the introductory video, and wait a bit for the main menu to load.
So what now?
You see that? The option I have selected and highlighted with a crude MS Paint arrow? The one that says ‘Play Online’. Click it.
Go ahead, do it and then alt-tab back here.
Now:
You know this right? I suppose you must somehow. Just select your desired campaign or difficulty, like you always do if you have a taste for a certain escape. Now, calmly, don’t rush and press the usual ‘Find a Game Lobby’ option. Remember why you’re here, just to have a bit of simple fun.
Move your mouse to the option also highlighted by the MS Paint arrow and click it. We’re done, you’re going to play now, right?
Why am I telling you this?
Well, mainly it’s because of helping everyone make sure they might the right decision. The question might be more, ‘Why is this the right decision?’. And the answer to that? Well, it comes in two parts:
Why you should not join a lobby:
- You know probably you won’t be able to stay there the whole time, and usually when you join a lobby, people are counting on you for the whole game.
- The lobby might still take some time to fill. You might even decide it’s not worth the trouble midway through waiting.
- Leaving a game in the middle while nobody might resent you, is annoying to other players who now will lose some of that so human soul that makes L4D fun.
- You yourself have just played a bit of the beginning, not reaching any closure. It’s like foreplay with no climax.
- You’ll get that nagging feeling at the back at your mind that you left something unfinished.
Why you should join a ongoing game:
- You’ll join a team that might only have one or two persons, and as such cheer their game a bit.
- You’ll be truly welcomed, because no matter how good the survivor AI is, none of them replaces a (minimally) competent player.
- You’ll probably savor the finale.
- You’ll be a true survivor.
- And you might actually have a real history to tell, that might not begin in a particular point, but that really ends.
Of course this is both just my opinion and based on my experience. Sometimes this will throw you into a game just at the beginning, and sometimes you might end in a noob team in the expert difficulty. But mainly, this choice will both allow you and other players to have a better time, and to avoid moments of the team almost breaking up when you might lose the leader. Some of the best games I ever had were in this situation, and I never regretted such a choice, in fact, I’ve grown to prefer it over the usual one.
Just my two cents, game on anyway you like!
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