On Left 4 Dead 2

Left 4 Dead 2 is a much more rounded, enjoyable, and downright fun offering than the original. There are several reasons why:

1. The Music
Reprising the main themes from L4D, but altering them to the flavour of each campaign gives the individual campaigns a unique identity, but retaining the core feel of the original game. The result is that each campaign is now more memorable and has a great sense of 'place'. Whereas L4D was your typical Dawn of the Dead affair, L4D2 creates a much deeper and more original character to its locales, not only making it stand apart from other video games, but from Zombie fiction in all media.
Also, the 'seams' between the different pieces of incidental music have been more effectively covered up this time around - the music no longer cuts from 'spooky' to 'frantic' and back again - it has far subtler gears in between; you can be clearing an area of common or garden infected, and when a few more turn up, or maybe a charger crashes the party and you start to feel things are turning against you and you've lost control - the music has already shifted through cues to reflect that mood without you even noticing, though now you're panicking, and there are frantic trumpet stabs and pounding drums to reflect that, and heighten the tension.
Also, there are more unique cues linked to locations and landmarks, which really helps the level design to stick in your memory - seeing a silhouetted ferris wheel behind a sign for Whispering Oaks Amusement Park, and hearing a gothic, jaunty circus theme near the beginning of Dark Carnival is a great example of the for-shadowing that Valve really excels at.

More later...

The Lyrics Of Video Games

Song writing is not easy.

It’s a process that usually feels most natural when it’s happening only at its basest level. I’ve written a fair few songs in my lifetime, and I’m not being modest when I say the majority of them are very bad. The reason is because when I was first writing songs, my instinct would be to pick up a guitar and strum some chords. Once they were sounding nice I’d improvise some lyrics and a melody and probably record a rough version on my laptop.

The next day I would listen to it again and usually be pretty disappointed. What happened? It sounded far better when I was writing it, and I didn’t set out to write a bad song. I know what songs I like to listen to, and I’m pretty sure I was trying to write something like those.. but it didn’t happen. It was a couple of years before I started to identify my mistakes.

The biggest mistake you can make in writing a song, is to write it back to front. If you pick up a guitar and start strumming chords or sit at the piano and start hitting keys you’ve already failed – the secret is to sit down and think about our song. What is it trying to say? What’s it about? The key is to work from the ground up - to start with the lyrics, and really work at them, because these are the most accessible part of your song to the average listener. You should allow those lyrics to inform the structure and sound of the song rather than sticking them on top, like so much filler. The most successful songs I’ve written have always begun with the lyrics. Sure - sometimes great song writing can happen by accident, and there are no hard and fast rules; That’s great – but you do have methods at your disposal which will allow you to reproduce those results more consistently.

I think some games makers sit down and hit the keys before they've really thought about what the core of their game concept is. "We're making GTA crossed with Left 4 Dead, with elements of The Sims!" That's fine (and actually now that I think about it I want someone to make that game) but you've built half of your game before you've even thought about what it's about. You haven't written the lyrics, you've just played some chords that were fun and now you're sticking the lyrics over the top (probably during a half hour cutscene). The difference is I can listen to my song in the morning and be disappointed and throw it away, but games are an enormous investment of time and money.

The most successful games I play seem to follow an approximation of the song writing formula, though some of them seem to be the latter happy accidents. Take Fallout 3 as an example – the core idea of this game seems to be the idea of the lone wanderer, travelling the wastes, and initially just surviving, but eventually becoming some kind of evangelical figure, an immortal legend changing the lives of all who cross her path. If I didn’t know better (having played Oblivion and knowing of the previous Fallout games) I would think this game could only have been designed from the ground up with this concept in mind. The way the RPG model encourages you to scavenge wastes for scrap you can sell on or use to repair your gear is perfectly designed – no tutorial in the game tells you to do this, it just happens naturally and is vital to progression in the game. The level of influence you have on the world, usually a point that grates on me in most games as unrealistic, fits your character correctly – everyone else is amazed by what you’ve achieved, word of your deeds travel the radio waves to all in the wasteland. The mechanics and the gameplay have been informed by the core concept - Bethesda didn’t build a game or an engine and then slap a story on top of it, they built it from the ground up.

The reason almost all video games based on films, for example, are so bad is because the developers build a platformer or an FPS or whatever is popular at the time and then try to shoehorn the theme in there – usually through poor quality cutscenes or voice acting. The game usually has little to do with the concept it’s building on. For an example of a license which has clearly followed the song writing method and worked, read Mitch Krpata’s review of Batman: Arkham Asylum or better yet, go and play it yourself. If more games could start at the core of the experience and build from there, we would have more wheat and less chaff, and possibly a broader spectrum of experiences to choose from.

But then again, making a video game is not easy.