I'm replaying some parts that I didn't quite finish (like beating a campaign without dying), and trying out some of the weapons I never really used. The weapons are sadly few in type, but they are all good. The auto-shotgun is lots of fun. A pistol in each hand, which doesn't make much sense in real life, makes sense here. I'm getting better with grenades. I briefly read that in Left 4 Dead 2, there are melee weapons; that should be interesting. But L4D2 is still $19.99 in the steam store, so it can wait.
The campaign, such as it is, feels really disjointed, as if there were connections, but I didn't get to see them, like maybe I accidentally skipped the cut scene every time. Reading the wiki page, I can see that half the chapters in the campaign were add on DLCs, and there was a comic book that provided more backstory. For single player, just little more connecting material would have been nice, even if it was just something that let you play them all in order.
I would like a little more campaign, looked online, found "I Hate Mountains", trying that first. Nice site, ihatemountains.com; this seems like a mature product made by dedicated fans, which is always a good sign that you're not wasting your time. I follow their advice to enable console, rebuild sound cache, etc. Game seems stuck at end of sound cache rebuild; end task. Oh, its right there in the documentation, have a game running first. OK, but this time the game exits; documentation doesn't say one way or another how its supposed to exit.
(later)
"I Hate Mountains" is really quite good, not quite good enough to stand with the original campaigns, but its up there. The giveaway is that its cobbled together out of existing media (images, bits of voicework) from the originals, and doesn't contain anything unique to itself.
I haven't yet mentioned one of the coolest things about L4D and that's the return of friendly fire. This has been dumbed out of almost every game, and its great to see it back as a tactical consideration.
Off to l4dmaps.com to find some more campaigns. Looks like Mountains got a 94 rating, and happily I see several others in the 90s. Selecting "Night terror Fix". Should I rebuild sound cache everytime? I start the campaign and rebuild, again after a long wait it exits to desktop. Don't know if it accomplishes anything. The "Haunted House" level is really cute, a nice mix of childhood memories of Disney Land and something more current. In the "Moria" map - small spoiler - I didn't get the idea of holding the use key down long enough to activate the switch. They could have telegraphed this somehow, maybe by making the bucket starting to shake, or just not making it so obscure in the first place. It's kind of out of place.
(later)
Done with 'Night Terror". It was a cute bunch of maps, worth playing through once, but once you get all the jokes and surprises, there's nothing more to it.
