Left 4 Dead 2: Guardin' Gnome

My XBox 360 is so new you could call it spankin'

It sits now on a bookshelf about 5 feet off the ground, sandwiched between a Tivo and a Wii. Those jealous neighbors are outclassed in every way: the storage capacity is twice that of the Tivo and an embarrassing 240 times that of the Wii; the graphics hardware makes every spare PC part in my closet cry in obsolescence; the GUI is breezy and the downloads are bountiful. Oh, and it's pretty.

I've had this big beautiful hunk of gaming hardware for one month and in that time I've already accumulated a gamer score exceeding 1600. You uninitiated might wonder what that means. Allow me, via the official XBOX.com description, to explain.

"The gamerscore is an aggregate number ... that shows how much experience and expertise a person has with Xbox games overall. Gamerscore is a progress-tracking system that is intended to motivate Xbox LIVE and non-LIVE members to play more games. ...Each achievement in a game provides a certain point value in gamerscore."

[Xbox.com]

The key word in all of that is "achievement." This innocuous sounding bit has, in one month, turned me into an addict. A whore. An achievement-seeking whore. The achievement element, which does not exist in Wii games, has added a fantasy-football-like wrinkle to my gaming habits. Even when I have no personal interest in a game I'll play it for days until I harvest as many points for my gamerscore as possible.

The achievement is the essence of cheap replay value. While the Wii has to have dense games, with fully developed characters and intriguing stories and a thousand little gameplay tweaks, the games on the XBOX can be hallow, take little more than an afternoon to complete, and then throw in a few MacGuffins to collect and tack on a timer and, voila!, achievements galore and playing time is extended by a factor of ten or more. Microsoft as much as admits this in the above paragraph when they tell us that "Gamerscore is... intended to motivate... members to play more games." And we knowingly eat it up. I knowingly eat it up.

With my first post it seems only proper to talk a little about my "grindingest" (*coined here) moment thus far as an XBOX owner: Guardin' Gnome, Left for Dead 2. The objective here, at the Dark Carnival, is to win a garden gnome from the shooting gallery game and carry it all the way to the helicopter rescue at the very end of the campaign. This means one person is essentially unarmed as you move through the last half of the campaign (though that person can throw the thing down to help out during an infected bumrush).

The rescue mission is more of an annoyance than a challenge, especially with help from human teammates. But when I decided that I needed to go for this one I had a couple others on the list as well that I wanted to knock out. Specifically, I was looking to accomplish 'Stache Whacker, Gong Show, Clownd, and Confederacy of Crunches in addition to the rescue of Gnome Chompski. Each of these, conveniently enough, could be accomplished on the same campaign. So that became the challenge: an achievement achievement: five all at once.

So I called upon friend koolkamel to be my gnome courier and set the difficulty down to easy to make sure that we could get through it all in one quick attempt. And that was how it went. This was my first time playing the game on easy and I was startled at just how easy Easy was. I think we lost a grand total of fifteen health in the first four chapters (a little more in the final battle) even with the gnome in tow.

• Gong Show was accomplished in a matter of seconds once I found an adrenaline shot.
• 'Stache Whacker, which involves playing a whack-a-mole minigame, took longer but was no less difficult since I didn't have to stop to help fend off the waves of zombies that would have on any other difficulty setting constantly interrupted me. On Easy the two computer players could have fended them off with a pair of frying pans. Their guts seemed to want to be spilled: the slightest blows tore zombie limbs from reanimated zombie corpses.
• Clownd, which asked me to honk the noses of 10 clowns, was just a matter of patience because whenever I spotted one of those noses I had precious little time to get to them before the computer players blew their dead clown heads from their dead clown shoulders.
• The use of melee weapons only, in order to accomplish Confederacy of Crunches, was little hinderance--as it would be on any other difficulty because every time you get knocked down you have to be sure not to fire the pistol accidentally--in fact, it made the grinding much more enjoyable. There is no sweeter sound than that of a machete slicing through the soft, decomposing flesh of zombies.

As for the main objective, Guardin' Gnome, it was no sweat. The most trouble we had was in keeping the gnome nearby during the final battle and making sure we grabbed it again before hopping on the rescue helicopter with watered-down Tanks in pursuit.

This challenge proved such little challenge that koolkamel was concentrating more on finding a clown to hit with a molotov so he could add a sixth achievement to the list (Fried Piper, he didn't get it though) and another friend was able to pop in at the last second to get Confederacy of Crunches and Guardin' Gnome added into his own gamerscore.

Next:

Obviously, this should be tried again on Normal difficulty and above. Doing it on easy was too easy. This would merit some serious kudos to accomplish on Advanced or Expert or simply by turning on Realism mode.


As for the next achievement in Left 4 Dead 2, I really want Bridge Over Trebeled Waters which asks you to finish the Bridge episode in 3 minutes or less. This is, I've decided, impossible with computer players because they can't keep up on the sprint to the chopper after you get off the bridge. So I'll need to coordinate a team of competent human players before this one comes off the board. And that, judging from what experience I have of most players that stumble into your game lobbies, is easier said than done.