titusnowl | (no subject)

So I was playing L4D last night. If you're not familiar with the game it is basically a zombie movie in which you are one of the four main characters. (Well, there's a Vs. mode where you can be one of the zombies, but I've only played on Campaign mode.) There's a bunch of different kinds of zombies: your regular ones, who are the fast zombie type from movies like 28 Days Later (they're called The Infected, and it's one of those rabies-like infections), and who can be found all over the place and occasionally mass together into THE HORDE OMG and come to bite your teeth and face off, and some "Special Infected" who've been mutated by the infection. Your Smoker is a dude who's got, like, a 100-foot-long tongue (or maybe it's his intestines who knows) and he sticks it out and wraps it around you and drags you up to him and shit and your buddies have to break you free or he claws your shit up and makes you a pinata for all the other zombies. Your Boomer is a big fatty fat-fat who pukes all over and explodes into bile when you shoot him, and if you get any of his puke or bile on you, it's like a big COME EAT HERE -> sign for the horde. The Witch is an emo chick who just kind of sits in the corner and cries, but if you go up and go "awwww cheer up emo girl what's wrong" she stands up and chases you with blinding speed until she can rip you to shreds with her claws (one-hit incapacitation on the easy levels, one-hit kill in expert mode). The Tank is basically the Incredible Hulk and he throws cars at you and takes six years to kill. My personal favourite is the Hunter, who is totes a parkour chav dude who screeches like some kind of man/dog/mountain lion hybrid and pounces on you like a wildcat so he can rip tits. When a Hunter's on you you can't do shit-all, not even try to bop him with your pistols, you just have to lay there and take it like a man until either your fellow survivors drag him off of you or he feasts upon your rich red blood.

So yeah, the Hunter is typically kind of a bad news bear, but last night I was playing, and I heard the Hunter growling - they all make very distinctive noises so you can tell when one's around you - but I never heard him do his "IMA POUNCIN MAH LASERS" screech, so I didn't know wtf. We were lost in an attempt to get to the safehouse - how we got lost I don't know, we were in one of the more linear levels, but we managed it - and I was waiting in a doorway while my friends checked out a building to see if there were any goodies in it. I started getting hit by something, and I spun around thinking there was a zombie behind me trying to chew on my shoulder, but I didn't see anything. Still getting hit by something, so I kept spinning, and looked DOWN this time.

The fucking Hunter was sprawled out on the ground PAWING AT MY FEET. Like a kitten playing with my shoelaces or something. The Hunter's AI is supposed to be programmed so when he's in direct line of sight to a survivor he crouches and growls at you, and usually then it's SCREECH N POUNCE time, but this one looked up at me, made eye contact, growled a little bit, and then went right back to playing with my shoelaces.

I honestly felt kind of guilty about capping him, at that point. He was the cutest little infected I'd ever seen. I bet if I'd turned my flashlight on I could have had him pouncing at it all over the tarmac, like a cat chasing a laser pointer. CUTEST ZOMBIE EVAR