Rookie of the Year: The Walking Dead

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The following is the third in a series of journal entries chronicling the author’s descent into next-gen gaming degeneracy — from getting his first television in years to trying to figure out why the @$@”$)@ you need two goddamn directional pads just to walk down a fucking hallway.

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I’m not sure what it says about me, but when I slaughter zombies with an automatic weapon…I laugh and I laugh and I laugh.

When I make communion with carnage, when I spread the gospel of gore, in Left 4 Dead 2, I laugh the kind of laughter you only ever laughed at sleepovers in grade school, a pure expression of unencumbered, un-inebriated joy you almost forget you ever felt.

I like annihilating the undead that much.

Unfortunately, as of this writing, I’m still a week away from having Internet at my new place, so I haven’t

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shared my joy with the gang on a Team Unwinnable game night just yet. (Nor have I had my rudimentary skills pulled apart by my more seasoned colleagues.)

[pullquote]And with every wave of walking dead, came a wave of unwavering laughter…[/pullquote]

But I did go on a co-op adventure with my buddy Geoff – the Arduino master – a weekend ago, and the two of us laid waste to what seemed like many hundreds of zombies, marveling in the many ways they could be maimed and massacred, popped and pummeled, slammed and ‘sploded.

And with every wave of walking dead, came a wave of unwavering laughter, so surprising that it made me laugh even more.

It helps that Left 4 Dead 2 has a great sense of humor. Geoff and I broke into a convenience store to retrieve bottles of Coke for a survivor who wouldn’t lend us a hand from within his impenetrable, makeshift fortress without some soda as payment.

But the funniest thing about Left 4 Dead 2? The sudden onrush of dozens of zombies, and you holding your finger down on the trigger to the pop-pop-pop of your machine gun, undead heads exploding, zombies clutching their legs or their sides, reacting to your bullets, riddling them with holes, in a frantic, fantastic melee without any real rhyme or reason.

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