Brains & JavaScript

We had a go at the Survival mode of Left 4 Dead last night. Matt told me there would be more zombies than we had bullets. He wasn't far off. After several tries, we attained the bronze medal for surviving four minutes of wave after wave after wave of the infected. The silver medal is awarded for seven minutes' survival which was a torturous sixty seconds away from our end result. I have no idea how long you have to survive to attain a gold medal; probably ten minutes.

We're getting better as a team; we cover one another more effectively and, for the most part, come to one-another's aid more often. However, we're also getting a little cocky. When there's no zerg rush or special infected lurking around, we tend to just meander about with lots of space between us, putting pistol rounds in regular infected that haven't noticed us yet.

Another problem comes from when someone has to leave the game and we get landed with an AI Louis or Zoey who insists on startling every witch, shooting every car, and stealing every first aid kit they find. Yelling at an NPC just isn't the same as being able to verbally complain to someone who understands you.

Most irritating of all though, it's the people you don't know but decide to play with anyway. Some insist you've played through each chapter on extreme or they'll leave you high and dry. Others just run ahead, shooting lone infected with their shotgun and not paying attention to their team mates or the smoker that has grappled someone. And finally, there is the guy who somehow gets bored and decides to shoot his team mates.

Most players are okay though. There will always be one who is too cocky or cowardly for his own good. The "Friends Only" lobby option is a godsend (as long as you have enough friends online).

As for this website I am working on, I may have to implement some JavaScript in order to get the image gallery working. That means learning a new scripting language. Well, I say learning but I'm not going to learn the whole thing. JavaScript is more complicated than the other website languages I'm used to; it looks and behaves a lot more like C++ rather than HTML or CSS.

I'm still not anywhere near as interested in learning new programming languages as I was in my first year of college. Back then I would have leapt at a challenge like getting to grips with JavaScript. I was very excited to learn C++ in college, but somewhere along the line I lost that fire and haven't gone back to programming since; I doubt I could even write a "Hello World" application in C++ any more. We'll see if I manage to retain anything I learn about JavaScript after this website is done.