Great Moments in Soloing Multiplayer Games
As I’ve mentioned before several times, I love watching people solo multiplayer games without bots, especially Left 4 Dead 2. There’s nothing more badass than taking on hundreds of max-difficulty enemies without even the developer-expected teammates backing you up, and some godly players take it a step further and restrict themselves to melee-only or pacifist runs or even invisible special infected with no HUD. But for this article, I just wanted to highlight some of the coolest moments in specific runs that I’ve watched, moments that really highlight how quickly a truly good player can react to a sudden threat and still come out on top. Or, in other cases, how unbelievably lucky they can get.
1. Titsonabullsteam survives getting pinned by a Hunter. When soloing Left 4 Dead 2 on realism expert solo, incapacitating specials are even more dangerous than Tanks. There’s nobody around to rescue you, so getting pinned is normally an instant death sentence. But during the finale of Swamp Fever, Titsonabullsteam received a helping hand from an unlikely source:
Not to be outdone, the Tank proceeds to murder a Charger roughly a minute later, and the next tank saves Tits by severing a Smoker tongue at 8:30. Thanks Tanks!
2. Tromboncino plugs a long-range headshot while tased. I’m not sure whether to call this one luck or skill, but either way Tromboncino was counting his lucky stars after a Taser managed to snipe him from across the room while he had his Bronco out. The Bronco revolver has only 6 shots and the tasing effect demolishes your aim, but Tromboncino nevertheless manages to land a hit, disrupting the tase and letting him escape.
This particular run is also amazing because he doesn’t bring a Medic bag; no healing for the duration of the heist!
3. Zoralink47 qualifies for the zombie olympics. While running through the second map of popular Left 4 Dead 2 custom campaign Suicide Blitz 2, Zoralink47 ignites the bowline that will free a boat, plugging a hole in a ruined bridge that will allow him to cross the canal. While backtracking to find a decent holdout spot, he encounters a horde of commons coming at him in a spacious chokepoint, one of the worst places to fight a horde. How does he get past them?
By being amazing, that’s how.
4. Don Cholo beats the final wave without restocking on ammo. Don Cholo discovered a bug with the Killing Floor 2 custom map ‘Stalker Agroprom’ in the middle of his Hell On Earth solo run; the arrows don’t show up between waves letting you know where the trader pod has spawned. Worse yet, he was a Demolitionist, a perk not even remotely known for ammo conservation. As Wave 4/4 began, he had only 2 pipes in his M79, 7 rockets in his RPG, his 9mm side pistol, no body armor and a single grenade. Not exactly a comfortable position to deal with the upcoming wave of over 70 zeds with multiple Fleshpounds and Scrakes.
Nevertheless, he manages to pull it off, relying heavily on environmental hazards, melee attacks, and his 9mm pistol.
5. hkl4dplayer survives 13 Tanks during his run of Hard Rain. This run of Hard Rain is my personal favorite of all the solo runs I’ve ever watched. I still don’t understand what the AI Director was smoking, but it felt like every time HK turned a corner there’d be another tank blocking his path, meaning that he was constantly on the run from tanks, commons, and special infected all at the same time. His reflexes are nothing short of extraordinary; he severs a Smoker tongue out of the air with a Fire Axe, strafes Witches (remember, this is Hard Rain where you can encounter up to a dozen Witches in a single map), and beats a Tank to death with his melee weapon after running out of ammo during the finale. But the best moment, in my opinion, is at the end of Map 2, where he has to press a button to summon an elevator (and a horde) with two Tanks hot on his heels:
Of course, there’s another tank waiting for him in the gas station! But really, you should watch the entire run. One of the highest-octane games of Left 4 Dead 2 I have ever witnessed.
6. Shadu of PCI Gaming takes on a quartet of Specials in a dead end. I wasn’t sure whether to include this one, just because the PCI Gaming speedruns (and those of their competitor Game Center) are a whole different beast from the straight runs seen in all these other videos. They have several exploits like bunnyhopping activated, and they preset the weapon/pickup spawns so the right stuff (usually biles and adrenalines) shows up where it needs to, but the runs are still insane because it’s all in the name of setting the fastest time records for each map. Already they’ve finished every map in the game (cheated on Blood Harvest though) and every run is full of mindblowing moments, so I’m just going to include my personal favorite:
First of all, Shadu is soloing the Passing finale, the single toughest map in the entire game, and at this paticular moment he’s going for the two gas cans in the alleyway near the lower generator. In under ten seconds he gets ambushed by a Charger, Jockey, and Hunter and manages to kill all of them. Then, on his way out he gets stunlocked by a common right when a tank is staring at him, halfway through the throwing animation of a OHKO-rock. So Shadu throws his gas can at the midair rock, shattering it and sending his gas can flying out of the alleyway towards the alleyway exit. Then he escapes while juggling three gas cans at a full sprint with the Tank hot on his heels. Absolutely incredible.