The Best Gaming Moments of 2009

James – Killing Floor

While there have been some truly enjoyable games released this year; namely Arma II, Borderlands and Dragon Age: Origins, for me Killing Floor has probably resulted in the most ‘ROFL’, ‘WTF’, ‘LOL’ moments of any game.

Killing Floor started off life as a free to play mod for Unreal Tournament 2004, which probably explains why I hadn’t tried it (to me every Epic game after the original Unreal Tournament has been insipid). However, earlier this year Killing Floor was released on Steam as a standalone game.

To sum up Killing Floor’s gameplay in one sentence I’m going to rely on your knowledge of other games and describe it as Counter-Strike plus Left 4 Dead.

That’s not to take anything away from Killing Floor’s developer Tripwire Interactive though, as what makes the game special is that unlike most 3D shooters, there is character development. Every wave, you get to choose which of the seven character classes you want to play as, each providing various benefits, such as bonuses in hand to hand combat or the ability to carry additional weapons and equipment. Each class can be levelled up, providing even greater perks, by completing set tasks, such as killing a specific number of a particular type of zombie.


In short, the class system means everybody plays in different ways, leading to much greater gameplay variation each time you log onto a server.

You can also tell quite a lot about the character of players by what class they play – sharpshooters, demolitions, field medics and commandos tend to stand back from the action, calmly picking off zombies from afar. In contrast, berserkers, support specialists and firebugs tend to rush headlong into danger, carving up zombies, causing gibs to fly in all directions while giggling psychotically into their headsets.

Having logged a silly number of hours over the last four months online playing there are probably too many memories to condense down into just one moment of the year. Here therefore is a shortlist of the funniest, sickest, scariest and most satisfying moments.

Leaving the trader at the start of wave seven on Office and while reloading my shotgun walking headfirst into a nine foot tall 200kg Fleshpound, the hardest non-boss zombie in the game. I don’t think I even had to time to scream into my headset before getting splattered all over the corridor.


Shooting three Bloats with both barrels of the hunting shotgun causing my whole team to be covered with a copious quantity of steaming zombie gibs. Coupled with the wet squelchy noise of their chest cavities exploding, the reaction from all the other players was an amusing combination of "eugh… lol".

Waking up one morning to be informed by my very amused wife that I had been sleeptalking about ‘shooting their faces off!’ after a long session of Killing Floor the night before.

Trying the berserkers’s chainsaw for the first time and discovering the joy of carving up zombies without having to worry about running out of the ammo mid-wave.

Watching the corpse of a 200kg Fleshpound that the whole team had been blasting at fly out a third story in slow motion as somebody (ahem!) threw just a few too many grenades than were strictly necessary.

This last one isn’t actually mine – it’s something that happened when I was playing alongside Antony one time, but it’s lodged in my brain as one of my favourite highlights all the same. He had run out of ammo and was cowering in the corner of a barn when his headphones were filled with a tumultuous roaring noise and his whole screen was lit up with a bright orange glow, all because I had decided to set the whole horde of zombies, plus barn, on fire with my flamethrower and was only able to cackle with glee as the whole thing burned around him.