Now before any Valve fanboys start yelling at me, hear me out.
What I mean by this is, before ld4 came out Valve's fans where I guess you could call them intuecuals (spelling?) of gaming, what I mean by that is these people (including myself)
Really? Intellectuals, like being intellectual enough to google how to spell intellectual? Sorry but the comment is epic fail and had to be picked out for it's comedic value.
like a good story, some nice action but not full on action, use good teamwork, and needed to have the mental capacity to solve a strew of puzzles.
I can only assume that you are referring to the HL series of games. Well in ever aspect those games fail to tick any of the boxes you listed above.
The story in the first was good and in the second you spent the first half of the game wondering how you got from the end of the first game to the start of the second by which time I didn't really care about the story. The first was interesting, some may say ground breaking given that most FPS games of the time were run and gun affairs but the story in the follow up games are hardly ground breaking, they even border on being cliche.
Use good teamwork.... maybe I am lost but where exactly is the teamwork in any of the HL games? If you mean the few occasions were you have to team up with the thick as mince AI then perhaps but it is hardly good teamwork. If you're talking about the Multiplayer off shoots like, CS and TF then L4D requires that you work as a team to succeed were as the other two you can stomp around like a one man army and still get by quite well.
Mental capacity to solve a strew of puzzles... there is nothing in any of the HL games that require even the slightest bit of intelligence. The puzzles in HL amount to nothing more than plot driven and environment driven go here and push this puzzles, hardly a great stretch from the Doomeseque go and collect the key card nonsense. HL2 introduced the physics based puzzles which revolved around no more than simple see-saw puzzles.
All Left 4 Dead has done is indicate that their are an awful lot of very stupid people out there that play Valve games. The hard and fast rules for playing L4D are simple, move as quickly as you can do safely, clear a room and move on, stick together, back each other up, don't run off by yourself and don't waste time exploring unless you're in dire need of health. It's taken me just three weeks to see that that strategy works but you still get people who completely fail to grasp it even when you tell them to stop arseing about and get a move one.
The only game that ticks the boxes, besides multiplayer teamwork, is portal.
