February 2, 2010
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You might want to make different plans for Thursday if you intended on playing
Left 4 Dead 2 or any game relying on Steam matchmaking and lobbies. Valve is planning on performing scheduled maintenance on Thursday beginning at 6PM PST; they expect it to take no longer than three hours, setting a return to normal operations by 9PM PST. You'll still be able to play any of the games you own on Steam, but those that rely on Steam matchmaking, including L4D2, will be unplayable.
Other services will be unavailable as well, including Steam Community, downloading games from Steam, and purchasing games from the Steam store.
Valve will be updating the news post located here with any further details as they become available. As you'd expect, they're promising to "make this downtime as short as possible," but the downtime is sure to once again bring out the anti-Steam crowd who will cite this as the reason that physical media is superior to digital downloads.
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January 27, 2010
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It seems as if Half-Life and Left 4 Dead developer Valve is looking for a few good men to engineer things for Linux and Macintosh. Several sleuth sites, as well as more than a share of Mac-focused sites, have been reporting on a rogue sentence not-so-tucked-away in Valve's Chris Green's LinkedIn profile, indicating that the studio is indeed doing as much.
"I work at Valve," it reads. "You should work at Valve." A hard enter. "REALLY looking for senior Linux (plus) Mac engineers."
Left 4 Dead 2 on the Macintosh? It could happen -- in a world where unicorns exist and cement tastes like Red Bull, that is. A boy can dream, right?
Valve Looking For Mac And Linux Engineers [Inside Mac Gaming] [image cred]
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January 23, 2010
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Valve has announced that
Left 4 Dead 2's next update won't be out for another few weeks, but at least they let us know what to expect: Infected bots and auto-spawning tweaks in the game's popular Versus mode.
Detailing the two major aspects of the update in a post on their official blog, the L4D2 team explained how both the bots and auto-spawning tweaks are intended to smooth out issues with the Versus mode. The bots will "help out the Infected when they are down a man or two," the post explains, and "will also make 1v1 Versus a bit more fun."
As for tweaking the auto-spawning in the finale events of Versus mode, Valve says one thing they've been experimenting with is disabling them altogether -- and crunched some numbers to show why. "Across all finales in Left 4 Dead 2 currently, a single survivor has a 34.56% chance of escaping," the post reads. "That includes the Concert Finale in 'Dark Carnival,' which boasts close to a 50% escape rate (and yes, a fix for everyone's favorite cheese spot is coming). Remove the Concert Finale, and we see the average drop to 29.61%."
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January 13, 2010
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Speaking to Official Xbox Magazine, Valve's Chet Faliszek said the Left 4 Dead 2 team came up with a since-discarded special infected called "The Leaker." He was axed not for doing something disgusting, but predictable.
"With The Leaker, the idea was a kind of Boomer that could take damage, and shoot out spouts of goo. And you could plant yourself and explode - be this walking bomb," Faliszek told OXM. "The problem is there's a warning that you're going to do that. So when you go to plant yourself, everyone else runs away, and you just die and don't hurt anybody."
So they scotched The Leaker, but carried over some of his properties to The Spitter, Faliszek said. Oh, and about that inspired name (and others)? It's "because I'm lazy," Faliszek said. "'What does this one do?' 'It charges.' 'Yeah, it's a Charger. I'll go with that.'"
Interview with Valve's Chet Faliszek [Official Xbox Magazine]
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As part of an ongoing set of articles about Irrational Games, Game Informer has posted information and a video about a zombie game Irrational pitched back in 2005. But before production got underway, the studio was acquired by Take-Two Interactive. The zombie game was a casualty of that acquisition, but you can see here a video of a demo put together using Irrational's SWAT 4 engine.
A couple of things stand out in that video. First is the pace. You move slowly and the zombies move slowly. It adds a whole different kind of tension that's lost in a lot of modern zombie mythology. Left 4 Dead, for instance, is so fast. You're fast, the zombies are fast, the guns are fast. It's one part horror, three parts action.
The second thing is watching the SWAT 4 interface in action. In that game, you had a smart AI team tagging along with you, and you had meticulous control over what they did and where they did it. Imagine the tactical finesse this would give a standoff against zombies that moved slowly enough to give you time to think. Imagine what a great single player game it would be. Right now, in the slower zombie games like Killing Floor and Call of Duty's Nazi zombie mode, there is no friendly AI. Instead, you need other players to fill in for the AI. And in a game like Left 4 Dead where you do have a friendly AI, it's entirely out of your control.
It's worth pointing out the two main characters in George Romero's 1978 Dawn of the Dead, arguably the single most important zombie movie, the two lead characters (pictured above is Ken Foree at Peter) are members of a SWAT team. It's a shame that Irrational didn't get to take what they accomplished in their SWAT game and apply it to the American pastime of zombie killing.
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January 10, 2010
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If you've been sitting around on your hands waiting for the next free opportunity to play
Left 4 Dead 2 on Xbox Live with your friends, well, we think you're a bit strange and should likely find a better habit. That being said, you'll be happy to hear that the game will be free-to-play for all Xbox Live members (even you lower class Silver folks) next weekend, starting promptly at 12:00PM ET on Friday, January 15, and finishing up on Monday the 18th (also at noon, as confirmed to
CVG by Microsoft). We can't imagine that those of you still holding out will be convinced of an Xbox Live Gold account's worth after just one weekend, but it certainly can't hurt, now can it?
Update: The free weekend has been confirmed for Europe only. A Microsoft representative tells Joystiq the company has "nothing to announce at this time" about a North American promotion. When asked if they had a timetable to announce something, the representative politely said that we'll hear something soon one way or another.
Left 4 Dead 2 goes free-to-play on Xbox Live next weekend originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 10 Jan 2010 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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January 9, 2010
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Yesterday Mike wrote up his impressions of a motion-control enabled version of Left 4 Dead 2 running on a PC with the help of Sixense TrueMotion wireless motion controllers.
Now take a gander at a Razer rep playing a bit of the game with the dual, black sticks.
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January 6, 2010
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Back in November we got a
glimpse of developer Eric Ruth's project to "de-make"
Left 4 Dead into an 8-bit game, and since then he's released another
video showing of almost all of the game's special infected (seen above). The first playable version of the game has been released, making the promised January release date.
As we noted originally, the game runs as a resolution of 256x240 with 16 colors and a 4 sound channel soundtrack. It includes all five of the special infected from the first Left 4 Dead (all seen in the video above, with the exception of the tank which doesn't show up until later), the four campaigns' five maps, and each of the four playable characters.
Keep in mind that the goal, as Ruth notes, was "to create the game Left 4 Dead in a way that I feel it would have been handled back in 1986. The idea was NOT to remake it exactly like the Valve original." Among the complaints sure to be leveled at the game is a lack of four player support, which Ruth says the game is capable of handling but wouldn't be true his goal -- there just weren't a lot of games that had support for four players back then.
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January 3, 2010
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Granted, this chart assumes the Tank is just standing there taking the abuse. Still, a Steam user found that 10 frying pan hits kill a Tank in nine seconds, compared to 30 blasts from a combat shotgun in 26 seconds.
The forum user, Urik, found that It's not just the frying pan, any melee weapon is a 10-hit kill on a Tank, expert difficulty. You can go all honky-tonk man on him with 10 whacks from the git-tar if you like, which sounds even more absurd (and less durable) than the cookware. I've never done this, probably would never try to do it except as a last resort. I'm betting Tanky-poo, in actuality, makes it take longer than 9 seconds, though.
Left 4 Dead 2: Weapon Effectiveness vs Tank [Hellforge]
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December 28, 2009
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Though the Midnight Riders didn't hit the big time until their explosive debut in Left 4 Dead 2 circa November 2009, the fictional quartet's
YouTube Channel has been updated with an overlooked 1998 single, titled "All I Want For Christmas (is to Kick Your Ass)."
As can be surmised from its title, the festive jingle isn't exactly safe for work.
[video]16154[/video]
Shackvideo users can use the HD Stream.
As for the history behind the tune, the legendary rockers explain:
In 1987, the Midnight Riders were asked to participate in a children's charity Christmas album with their rock peers. The Riders refused. In a 1993 Guitar God Magazine article, Dusty explained: "Givin' kids charity just makes 'em weak, man. Teach a kid to fish, he can eat fish his who...
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