Falcon Novint

Now everyone can enjoy the Left 4 Dead experience using the Novint Falcon which allows players to feel realistic weapon recoil, enemy attacks, and interactions with the environment, including a variety of specialized forces. With the Novint Pistol Grip accessory the First Person Shooter gaming experience gets even more immersive.

“As both the reviews and the sales figures show, Valve’s Left 4 Dead has been an absolute hit, and it is one of our strongest Falcon supported titles to date,” said Novint CEO Tom Anderson. “The Falcon makes the experience of being attacked by Zombies ultra-realistic, and it has been our most popular title with our early testers. We’re very excited to add Left 4 Dead to our ever-expanding list of Falcon-compatible titles.”

Left 4 Dead: Crash Course

There’s a great interview with Valve writer, Chet Faliszek, at Offworld about Left 4 Dead and Valve culture in general. Very interesting conversation about the larger Left 4 Dead world, which has some surprises in store for us.

Interestingly, Faliszek mentions that the recently announced L4D1 DLC, Crash Course, was supposed to be released before E3 and the Left 4 Dead 2 announcement.

“I think in this case we just didn’t message correctly,” said Faliszek to Offworld. “We didn’t make it clear that Left 4 Dead was still going to be updated. We just didn’t think to mention it, we were focusing on other stuff.” “We, internally, always knew we were going to do cool new stuff, so we didn’t say anything about the original game,” he added. “Of course we also intended to get the Crash Course DLC for L4D out before E3, but some things held us up.” “I think if we had that out before the Left 4 Dead 2 announcement, then it would have been clearer for our intentions. Losing the opportunity to get that right hurt us, but I think we made the right choices otherwise.”

While I really enjoy what Valve is doing here, I’m not entirely convinced this is true. It all seems like damage control. From the outside looking in, Crash Course seems to be a short Left 4 Dead experience, one easily concocted between E3 and its September release. I’m hoping I’m wrong!

GameTrailers revealed some video about Left 4 Dead 2′s “Fairgrounds” campaign and the pending DLC for Left 4 Dead, Crash Course. In Left 4 Dead 2, there’s a cool amusement park scene, and an eerie carousel, but I’m hopeful for a working rollercoaster. Crash Course opens with a helicopter crash, as it bridges the gap between No Mercy and Death Toll, and yes, confirms there are only two maps. Boo hoo, but still fun!

It seems Left 4 Dead has been, err… left for dead after the release of Left 4 Dead 2. Left 4 Dead 2 fans will be able to enjoy all the campaigns of Left 4 Dead and then some, but the old group will be alone in the cold.

Other highlights from the interview follow:

Is this DLC going to be playable by owners of L4D2 as well?
We’re still struggling with how interoperability is going to work, right now. When we talk about L4D, the story stuff – there’s actually a lot of character dialogue that’s based in each map.

So you can’t just play it with another set of characters?
No. We’d have to duplicate that, which we’re not against doing. But there’s this thing of the world – these characters wouldn’t be here – how much does that matter? We have a world sketched out and we have an understanding of where everything is and what’s going on, you know, so story-wise it wouldn’t make much sense. But equally there’s a whole group of the fans who don’t care. So we could put new characters in old places and old characters in new places.

Would you really need to use the characters from each game – wouldn’t just loading a map dictate the characters you were playing with?
That’s one of the routes we’ve talked about going, and maybe adding the new creatures, or whatever. There’s a lot of back-and-forth. We haven’t fixed on what we’re doing yet, so we don’t want to talk about it and make people think something is going to happen when we don’t know ourselves.

I’m still happy that we’ll have more Left 4 Dead to play, but I wish Valve cared a bit more. I would be fine if they bundled the best of the best fan content and sold that to me on my Xbox 360, as there is no way to play the user-created content outside of the PC. I suppose this will tide people over until November, when Left 4 Dead 2 comes out. But it feels a little cheap. If people really want a 20-30 min. Versus experience, why not just start on one of the later chapters?

Left 4 Sims: Chapter Two

I really love this new Sims-inspired web series around Left 4 Dead, and I think you will too. Especially after this new chapter that has Zoey going face-to-face with a Boomer! Yikes! All is not as it seems though, so get in and make sure to start from the beginning.

Read Chapter Two: “We Just Crossed the Street…”

Left 4 Dead: Crash Course

Valve announced today that a new Left 4 Dead downloadable content campaign, Crash Course, would be coming to Xbox 360 and PC this September. PC owners will get it free, but Xbox 360 players will need to pay $7 (560 Microsoft Points) for the campaign. Within the campaign, players can expect “new locations, new dialogue from the original cast, and an explosive finale.” Valve also stated that Crash Course is meant to bridge the gap between “No Mercy” and “Death Toll” storywise, and includes new Survival maps.

“The primary goal of ‘Crash’ is to deliver a complete Versus mode experience in just 30 minutes, resulting in a streamlined version of the game’s existing Versus campaigns,” said Valve. “A recharge timer for infected teammates has also been added, and item spawn behavior has changed for more balanced gameplay.”

A complete Versus experience in under 30 mins? It usually takes that long to find a game!