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.

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]

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%."

"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]

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.

Gallery: Left 4 Dead 2

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.

Now take a gander at a Razer rep playing a bit of the game with the dual, black sticks.

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.

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]

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...