Left 4 Dead 2 has new 'Versus' game mode.

Last night Valve unveiled a new Versus mode called 'Scavenge' which will be included in the upcoming Left 4 Dead 2. The new mode has been designed to provide "quicker, even more frantic game play" than Left 4 Dead's current vanilla Versus mode according to Valve.

The new mode still pits a team of survivors against a team of infected, but in this mode the survivors need to acquire 16 cans of gasoline which are dotted around the maps to power up a generator. The opposing team of infected have to stop the survivors and/or destroy the cans of gasoline.


The game mode lasts for 3 rounds and the winners are the team who collected the most cans of gasoline. In the event of a tie, the winner is the team which acquired the cans in the quickest time. Each round is timed and collecting a gasoline can adds 20 seconds onto the clock.

Dispensing a can of gasoline into a generator takes about the same amount of time that it takes to heal a team mate and early reports indicate that generators camping by the infected team is a sound (perhaps frustrating?) tactic. The new Spitter infected is also highly valuable on this map as he can make gasoline cans explode in a Survivors arms with a well timed shot.



Survivors can also shoot gas cans but this isn't a total disaster as they do respawn if destroyed.

So far the mode seems to offer extremely quick and frantic game play which requires quite a different kind of strategy to the current Versus offering and I'm very much looking forward to trying this mode come November.

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Crash Course suffers Crash Landing.

Left 4 Dead’s latest update Crash Course arrived yesterday, but despite Valve’s best efforts it seems to have plagued the game with numerous issues.

Servers went missing, many users were reporting pings in excess of 500 and the achievements don’t seem to be working very well either, with many either not activating or disappearing after they have been earnt. The map itself also has its fair share of bugs.

Valve also decided eradicate the server variable mp_gamemode and replace it with sv_gametype. This change alone managed to break a fair few servers (including our own 22g servers – the change managed to completely bork our campaign menu).


All this is a real shame because at its core the Crash Course campaign is a great piece of mapping and does provide an ideal 30 minute Versus environment.

Still I’m sure Valve is working on it and I’m looking forward to playing with some more once the various issues are ironed out.

And don’t forget until October the 2nd you can grab the PC edition of Left 4 Dead from Steam for half the normal price (£12.49), or even grab four copies for £37.49 if your mates need a bit of encouragement to join you!

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Left 4 Dead scary? It is now!

This latest Left 4 Dead mod is almost too brilliant for words. Thanks to modder flameknight7, the Teletubbies have invaded Left 4 Dead and believe me; no zombie will make you jump as much as one of these rabid monsters!

You can grab the mod over at l4dmaps.com; just make sure you avoid CBeebies afterwards!

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Left 4 Dead: Counter Strike favourite Dust 2 arrives in some style.

Counter Strike map favourite Dust 2 has now been ported over to Left for Dead by talented community mapper Sin. Other mapper's have already tried to port Dust 2 over to Left 4 Dead, but none have been as successful as this stunning effort.

The map is currently at beta 4.1 but it’s fully playable and is designed for Survival mode although a Versus release is also in the works.

You can download the map by heading over to L4Dmaps.com. Sin has also released a conversion of Aztec following a large number of community requests.

More pictures after the jump.

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Mario invades Left 4 Dead in Mushroom Massacre.

I guess it was inevitable given the various amount of Mario styled maps fans already make for other games; but somehow seeing Valve's undead horde wandering through the Mushroom Kingdom (Super Mario 64) is rather unsettling!

Currently 25% complete, you can follow the progress of Mushroom Massacre on l4dmaps.com. The first part of the campaign is already there for you to download along with full installation instructions.

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Red Mesa: Half Life style Crysis Mod.

You can now download and play Red Mesa; a Half Life inspired level for Crysis.

FPSBanana are now hosting it so what are you waiting for, grab your download here! You can also see some more screenshots by hitting read more below.

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Team Fortress 2 Beta Update Leaked on You Tube

One of Valve's beta testers has recently released footage of a beta update on You Tube. Guess that's the NDA broken then. Perhaps a Spy really is sapping Valve's sentry!

!

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Left 4 Dead modder to fly Gabe to Australia?

Further to yesterday’s news about Valve flying two Left 4 Dead 2 boycotters to their offices in Seattle, it’s nice to see some fun amongst the chaos!

A modder working on a campaign for the original Left 4 Dead sent Gabe an email asking why he hadn’t been invited to Valve so that they could preview his work. Gabe’s reply?

“We are boycotting your campaign.”


The modder in question then asks if he has to fly Gabe to where he lives in Australia to which Gabe replies “me and Erik”.

Good to see despite all the lunacy Gabe has to endure; he still retains his sharp sense of humour!

It doesn’t end there though. Following Gabe’s reply, the modder Joe has now started a fund in an effort to bring Gabe to his house to check out the campaign. You can find the details here.

The fund currently stands at $469.73 with $100 of that total having been donated by Valve’s very own Robin Walker who left the following message:

This is Robin Walker, from Valve. The rest of us at Valve would sure appreciate a couple of days without Erik around, so thanks for organising this!

Quick question though: if I donated more, would you buy a one-way ticket for him?

Robin.

I think I may just love Valve again! Anyone with such thick skin and such a great sense of humour deserves your support; roll on November!

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Valve rewards childish boycotters.

As a keen Steam user and Left 4 Dead player, I have to say the latest actions undertaken by Valve have really ticked me off.

Most of you will be aware of the ridiculous uproar from certain members of the Steam community when Valve released news that they were working on Left 4 Dead 2.

Accusations of abandoning the original game and ripping people off flew around from the more childish members of the community (despite the fact most L4D players have clocked up 100’s of hours in a truly great game) and a boycott group was formed.

Valves response? Fly two of the group out to their offices, all expenses paid, to play Left 4 Dead 2.


Here we have a group of people who have spent their time slamming Valve on what is for most gamers a non-issue; and Valve rewards their moronic behaviour with what for many gamers would be the trip of a lifetime.

Nice one Valve. Most of your true fans appreciate the great game that Left 4 Dead is; have never been unhappy with the hundreds of hour's entertainment it’s provided because that is superb value for money. Most are happy we are getting a sequel to a great game sooner rather than (Episode 3) later.

So why does it now feel like you’ve just kicked all your loyal fans right where it hurts?

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Left 4 Dead 2: Baseball bat pre-order 'bonus'.

The rather annoying in-game pre-order bonus fashion continues, this time courtesy of Valve.

Pre-order Left 4 Dead 2 on either PC or Xbox 360 and you'll get the exclusive melee weapon the Baseball Bat available in your game. It's not just a re-skin of another weapon either; the baseball bat will have its own handling and damage characteristics.

Interestingly if you don't have the bat but join a game with someone who does, the weapon will be available to you for the duration of the game. How thoughtful!


I've already posted about how I don't like this new in-game bonus trend and I have to say I'm rather disappointed in Valve for jumping on this bandwagon of bullshit.

As a big fan of Valve and Left 4 Dead this news certainly won't stop me buying the game; I just thought they were above this kind of stunt. Guess we all better pre-order Half Life 2: Episode 3 if we want the crowbar eh?

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The best Left 4 Dead review on the net?

Awesome Left 4 Dead video review, you know, that zombie game by Vulva.

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Getting out of the game.

It’s that time of year again. The time when I leave gaming and the family behind for the weekend and head off to the green slopes of a small mountain boarding centre near Hereford. The event? The annual 22nd Global Gaming Clan meet part IV: The Search for Carlsberg!

I first became serious (or perhaps I should more accurately say dedicated) to online gaming around 3 or 4 years ago. I had at that time acquired, for the first time in many years, a rather shiny and supercharged new gaming PC.


The PC purchase had been ‘inspired’ by the imminent release of Doom 3 which had been branded in my mind as an absolute must have because of my love for its prequels. Needless to say my high hopes were dashed a fair bit when I eventually did play the game, but the Half Life 2 release around the same time ensured that the new PC didn’t go to waste.

Much like its excellent predecessor I played Half Life 2 to death and loved every fragging minute. But once it had offered all it could, I nervously ventured online to play Half Life 2: Deathmatch. This was in hindsight an action that would very much have a large impact on my life.

My first steps in the online world of HL2DM were not pretty. Every time I spawned, I died before I could really work out what the heck was going on and I was constantly the victim of more insults than I care to recall. ‘Noob’ was certainly the most common but it usually came after a harsher expletive!

For a while I gave up, I hadn’t enjoyed my online experience that much after all, but my love of the Half Life world eventually drew me back a few weeks later. This time though, I vowed to do things differently.

Before I went back to play, I ventured over to Valve’s very own Steam forums (itself not always the friendliest of places), and started asking questions about the game. HL2DM has never been the most popular of online pursuits (and certainly the game and community can be fairly regarded as rather niche, even back then), but I found a few friendly souls, one of whom pointed me in the direction of 22g.

22g as it turned out was a clan who primarily played HL2DM but did not play the game in a competitive (i.e.: league) manner. That’s not to say they didn’t have good players, far from it, but they were not actually bothered about how good or bad your game was. Far more important to them was your attitude and having a laugh together. Finally it seemed, I had found a place I was safe.

And safe I was. I quickly became a regular on the servers and forums and discovered to my delight that the regulars there enjoyed all forms of video games and not just HL2DM. The clan was strictly invite only so I never asked about joining although I’d be fibbing if I said I hadn’t wanted to. Not long later, my game improved enough so I could hold my own a bit on the servers and I was also lucky enough to be invited into the clan.

From that point in time I eventually graduated from ‘stupid noob’ to ‘f#*king hacker’ and played the game almost non-stop bar the inevitable need for sleep. I wrote guides on the game and helped out other players, always remembering how bad my first experience online was. I dreamt about the map layouts in my sleep. I daydreamed at work about new ways to take my opponents down. But most importantly, I made new friends.

The funny thing with online game play is that you never really know who you’re talking too. We all create our online name/persona, wear proudly our affiliation tags and quite often behave in a manner which does not reflect how we are outside of this specialist virtual world.

I’ve often wondered if this change is brought about by the fact you are around fellow enthusiasts. Perhaps here, around ‘our own’ so to speak, is where we can be our natural selves, where our passion for games doesn’t have to be hidden for fear of being labelled a geek or simply not being taken seriously at work. In this environment we can let it all out with people who understand, with people who care as much as we do.

Of course online gaming also brings out peoples worst sides to, the insults that are free (mostly) from recrimination, the one-up-manships (or should that be 1 up’s!) that you couldn’t possibly use in most areas of your offline life. Specifically, it’s pretty easy to be an arse if you choose too with little come back.

You are after all just this digital persona, someone that can act how they please with little affect on anything that’ll land you in serious trouble; something that can be changed and somewhere you can come back anew.

And it’s here (finally!) where we come full circle to the point of this post.

Because tomorrow, for my 3rd time, I’m off to actually meet my gaming comrades. And I don’t just mean in Second Life! We are actually meeting in the flesh; flesh which not long after will be hurtling down Herefords finest grass hills on little more than a piece of wood with wheels on. This time though it’ll hurt when we fall, we won’t just feel a small electrically powered rumble, screw up our multiplier and lose a tiny bit off our health bar.

And what a motley crew we’ll be. Because when you’re online, you don’t see the person – you see the persona. And what shocked me when I did this meet the first time was just how utterly diverse the whole group is.

The age range alone is fairly large; our backgrounds all for the most part completely different; personality, looks, size, views – everything. This is a group of people that you realise would never normally be put together because they are just so damn different.

And that is what makes this meet so bloody great! I couldn’t even begin to imagine meeting these people through any other means, that’s not to insult in any way who they are but just to re-emphasise how different we all are. And yet meeting with these people, my good friends, is one of the highlights of my year.

Enjoy your gaming, be passionate about it (but be nice to) and get involved. There’s so much more to it than meets the eye. But be bold too. If your part of a clan, go meet them. A group of enthusiasts? Get together.

Because sometimes the best thing you’ll ever do in this hobby is get out of the game.

Happy Fragging,
[22g] Nana
http://www.22g.co.uk/forum/

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Concept Art: Left 4 Dead 2.

Kotaku have posted up some great Left 4 Dead 2 concept artwork they have acquired from Valve.

There are 11 images in total; 5 covering the new characters and 6 covering the proposed locations from the game (these are definitely the pick of the bunch).

If you hit the full size option, you'll be treated to the images in all their massive glory (and they really are HUGE), ideal for your desktop or for framing.

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Electronic Arts condemns German 'censorship'.

Gerhard Florin (Electronic Arts executive VP) has publically requested that Germany ditch it’s current USK rating system and adopt the more widely used European standard PEGI.

"What we're doing here is censorship," stated Florin. "And nobody complains. When we talk about games here it's about violence or their alleged addictiveness, and not about their cultural status. The few good studios are asking themselves why they should stay here anyway."

Marek Brunner who heads up Germany’s USK disagrees and states that there are no plans for to move to a PEGI system. It's hard when half-truths are being used," said Brunner. "They say the USK does this wrong, the USK does that bad and why doesn't this get a rating?"

So who’s right? One thing is for sure, the poor Germans certainly get a raw deal when it comes to their choice of games because of their rating system and the rulings of the BPjM (Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien - the German government's Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons).

Even if the game isn’t rated (which essentially means it’s banned from sale), it may still suffer from omissions to enable it to be sold in the German market. Both Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 and Valve’s more recent Left 4 Dead had to be heavily edited so they could be offered for sale. More often than not, it is the depiction of blood that has to be removed.

Recent titles the Germans have missed out on completely include Dead Rising, Gears of War and Ninja Gaiden 2 although the more savvy German gamer can import the titles to play without fear of penalty as the law there only prohibits the sale of such games not their ownership. Many gamers also import the titles which have been subject to edits so they can play and view the games as they were intended.

Such is the impact of the German rating system that a quick scan of Google reveals quite a few specific job roles for German localization. Note the text in the example; “ensuring each piece is followed through with relevant checks and edits.” Interestingly Microsoft simply refuses point blank to edit any title rejected by the USK, hence why titles such as Gears of War are not available at all.

The debate on video game violence and its effects on the young in particular have been ongoing for some time (particularly since the widespread use of 3D graphics) and this is perhaps an issue I will touch upon in greater detail in the future.

In brief however, I do personally believe parents and retailer’s ignorance towards ratings causes the majority of the problems as opposed to the actual content contained within video games.

Compared to film, the violence currently in video games is relatively tame although I appreciate the interactivity offered doesn’t make them completely comparable. It should also be noted that films within Germany are subject to stricter guidelines than those in the majority of other European countries.

And just why sex is so shunned within our industry? Show so much as a pair of breasts and your asking for trouble, and that’s a fairly universal trait, not one just reserved for the poor Germans. Given that I can chainsaw a man in two within some virtual environments (well outside of Germany anyway!), it seems bizarre that games developers are frightened to include an act essential to the survival of our species and largely associated with love.

However, these are issues that I will cover in greater detail in future, in the meantime spare a thought for our fellow gamers from Germany; forced into playing the gaming equivalent of edited for TV movies.

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PS3 isn’t the best games machine, but it is a great piece of kit.

The current generation of consoles marked something of a departure for me. At any other time in my gaming life I have always brought all the new consoles at the point of (or very close to) their release dates. This time around however I’ve only just now completed the ‘set’ with our recent acquisition of an 80GB Playstation 3.

When the machine launched it was extremely expensive and given the lack of any real decent exclusive titles I decided to wait until there were some titles on the system I wanted to actually play.

Since then the PS3 has hardly set the world on fire with its games and thus I never really got round to making the purchase. A console should live and breathe in the quality of its games library and to date the PS3 has offered very little that isn’t already being done better on Microsoft’s winter heater.



Multi-format titles have on the whole been better on the 360 (The Orange Box debacle instantly springs to mind as does the more recent Ghostbusters ‘admission’ by Terminal Reality) and to date the exclusives generally have been more appealing (Halo series, Gears of War, PGR, GTA IV exclusive DLC).

Some developers such as Haze’s Free Radical have voiced complaints over the PS3 being difficult to code for, whilst heavy hitter Valve have gone one step further and simply refused full stop to code for the system. This decision alone means that PS3 owners may never get to experience the brilliance that is Left 4 Dead and potentially the up and coming (soon I hope!) Half Life 2: Episode 3.

I must admit that Uncharted: Drakes Fortune and Little Big Planet have both nearly persuaded me to part with my cash previously but unusually the sensible family man overruled the impulsive gamer’s heart.

It’s also worth noting that although I do not consider myself a ‘fan boy’, I do at times tend to think of Sony more negatively than the other two big hitters. This is mainly due to the impact Sony has had on Sega over the years; they are after all responsible for Sega’s exit from the hardware market, they killed the Dreamcast right? Well no, Sega unfortunately managed that all by themselves.

Sega failed to recognise the importance of 3D with the Saturn, produced a machine for the ‘hardcore’ (I prefer the term old skool mind you) and missed out on a whole new generation of ‘clubbing’ gamers.

They then produced the brilliant and pioneering Dreamcast, failed to market it so anyone really knew what it was and again produced old skool games. Now that’s great for someone like me but was hardly likely to entertain the newer (and by now much larger) gaming demographic.

Now you may well assume given so much negativity on my part and the minor bias towards all things blue and spiky that I’m simply writing here to bash Sony and its black monolith. But to my own surprise I’m actually writing to say how impressed with it I really am.

Whilst many will no doubt disagree, it’s not in this writer’s opinion the best out and out system for games, something I have covered enough above. It’s expensive (although at the time of writing there are numerous price cuts around due to the imminent arrival of the PS3 Slim) and very surprisingly the word Playstation is no longer synonymous to many with the phrase games console. Owning a Playstation isn’t the cool thing it was in the past.

Bizarrely we actually never really ‘paid’ for our PS3, it came ‘free’ with my partners new mobile phone contract (I’m holding off on renewing mine for the launch of the PSP Go!).

Our sole reason at the time for picking the PS3 as our freebie was that due to various circumstances we no longer had a DVD player in the main living room. Since the PS3 is both a DVD and Blu-ray player it seemed the obvious choice for us despite its gaming shortcomings.

What we never realised at the time was just how good the PS3 is at serving as our complete family entertainment centre. And it’s here that the PS3 really excels, it is because of this the PS3 sees use in our household every day and by several occupants.

We have our DVD and Blu-ray player for our films. We have a music centre which streams music from our PC effortlessly along with our photo and video collection. Then there’s Vidzone, essentially a free music video channel where you pick what plays. And of course there’s the games, finally Uncharted and Little Big Planet are getting my well deserved attention (Uncharted being the first game in ages that I’ve actually bothered to complete). Heck we can even surf the net with it during the television ad breaks.

Of course the 360 also has some media features of its own but they simply are not as well implemented.

The DVD player is DVD only and it’s intrusively noisy for a front room. The media streaming works to a point but it’s not as easy or as smooth as on the PS3. The music videos on Live are limited and have to be paid for. It can’t surf the internet and unless you own an Elite model the HDD is woefully small. And also, somehow, the 360 just doesn’t look like an entertainment centre. It looks like a games console; it looks out of place under my main TV.

My partner has never really touched a non-handheld games console before and yet with the PS3 she presents our photos to friends and family, pops music on in the morning to keep the kids quiet (our 1 year old daughter dives across her pen when the PS3 power button beeps because she loves to dance away to the videos) and even watches the odd film.

And so, it’s only now that I’ve come to realise that the old skool gamer in me has blinded me into ignoring this great machine.

No it’s not the best games console, the 360 is currently the choice here with its vast library and it’s excellent (though still annoyingly chargeable) Xbox Live. But it is a great all rounder, it serves the purpose Sony always said they wanted to serve, the central family hub of entertainment, the unseen box of tricks that quietly delivers all of your living room needs without you even realising it. And for that Sony should be applauded.

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