Rock, Paper, Shotgun

You might recollect that our recent verdict on Valve’s mini co-op shooter Alien Swarm concluded that the game would have been improved somewhat if it utilised the same kind of AI director routines that make the Left 4 Dead games so interesting to play. Well, soon it will do so. Steam News reports: “…we’ve added “Onslaught” mode, which introduces an AI Director that dynamically generates swarms of aliens based on several factors, such as the squad’s stress level. Onslaught works with any difficulty setting and ensures no mission plays the same way twice.”

So hurrah for that.

There’s clearly going to be a lot of messing around to be done with Alien Swarm and its SDK, but one thing that can be messed about with immediately is the perspective. PCG spotted that you can play the game in first-person by enabling the dev console in the options and then typing:

firstperson
asw_hide_marine 1
asw_controls 0

Video of it in action below. There’s no ceiling/sky, obviously.
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Alien Swarm is out! And free! A four-player co-op alien-shooting game. What better choice for a four-person blogging team to Verdict? Except that Kieron’s on a plane, and Alec’s locked in a cell deep underground. So it fell to Jim and John to dispense the only correct thoughts and opinions anyone should have. Thanks to Phill and John G. for making up our numbers. Read our thoughts on the game below.

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Servers are a bit busy, mind. Alien Swarm, of course, is a free game from the Black Cat team, who happened to have been eaten by the Valve monster. They’ve been making a nice home for themselves in its belly, and working on this, which is a shiny remake of the original. And free. We’ll play it later, probably, and have some impressions up tomorrow, maybe. That’s for certain.

So, well, Valve just rather nonchalantly announced a game. Yeah, exactly.

Remember Alien Swarm? A total conversion mod for UT 2004, with four-player co-op top-down action. The team behind it, we’ve just learned, were hired by Valve two years ago, and have since been working on L4D and now Portal 2. Except at the same time they’ve been making Alien Swarm all over again in Source. And it’s coming out on Monday. And it will be free. And it looks great.

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[Since Quinns' last piece on a mod he loved went so well, he's done another one. Hurrah for Quinns! Also, Alien Swarm for UT2004. This article includes profanity and mild-bullying of PCG deputy editors]

Deep Space
The Sigma Campaign
Mission #3
23:49

For the first time in hours our squad was experiencing a period of speechlessness. We were all looking back and forth between the smoking barrel of Schach’s shotgun and the bloody smear where FiveEight used to be. The dismembered chunks of the alien that had been attacking FiveEight bounced away from us all into the shadows. Silence.
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