Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Making Left 4 Dead campaigns is an interesting challenge. You’re building levels for a game that decides when and where to attack the player, and you have almost no control over those moments. It means your focus is in creating the world and in making it an interesting space for the players to exist in. You can’t guarantee that the cleverly designed chokepoint you made will ever be used as one, but you can make it the prettiest damn corridor the player will ever see. The setting is one of the biggest considerations you have, and then you have to have the talent to pull it off. It’s why I think most L4D campaigns take such a long time coming. Dniepr’s a Left 4 Dead (1 and 2) campaign that’s set in the Ukraine, including Pripyat, and has been three years in development. There’s a quite startling pair of trailers below.
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Pretend that you didn’t read anything on the internet last week so that I can tell you about a keerrraazy new crossover that you won’t believe. Left 4 Dead 2 and Resident Evil 6. I know, right? When you’ve gathered the pieces of your mind, now blown into giblets, indulge me for a moment longer and act like you didn’t know that the survivors from Valve’s co-op sequel will be selectable in Capcom’s lurching horror. Mini-tanks and witches will also appear in the No Mercy game mode, which is part of the ‘Mercenaries’ minigame. Some Resident Evil monsters will also appear in Left 4 Dead 2. They’re called the Lepotitsa, Napad and Ogroman, and I can’t work out which has the silliest name. There’s a video below.

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My absolute favorite thing in the world is when games existences somehow mirror their names. Seriously. I have very few other interests. I’m an incredibly boring person. But anyway, just as Duke Nukem Forever took forever to come out, Call of Duty is nothing if not dutiful in its adherence to a yearly release schedule, and Toilet Tycoon was awful, Left 4 Dead 2 has not, in fact, been left for dead. Sure, Valve hasn’t lavished it with quite as much attention as, say, Team Fortress 2, but it’s certainly attempted to empower the community’s efforts – first with Cold Stream, and then with full Workshop support. But those mods? They’re about to get seventy five point blue banana apple sauce percent modderier, because Valve’s put its Extended Mutation System into beta.

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I preemptively think I’m gonna be sick. Don’t get me wrong: there are few things in this world I want more than Oculus Rift virtual reality for my mad dash through Mirror’s Edge‘s theme park of parkour, but now that it’s probably going to happen, I realize that I should probably bid farewell to any lunches I’ve had in the past couple months. And who will I have to thank for my sudden bouts of violent nausea? Interestingly, it won’t be EA. Instead, a third-party toolset called Vireio Perception is primed to add Rift support to Mirror’s Edge and other older titles.

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To celebrate Halloween, say Valve, they’re making Left 4 Dead 2 free this weekend. And by weekend, they mean from today (Thursday) until Monday. And by Halloween, they mean stopping days short of Halloween. Ladies and gentlemen: Valve Time.

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‘Twas more than a year ago that Left 4 Dead 2′s Cold Stream DLC first stirred beneath the grave of Valve’s nearly immortal undead sequel, and then – as though cast in the world’s most anticlimatic horror movie – it just kind of sat there. “I’ll rise and kick off the end of all human civilization tomorrow,” it thought to itself. But tomorrow never came. Until now! After gobs of testing and fine-tuning, Valve’s finally deemed Cold Stream fit for public consumption.

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Left 4 Dead 2′s Cold Stream DLC has been through more tests than a guinea pig that just survived a nuclear blast. As well as the new map, the DLC contains Blood Harvest, Crash Course, Dead Air and Death Toll from the first game, but that’s not new news. The fresh meat on this data morsel is the availability of all mutations at all times and Valve promise “other surprises and details” soon. July 24th is the release date. That’s the release date for the DLC, by the way, not the guinea pig. The guinea pig is too uncanny to release into the wild so top scientists have sealed it in a lead box which is currently being dropped into a furnace.

Well, this is odd. We’ve known about an upcoming Payday: The Heist-Left 4 Dead crossover for about a month now, and – as is often the case with these things – it materialized earlier today via YouTube’s eyebeaming ethers. “”Have you ever wondered how the Left 4 Dead series began?” the video’s description asked, forcing me to realize that I’ve never actually wondered that. “It started with a heist!” Intrigued, the Internet looked on as Payday’s band of mask-loving hooligans shot its way through a very un-zombified version of Left 4 Dead’s Mercy Hospital. And then the trailer disappeared.

Happily, Eurogamer managed to upload a roll to its own Internet-powered projector machine, so you can still watch the trailer and remember it as it was before its mysterious disappearance. Perhaps Valve and Overkill (now known collectively as Valverkill) stole it. From themselves. This may just be a heist caper for the ages. I, however, will work tirelessly to get to the bottom of it: Oh look, here’s the answer. It’s just a Left 4 Dead cameo (character and hospital setting) in a Payday map.

Hooray! Sort of, eh?

Seems a trifle odd to be saying this given 2009′s foremost angry internet man-generator was the perceived too-soon release of a sequel to Left 4 Dead, but Valve’s zombathons seem to me to have been left a little fallow of late. Team Fortress 2′s ongoing transformation into QVC, Portal 2′s awards-hogging and fever-pitch speculation about Half Life has been the order of the day for the last couple of years. You could – aheh- say that Left 4 Dead has been – aheh – left for dead. Aheh-heh-heh. Just my little joke, there.

Something is suddenly stirring, however (editor’s note – I really need more elegant alternatives to ‘however’ and ‘though’, which I know full well are often seen to be cludgy writing. Suggestions?), and it comes not from Valve, but from Payday: The Heist devs and recent Starbreeze acquisition Overkill.
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Over the last few years, Valve have been quietly honing the fine art of viral marketing in an online age, and comics have been a big part of that. A cartel of in-house writers and the excellent pencils of Michael Avon Oeming (and others) have created some rather splendid words’n'pictures. Of course, they were merely digital. HOW DARE YOU INSULT OUR EYEBALLS WITH YOUR CRUMMY JPEGS? Why, that’s for philistines and people too damned lazy to turn paper pages. This horrendous oversight and offence to everything that some angry guy somewhere probably holds dear is about to be corrected, thanks to a hardback compilation of Valve’s various Portal, Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2 comics due from august comic publisher Dark Horse later this year.
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