Left 4 Dead Title

It’s rare that I’m as hyped up for a game as I was for this one. I think the last time this happened was for Age of Conan, and I was disappointed by it, and the time before that must have been World of Warcraft (which I still irregularly play).

Zombies in the Rain

So what makes Left 4 Dead special? First off, it’s by Valve, and they know what they’re doing when it comes to multiplayer shooters – you know how much I love Team Fortress 2, admittedly I never was a Counterstrike person but that game is rather good as well I’m told.

A Horde of Zombies

Next, it has zombies – and zombies are great. Those are particularly nasty, the runny, 28 Days Later type, not the more common shuffling and loitering Zombies!!! type.

And finally, it has proper teamwork (a headset is very, very useful), and a truly cinematic feel – that Director AI thing does work. Eventhough just two chapters of one episode (total 20 chapters in 4 episodes, I think) are in the demo, it’s totally worth it, and does what it’s supposed to do: raise expectations that were really high even higher.

People who preordered (like me, obviously) already got to play the demo since yesterday, it should be in your Steam games list then. It’s gonna be open for everybody else as of tomorrow. Get it from Steam. As for me, I can’t wait for the 18th, when the full game comes out I will make a review after I got to play it properly.

If you want extensive previews of the full thing by the way, Rock Paper Shotgun has one for the coop mode, and one for the versus mode. And just now, they posted tons of screenies.

Update 2008-11-08 02:11: Apparently, you can play as the infected, even in the demo Gotta try that out tomorrow.

Update 2008-11-09 16:57: Seems I was wrong about the demo going open on the 8th, it’s on the 11th apparently. Torrented versions will not work online, they’ll only piss of legitimate customers like me when the game won’t start because somebody doesn’t have a legit demo.

Update 2008-11-10 16:55: I read two main criticisms when it comes to the demo so far: “The game is dull, something for sitting on the couch and eating chips while playing” – you haven’t played it in anything but easy or normal if you think that. And “the guns don’t even allow you to scope” – if you have a PC monitor, you won’t have to, as you have a high resolution; and the hunter rifle does have a scope and allows you to scope (middle mouse button), oddly enough, just like those guns that don’t have scopes don’t allow you to scope.

So, he made a blog. From his post about what self-defense actually is:

Self-defense is the ability to come out of violent situations alive and if possible unhurt and with all of your possessions. For most persons, self-defense is learning how to beat someone up (or use any other suitable technique like throws, locks,…). This is the stuff you will learn in most martial-arts or self-defense classes. Unfortunately this is only a part of the whole self-defense business.

Learn more on Ste’s self-defense Blog!

Bye Slug.ch

As a rather important sidenote: There I was, thinking I’d have done a great service for Ste when I told him that the best thing he could do to promote his shiny new blog was sign it up for all those blog directories (link German) we have in Switzerland. I guess the advice wasn’t all bad (despite the fact that this blog here isn’t really old either), after all I do get some visits from those as well…

But today, I looked at one of them, Slug.ch, and was greeted with a short “bye” message. Well, uhm … bye, I guess I wonder if we’ll ever find out what it was that made Benny Rüegg stop?

BloggingTom doesn’t know much more (link German), but he has plenty of nice links for web history nuts (like me), and way more of them can be found at tou.ch.

Update 08-09-19 13:01: Meh, Slug.ch is back online. I agree with BloggingTom when he writes:

Hey, Benny, immer dieses Hin und Her mit Slug. Da kommt man ja kaum noch hinterher!

Unlike him though, I do think that such aggregators do serve an important function in the blogosphere: They allow you to find blogs you might like, they allow new bloggers to introduce their blog to a wider audience, and they allow searches through a particular subset of the global blogosphere.

All of those are important functionalities that hold us all together – so if Slug is not it, because of all those “sell-keep” and “stop-restart” inconsistencies, it’d have to be something else. I guess the fact that nothing else is as technically refined as Slug is then also the reason for the big backlash the too short “bye” message provoked.