Tag Archive for 'left 4 dead'

Upcoming Releases: Left 4 Dead and Silent Hill

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Andy
on August 25th, 2008
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Some more news this week regarding Left 4 Dead, as well as news of Silent Hill Homecoming.

It was revealed this week that Silent Hill Homecoming will be coming to PC along with the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 releases, and will be available on Steam. The game should be released some time in September.

If that’s not enough to fill your thirst for the supernatural, you will be able to get through hordes of undead in Valve’s new release Left 4 Dead.

This week, we learned that Left 4 Dead will be following both Team Fortress 2 and Portal’s examples, when Doug Lombardi told us that, like Portal, there would be:

subtle hints fleshing out the game’s back story.

He goes on to say that:

graffiti and scratches [will pepper] the walls of the zombie filled city, with messages to and from survivors scrawled upon the walls of the game’s safe rooms

In addition, like Team Fortress 2, there are plans to:

feed Left 4 Dead players with regular updates. [There will be] new scenarios as future downloadable content through Steam, [and] new monster types and weapons sound like a distinct possibility

As Left 4 Dead sounds like it’s getting better by the day, we also heard this week that the boxart that we showed a few weeks ago (and can be seen above) may well be open to change.

Why would they do that, you ask? Well, apparently, it may have something to do with the obvious pun in the image. You see, the hand obviously only has 4 fingers, and it is clearly dead, however the more observant of you may have noticed that it’s a right hand…

Yes, really. They are thinking of changing the artwork so the one person in 3 million who actually notices this will feel all warm and fuzzy inside! I guess we’ll actually have to wait an see if this transpires, however I for one wont even be looking at the boxart… who needs a physical copy when you’ve got steam?!

Unfortunately, the final bit of news about Left 4 Dead is that there has been a release delay. Left 4 Dead will now be released on November 20th, not the originally planned 4th November (to go with the whole ‘4′ thing…).

No news as to why this is, and it’s not that much longer to wait, however at least we will be playing it exactly 10 years after we were originally playing Half-Life. That’s right folks, Left 4 Dead will now be released on the 10 year anniversary of the release of Half-life… ah the nostalgia :)

Valve E3 Update

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Andy
on July 23rd, 2008
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Last week we posted some news regarding Valve’s ’showing’ at E3, and since then some more information has been released regarding both of the games mentioned, and who would we be if we didn’t update you!?

Left 4 Dead’s disturbing boxart has been released (left) which I think makes clear that the game will feature plenty of gore (if any of us were in any doubt!), and zombies.

In addition, if you were still unsure if you were going to buy the game, Kotaku have an interview with Doug Lombardi (Valve’s Director of Marketing), where he gets 15 seconds to sell Left 4 Dead to you… whether it will work for you, who knows, but it’s worth a watch as Doug is always interesting.

Moving on to Portal, it has been revealed that the newly announced Portal: Still Alive release for Xbox Live Arcade will in fact be a combination of Portal and Portal The Flash Version Mappack. The excellent (see our review) map pack is an interesting addition to the game and it is great that Valve are clearly still helping out independent developers by buying into their work. I’m sure that Valve will add their own seal of quality to the pack, and perhaps remove story elements so that it doesn’t clash with the original story arc, but until the actual release, who knows… Either way, if you have the PC version of Portal, there really isn’t a great deal of incentive to buy this, since you can already get the additional content… for free, but it’s good that Valve are spreading the Portal love :)

Valve E3 Rundown: Portal and Left 4 Dead

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Andy
on July 17th, 2008
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This years E3 is well underway, and the amount of news to come out of the Valve camp has been relatively low. There have however been a few announcements that are worth mentioning.

The first bit of news comes from the Microsoft Keynote, with the announcement of Portal: Still Alive coming to the Xbox Live Arcade. The game will feature updated levels to add to the original story arc, however according to interviews with Doug Lombardi it is basically a stand alone, downloadable version of the original game with extras tacked on. What has this to do with Steam? Unfortunately, absolutely nothing as of yet… The new levels for the game which was originally released on Steam and the PC have not been announced for these platforms, so at first glance they do not appear to be getting a release. I for one however think that Valve will not leave us hanging - not only do I have my gut feeling to go on, but it seems that Valve employees posting on the official forums also seem convinced that we will not be left out. In the meantime, if you can’t wait for an eventual PC release, why not check out Portal The Flash Version Mappack, which will certainly give you a few extra hours of playtime, or go through the Portal Maps Archive.

The other game to get a significant showing is Left 4 Dead. Left 4 Dead is now in a fully playable state and Joystiq have an interesting read detailing their time with the game. Not only this, but Kotaku have a great set of interviews with Doug Lombardi where they discuss both Left 4 Dead and Steam itself. Key points from the interview are how Left 4 Dead may well allow users to easily create their own Machinima with a patch post launch, why Microsoft decided not to use steam and to create Games for Windows, how Steam is creating a history of video gaming and reviving old titles, and Valve’s opinions on PC exclusivity.

From the interviews, it certainly seems like Valve have plans to keep the updates to the Steam Client going and that there are going to be plenty of things for us to keep writing about, so we can all breathe a sigh of relief!

Now all that’s left to do is wait for Left 4 Dead to come out in a few months time, so in order to kill that time, I guess we’ll have to watch the new gameplay videos.

Steam Cloud - Access Your Game Saves Anywhere!

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John
on May 30th, 2008
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Huge news coming out of Valve in the wake of a press event held on Thursday. A feature many of us dreamed about but never thought would happen is coming, Steam Cloud will allow saved progress, game settings and other user data to be stored “in the cloud” so that game progress can be resumed on any PC.

I have multiple PCs at multiple locations and have always found it hard to continue playing through the same game on all systems because save game management is a nightmare. This addition to Steamworks completely solves it by uploading user data to Valve and then downloading that same data when you connect on another system.

The added benefit of this is of course that you won’t need to worry about backing up save data either. I’m sure many of us have been in the situation where upon formatting a PC’s hard drive and reinstalling Windows the realisation sets in that those saves were not backed up.

The feature will be rolled out to existing Valve titles such as Half-Life and Half-Life 2 soon. Titles such as Counter-Strike will have the feature added at a later date and the upcoming Left 4 Dead will ship with it from day one.

[via Next-Gen]

Left 4 Dead release date ‘announced’

Published
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Andy
on May 25th, 2008
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Left 4 Dead Logo

Shacknews recently met up with Doug Lombardi (Valve’s VP of Marketing) for a 2 part interview.

During this interesting insight into the world of Valve we learn about the predicted release date for the highly anticipated zombie romp Left 4 Dead, as well as possibilities for a demo weekend.

Doug says it is going to ship simoultaneously on

360 and PC worldwide in November.

He goes on to say in regards to the potential of a free launch weekend that they’ve been

kicking around a lot of ideas now and nothing’s final. [However] the free weekend has proven to be really, really powerful in terms of promoting sales on Steam, as well as on retail.

So it looks like there is a strong possibility that we will get to play Left 4 Dead for free before launch. Here’s to hoping!

In the same article, Mr Lombardi also laughs at reports that PC Gaming is dying and that

Steam has taken off and become this whole other business for us, [and because of this] Valve has never been in better shape

Looks like we’re writing about the right technology then!

For the full article, headover to Part One of the Shacknews interview here.

Zombie Fresh Left 4 Dead Footage

Published
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John
on May 14th, 2008
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Every time we get a glimpse at Valve’s upcoming zombie blaster Left 4 Dead it’s looking more and more polished. The mix of co-op survival horror, 28 Days Later esque zombies and Counter-Strike style gun play is making it one of my most anticipated games of the year. Gametrailers.com have fresh footage of the game in action from EA Spring Break 08 embedded for your viewing pleasure below.

Left 4 Dead - EA Spring Break 08: Matter of Prospective Gameplay

Left 4 Dead - EA Spring Break 08: Zombie Assault Gameplay


Update: More from Gamevideos