f13.net

10% off regular price.  Preorders are, so far, 40% higher than the Orange Box preorder numbers.  All the cool kids will be playing this.  Schild can come too and set us up a server!

Do want a beta.

My friend's was in the beta. This game is co-op at its finest.

Does he have any invites? HAR.

I smell Zombie Beta. :oh_i_see:

I need to preorder this and I keep forgetting.

Oh, dang. I didn't know this was ready for pre-order.

I haven't seen the kid in a while. I'll ask when I get a chance to.

Edit:
Now that I looked it up, I believe there's no beta for this game yet.  :uhrr:
I must have been thinking of a different game, probably ReDead - which is actually a decent game to play while waiting on L4D.

Although, I've found people who managed to get a hands on with the game particularly at EA press events.
Here is post on gamespot forums by one very lucky guy:
http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/action/left4dead/show_msgs.php?topic_id=m-1-45991377&pid=937407#m-1-504325605

Also, some people in the thread above say that a demo might pop-up sometime around Halloween/November.  :grin:

I wonder why in the hell they're not letting you pre-load the game?  I've never preordered a non-Valve game, do they usually let you do that, or are you screwed until the day of release when you've got to compete with everyone else downloading gigs upon gigs of data?

ETA:  Whoops!  Thought this was the Fallout 3 thread.  Please disregard.   :uhrr:

Check this out:
steam stats page - http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3143/2973986642_c15bc61633_o.png
zombie panic - http://store.steampowered.com/app/17500/

Something to play while waiting on L4D?

We did ZP:S already. Did not turn out well. It was lacking a lot and it's probably only getting those numbers because of its recent inclusion to Steam.

Was not aware :)
I don't wanna start a huge thing about it in this topic, but what was missing?

It just wasn't a great game and got progressively worse with each update because the guy that made it is a raging dickhead who doesn't like fun.

Well, that sucks. I was looking forward to trying it out. Now, it's just "meh".

Your zeal was still incredible, though :)

This is because schild is a raging dickhead who loves fun.  Huuuuge difference. :awesome_for_real:

My zeal went down with each patch to the point of just not wanting to play.

Right when I started playing it, it was fun. It's a sad story that probably applies to most mods in some capacity.

In an odd bit of news Call of Duty: World at War will also include zombies (http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3170938):

"Left 4 Dead - Demo 11th Nov (6th For Pre-Orders)"

Yeah. Fast forwarding  time to 11th Nov...  8-)

Today is the day. All preloaded up. Anyone else excited? 360 owners say the demo is amazing.

damnit too many good games coming out at once

Downloading the demo on Steam right now.

Ok, this shit is pretty fun.

Edit:  The demo has two levels available, which can be played either single player or co-op (of the jump in/out variety if the people you want to play with have already started a level). 

If you wander too far off from your group, chances are you are going to die quickly.  Single player is pretty easy as your teammates will generally follow you around, and have pretty good aim.  Co-op was a little bit trickier, although there is really only one part in the second level where you need to worry about dying.

Very much looking forward to the full game, and some Zombie play.  From what I've heard it requires a lot of patience and strategy for the zombie players to be able divide and conquer the survivors.

I feel so bad. My roomie kept saying "Someone joined. Velorath or something" and I didn't pick up on it until I stared at your name in-game. It was a hell of a lot of fun and really seemed to get edgy when we realized we could talk to each other quickly, but not you. Voice is pretty much a must for playing this game and I look forward to every second of it.

Of course, I'd still like to know where that soul crushing lag came from.

I've got a headset setup that I have yet to use (bought it with WAR in mind, and then that pretty much fizzled out).  Not too worried about it for the demo, but it will be a must for competitive play.

Have one too, we'll definitely need to hit up versus play and see how it goes. My memory is hazy on how it works, are you just part of the horde or is it 4 v 4 style?

You play the boss zombies in the horde. It randomly chooses the type of boss zombie you'll be, and then you get to ghost through the map to choose where you want to spawn. You only score points as a survivor, so the zombie goal is to end their run as quickly as possible.

This is quite the fucking game.

Oh, and I've never ever seen a game that demanded a customized character creation as much as this one. The character lineup is like a United Colors of Benetton ad. Minus a hispanic.

There's a known issue being called the "15 retries" bug. For some odd reason the game tries to connect to a local address when connecting to listening servers. Best way around it is to type "openserverwindow" into console and use that to pick a game.

Patch went out last night/this morning to supposedly fix all the networking issues, some of matchmaking and other fixes.

Ah fantastic. I look forward to killing with people all weekend.

So far so good. I haven't had a problem finding a game and haven't encountered the "15 retries" error over the 5 matches I played.

The single player is not bad, but after two levels I felt pretty done with it.  The co-op is great except when you get a jackass in your game who has to shoot every gas can he sees EVEN WHEN I'M STANDING NEXT TO IT.

I just played for about 2 hours with the same 3 random guys and it was fucking amazing.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=745113

Split screen anyone? :)

360 Controllers and KB+M should never meet. Particularly since this game was meant to be played on Expert.

With a headset, and with your sound cranked up so you can hear in advance when a special zombie is around.

The crying witches are fucking BRILLIANT.

Actually, so far the most brilliant to me that I've seen is the car alarms in the first level.

Zombies coming from everywhere all over a pipebomb is pretty great also.

Also, setting a witch on fire just makes them scarier.

Play as infected in the demo: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=745482

Listening to the sound files is pretty cool. Seems like all of the scenarios are interconnected. Odd.

I like Francis. I guess an NPC bars a door at some point and everyone has dialog they can do with him.

"Let's see, I'm Francis, and that's Grampa Bill and THERE'S ZOMBIES OUT HERE OPEN THE GODDAMN DOOR!"

"ATTENTION, WE, ARE, THE COPS. I COMMAND YOU TO PICK US UP."

Picked this up yesterday after seeing you lot rave about it. So far it appears to be made of Win and Awesome. 
:awesome_for_real:

Yep, it's win.  Expert difficulty is brutal. A Tank completely owned me and my buddy. 

So I bought this thinking I'd stick with single player.  I'm rethinking that assessment now, because I'm a giant wuss with scary games.  Maybe I'll be distracted enough by teammate banter to actually enjoy the game rather than playing this in the dark solo and getting frightened by the sobbing I hear in the other room.

And yeah, I also think it'd help to play zombie.  Much easier not to get freaked out when you are the risen dead.

I'm shocked how much fun it is with random asshats. The only problem is most of my gaming time is late at night right before bed, and this game gets my imagination pretty riled up, so I have to play a little TF2 to calm down. I get a little spooked getting a beer between rounds from the kitchen.

Got the demo, played it with my wife, she's not too keen on FPS but she'll "put up with it" because I get giddy playing the game.

That being said, WoW has ruined many of my PC gaming friends. They don't like to move away from playing WoW, and it's really shrunk the pool of people whom I have available to tap to experience the full 4 player co-op. I guess they feel any time they're gaming *not* in WoW is time they could have spent grinding reputations with rats and birdmen. Many of them also feel that if the game doesn't live up to the size and scope of WoW, they don't want to bother.

Anyone else found that?

I think they lowered the difficulty on expert with the last patch.

Nope, you've just gotten more awesomer.

ENTIRELY POSSIBLE.

It's almost more fun with random asshats, because it ends up feeling more like a zombie movie (which tend to shove complete strangers together, trying to survive).  Of course it helps that so far, I haven't seen anyone abusing friendly fire to intentionally fuck up their teammates (or setting off car alarms or startling a witch on puprose).

I admit that when I've made it to the safe room early and the rest of the survivors are still out there fucking around, I like to go set off the alarm to light a fire under their asses.

 :grin:

I've found it from kind of a different angle. I've only been on WoW a few times in the last couple weeks. I try to talk about the other exciting games I've been playing like Fable II and Far Cry II and it's just met with a stony silence. You could hear crickets. I don't think these people have played anything else in years, I don't get it.

Anyway I've been trying to avoid Left 4 Dead but I keep finding myself reading threads like these ... just don't have the time for another game right now!

Please, Please, Please someone tell me I can log in to Left 4 Dead on the PC and unlock 360 achievements on my Gamerscore.

Co-workers have been playing this game's demo everyday and it's amazing.

Probably not, but the demo doesn't have achievements turned on, so hop in and kick some zambah ass!

Completely unrelated: "Take a break" is the best feature in an FPS ever. Not losing my place on the server when I have to do a quick late night diaper change is  :drill:

Lucky bastard. I had two matches where someone set off the car alarm on purpose. On expert no less.

Real pros jump up and down on the cars every time :drill:

I haven't seen mention of this yet, so for those that don't know, people who pre-ordered can now pre-load it.