whoops :P 

Is the best reuse of maps I've seen.

FYI a chainsaw makes mincemeat out of a tank. 

The weather in Hard Rain is amazing! Such great atmosphere.
I love in map 4, how you're running from house to house to stay out of the open and rain, when you get inside the houses they really nailed the feeling of being in out of the rain, with the storm still going strong outside.

I tried some team scavenge last night, and it's really fun, a nice change from versus, and quicker to play.

Love this game. 

The bridge (final rescue) map of the parish is a poor piece of mapping in comparison to the other levels. There's two points where you don't know where to go at all - and this is on a bridge map thats a simple GoTo A-B.

Very frustrating, so here's some spoilers:

When the road is on a raised level you need to repeatedly jump up the side of the truck, onto the bonnet then roof. When it splits, take the off ramp. 

Hmm, that didn't bother me at all? Seemed pretty logical where I was supposed to go, I thought the bridge was actually quite interesting for what is a basically a straight line. 

But I ended up running in circles various times - and getting thrown off twice by Chargers didn't help.

The achivements bug won't go away - I've gotten the stronger than moustachio one three times now.

Lost Violence in Silence, faster than Moustachio (twice) and some agregates like the defib one. 

The first one suffered alot from achievement resets too during the first weeks, seems to be related to server troubles etc. 

The closest the industry can come to mixing AAA and Creative, it seems.

Will be interesting to see what the future holds for it in terms of third party content.

And this type next year - L4D3!

Now going to combine two great hobbies - drinking and playing L4D2 in a Lan. 

spirit, do you know how big the steam folder is?

What does it matter? Mine is 60gb and I backup my entire games folder (onto a NAS) every now and then (which is 77gb). I could see how the archiving part could become an annoyance once you go above 300gb if you have a slow CPU though. If you don't cant afford or don't want to get a cheap NAS, just use an external HD? You do have SOME sort of a backup routine right? 

The internet. 

I think, like L4D, they've got it spot on, it just WORKS. No bullshit, no messing around, no stupidly obvious flaws or niggles that in the way of a good experience. You round up some mates, hop on a server, and shoot zombies. All the challenge comes from fighting well and working together in the game, not dealing with any extraneous issues. It's how gaming should be. 

You refusing to give Versus a try. 

They just give the players the building blocks for being able to play which slot together in different ways each time.

The only weak part for me is Swamp Fever - repetative visually and without any of the new creshendo events. 

On our first run through Swamp Fever, our team seemed to wordless conclude that the bridge lowering crescendo was actually a gauntlet. So we all began running it and consequently took a great deal of damage from it. But yeah, apart from a nice looking finale area there isn't so much going for it in coop - I'm just hoping vs makes it more exciting to play. 

We assumed the same with the crashed airplane and torn to shreds.

But there's no need to move - just stay where you are and melee.

It's odd since by stretching realism a bit there's plenty of terrain setups I can think of in a swamp - up in the trees, wading through mossy caves, crossing a quagmire (some bits are 'fall'), gassing up the boat . . . 

Hehe I guess here is a case where being more informed than a "regular gamer" about left 4 dead 2's design has actually caused harm :)

our team seemed to wordless conclude that the bridge lowering crescendo was actually a gauntlet

One of the best parts about all of valves games for me is that you never need to assume anything, if something is important to the progress in the game it is always given to you in a way that you will understand. All the gauntlet style events in l4d2 are clearly marked by either avatar chatter or environmental clues, or even blatant game ui hints in some cases. You are never really left scratching your head as to what you are meant to be doing.

Now, I don't know about you lot, but whenever I see a jockey jump one of the survivors I cant help but burst into tears of laughter, I find the whole spectacle hilarious I cant put my finger on why.

its even worse if I am controlling a jockey in vs mode, I usually start laughing before I even jump at someone because I know whats about to happen...

I'm fucked in the head, right? 

Yeah Swamp Fever is the weakest campaign for me too, even though it has it's nice bits.

About the bridge lowering crescendo event, in VS it's best to run through it anyways. If you stay in one of the rooms during the event, you're giving the special infected lots of time to deal damage. 

I really like it, great atmosphere. Still didn't complete the end despite about a billion goes. 

Are funny little fuckers - it'd have preferred it if their gibbering sounds had more laughter in there, they sound (and look) pretty much like imps.

For example their attack loops should be only laughter. SO they're doing their hyena / monkey laughing while they steer you into fire / spit / off a ledge. 

A Boomer already waiting in the safe room in Hotel.

What looked very much like two tanks fighting each other in Plantation (one was biled). At any rather that was two tanks at once, out of a total of 4 - on Normal skill!

A Charger and then something else knocking Ellis and Rochell both into the water and thus dead by the river raft in Swamp 1.

Something to do with an axe and a special Infected, but I forget what. Might have been axing a Jockey in mid-leap. 

Specials tend to be more human (sneaky) now, but also just as retarded as you'd expect a bot to be. Often they're in the safe room attacking the invincible door when you arrive. Suppose its nice to have a hobby.

Haven't played versus yet, but the charger promises to be one of the most frustrating, just because theres the possiblity of chucking people into the water - but odds on you'll never get close enough.

It's impossibe to hit a Jockey in mid leap with melee, even shove. Hunter as well - all you can do is Shambler dance out of range then move back in with a shove and then knock the undead out of em. 

I played a game of versus tonight with some dear friends, and on the first level of Dead Centre we had not one, but two people charged off the edge of the building as we climbed around fires. You'd think the second person would have learnt... 

Yes it's quite easy to get some instant-kill going with the charger if you know what you're doing. On the first map of the Parish (the one from the demo), at the very start, you can run up to them as they turn off the passageway, and charge one or 2 guys straight into the water.
Same thing on the rollercoaster part of Dark Carnival, not to mention the Parish final on the bridge...

I'm not sure if this is necessarily a bad thing, people should know about it... At least they fixed the charger bug today where it could get a survivor stuck in the scenery. 

if they change the charger so it only hits a survivor enough that they need to be helped up off the edge. Even this is still highly beneficial once you have the other 3 special infected jump into the fray.

Another great spot to insta-kill though is top floor of the sugar refinery in hard rain as survivors are either waiting for the elevator , or just getting off it.

It's one of those ways to die that only happens once though, then you learn to expect it. 

if they change the charger so it only hits a survivor enough that they need to be helped up off the edge. Even this is still highly beneficial once you have the other 3 special infected jump into the fray.

Another great spot to insta-kill though is top floor of the sugar refinery in hard rain as survivors are either waiting for the elevator , or just getting off it.

It's one of those ways to die that only happens once though, then you learn to expect it.