28 billion dead zombies and counting

The exact number is 28,981,249,043, or as Valve put it, that’s 4.62 times the entire population of the world, if they had been killed and turned into zombies.

With that news out of the way, Valve are also working on the first DLC for Left 4 Dead 2, which will have the survivors from the original Left 4 Dead crossing paths with the survivors of Left 4 Dead 2.  The DLC will be titled “The Passing”, and should be out soon, with no fixed release date being available just yet.

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TF2: The War Update

So the latest update is finally going to bring with it the class updates to the Demoman and Soldier classes, but thats not all.  Each class will be receiving 3 unlockable weapons, but the results of the next week of gameplay will decide which of the two classes will receive an extra special unlockable weapon.

Valve will be recording all gameplay stats over the next week with all kills of Soldiers and Demoman by the opposing class being tallied up to find out which class deserves the extra weapon the most.

As with all class updates, there will be some new maps making an appearance as well, so hopefully that’ll cure the tedium that is Badwater+Goldrush.

So stay tuned over the next week as the updates come out, but in the meantime, get stuck into slaughtering both Soldiers and Demomen, every kill counts!

Via:  TF2 Blog

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Mystery TF2 update

The patch notes listed fairly boring, standard bug fix type stuff, so of course most people (including myself) didn’t think much of it.  But it turns out that it was more than was revealed in the patch notes, with a number of other stealth changes being included in the game that Valve are only hinting at.  The update includes a number of sounds (I did notice this when updating our servers) that weren’t previously in the game, all of the sounds are related to the Announcer and hint at friendships, mercenaries and betrayals.

Robin Walker from Valve had the following things to say about it:

“So far, we haven’t seen anyone on the various forums out there who’s figured it out… there’s something about the way they’re used in-game that’s meaningful.”

“We’ve got something coming, but it’s not a new game mode…. The key to understanding the new sound files is to figure out who’s hearing them in-game, and who isn’t.”

So have you been hearing unexpected sounds from the Announcer?  Anyone figured out what it might be or how to trigger the sounds?

Via:  Shacknews & Kotaku

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Valve Official Dedicated servers now on 3FL!

So you might be asking what does this mean?  This means that when you load up a game and select “Valve Official Dedicated” as the server type you’d like to search for when creating a game lobby, you’ll be landing on a 3FL run Left 4 Dead 2 server!  So for those who could never get a handle on those damn search keys or had troubles using the Steam group server functionality, you should now get your dose of Freezone Left 4 Dead 2 gaming goodness by landing on one of our exclusive Official Dedicated servers.

You can check out the Serverspy page where we have labelled the servers “(Valve Official)” that are being run as Official Dedicated servers.  We are continuing to run other servers on top of these ones so that we can make custom changes (*coughs* appid) and run mods and/or custom campaigns when they become available as well.

So not only do we have several hundred Left 4 Dead 2 servers, more than anyone else in Australia, Valve are trusting us to provide Official Dedicated servers!

As you were.

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Over 2 million copies of Left 4 Dead 2 sold

In contrast, back in September Valve noted that they had sold 3 million copies of the original Left 4 Dead since its release back in November 2008.  So with 2 million copies sold in just 2 weeks, it looks like it won’t be long before the sequel breaks sales results from the first iteration of the game.

One other thing that Lombardi noted is that they will be releasing news of the first DLC for Left 4 Dead 2 soon, which hopefully for the PC platform will be free like the DLC for the original game was.

Quite an impressive feat for a game developer that is still privately owned, certainly shows that you don’t need to be an Activision-Blizzard or an EA to produce very popular games all without skimping on the PC platform like a lot of developers seem to be doing these days.

Via:  Gamasutra

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Farcry 3 in the works

The second game in the series was set in war torn Africa, with you working as a mercenary for hire trying to track down the elusive master mind of the warring groups.  For me I never could get far enough into the game to get any level of real satisfaction out of it, as it seemed to be a lot of driving around and repeating the same thing over and over (that said I probably only got 3-4 hours into it – maybe it got better?).  But aside from any debates over the gameplay, the game was quite graphically pleasing and is regularly used for benchmark comparisons between various hardware.

But getting back to Farcry 3, there really isn’t any info on when it will be available or even what theme it will have, whether you’ll be back to Africa, or slugging it out in some tropical rainforest/island environment like in the first game.  But one thing is probably a guarantee, and that is that the game will be very graphically pleasing and will bring today’s high end computers to their knees more than likely.

Via:  Joystiq

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Atkinson to appeal Modern Warfare 2 rating

Interviewed a few days ago on the ABC’s Radio National, Atkinson has reportedly stated he will be appealing the MA15+ rating given to Modern Warfare 2.  The interview itself states the game is about the Russian airport massacre level involving the killing of civilians, which is the main part of his argument against the game and its one that has been overly sensationalised in the mainstream media as well.

At the moment there aren’t any further details about whether he is going to follow through on his threat, or whether its just more of his rhetoric which is quite rife throughout the interview if you listen to the whole thing.

But given the game has already been released, its probably a bit too late now anyway, in that it’d be like closing the proverbial gate after the horse has already bolted given the number of copies of the game that have no doubt been sold in Australia already.

Via:  Kotaku

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