Edit: Looks like this came out two days ago, sorry if this is old news.

It happened last year with L4D, and now it's happening again this year with another woefully insecure demo for public dissection. If you've played through the demo a couple of times (which would be a fine stunt considering the occasionally broken lobby system) and feel like playing as the new infected, then download this mod and gather a bunch of friends to do the things zombies do to survivors.

- First things first, once your L4D2 demo has downloaded, right click on it, go to Properties > Updates and turn off automatic updates. I guarantee you this will be patched in the days or weeks to come; you'll thank me for this later.
- Second of all, go here and download this file.
- Thirdly, unzip the file into you Left 4 Dead 2 demo 'addons' folder. That's the hard part done.
- Now, start the game.
- Go to Options > Keyboard > Allow Developer Console and change it to 'enable'.
- Press the ` or ~ key (the key next to 1 and above tab, 'tilde' on American keyboards) to open the console
- Type... plugin_allow_remote_commands 1
plugin_cvar sb_all_bot_team 1

- Start a single player game or local multiplayer lobby
- Open the console again and type "set_infected 1"

You can also enable cheats, although not in exactly the same way as before. Valve has disabled cheats directly, but you can still enable them by creating a 'listen server', whatever one of those is. Anyway, here's how you get around it:

- Open the console and type... "map e5m1..." and select the first map from the drop down menu.
- Once in game, type in "sv_cheats 1" and you're away.

You can spawn items by typing "give ..." (with a space afterwards) and selecting the appropriate item. You can spawn infected by typing "z_spawn ..." and adding the name of whichever infected you choose and there are of course all the cheats from L4D which carry over, with a whole bunch more as well. I'm going to set up a script for this to make it easier to execute and add a list of fun commands tomorrow. In the meantime, get yourself infected and start breaking bones.

Crash Course is good. Very good. I'd go so far as to say that, with the exception of certain moments in the other campaigns, it is the best versus campaign I've played so far. It combines the best elements of versus and compresses them. This does a number of things. For one, it obviously means the maps are more concise. You can play a round of versus and not feel obligated to play and play until your infant children have starved or your family members physically pull you away in a fiery commotion of tears and psychiatry or maybe that's just me.

The less obvious side effect is that it allows overlap between the memorable moments of L4D, which is definitely a positive. A witch attack will be lined up side by side with a car alarm, which is right next to an errant gas can that a smoker is going to pull you though. Instead of each moment being a separate event, everything is going on at once. The peaks and valleys are still there, but they are swifter; amplified by the campaign's length.



Things I liked about Crash Course.
- The level design. There are plenty of cars, alarms, high roofs, tight corners and precarious ledges that make the jobs of each special infected more accessible and increase the risk to the survivors. At the same time, there are now more routes to take, with subtle sandbox elements that prevent overt camping and stacking.
- The atmosphere. This campaign feels to me like a better representation of the Zombie Apocalypse (capitalised) than the other levels. Crash Course is brimming with history and implied story.
- The humour. The dialogue has been expanded upon for Crash Course with additional writing on the walls and survivor remarks, which are fucking awesome. I won't spoil this for you, but you'll appreciate the detail.
- It's free. This isn't something I'd explicitly pay for. It's good, but it is only two chapters. It's appreciated content and the reason why Valve is the only company who ever gets my money on day one.

Things I didn't like so much about Crash Course.
- The art style. The levels are still very blue, and sometimes they are orange. I'm kinda sick of that colour scheme. I liked the green and brown pallet of Blood Harvest and the rich oranges of Dead Air. When I saw the live stream, I thought I was watching No Mercy.
-The humour. Yes I know I said I liked it. But there are a few jokes that jar with me. The "I love Helicopters!" exchange is the perfect example of how not to roll with a meme.
- The length. I really wanted three chapters. I was holding out for an announcement that there would be a third, but unfortunately that didn't happen. There is plenty of content to warrant replay, but hopping back and forth between the two chapters will get old.
- The connection problems. I didn't much like spending an hour downloading from the Tiwan, Polish, Irish and Singapore servers because all the UK bandwidth was being used. To eventually get into the game and realise that there were no servers available except local hosts was little comfort. Every game I have played, I haven't gotten under a ping of 150.



In conclusion, Crash Course has some issues, but trumps them by being awesome, and who gives a shit anyway you malicious bastard. It's free and brilliant so shut your whore mouth. Unless you have a 360, in which case, don't buy it, unless you really don't have anything else you want to spend the moon money on.

Xbox 360 users can download and play Crash Course right now. For us PC troglodytes, we have to wait till valve feels like giving us the update. So to tide us over, here is a live stream of the game being played.

Watch live video from Xbox 360: SwiftWave's Gaming. on Justin.tv

Riff could be a really shitty game. You might refer to it as completely unremarkable and emotionally paralytic. I wouldn’t even call it a great amount of fun, not compared to the standards that some free games have. You might also want to mute the game, because the music is annoyingly characteristic, you cannot mute it and plays on a goddamn loop. Simply, it doesn’t do a great deal new or well. What it does do is take the kind of fast-paced puzzle solving that you might get from games like Audiosurf and Bejewelled, and presents it in a clinical environment for short bursts of entertainment.

It’s the kind of game you put on for 5 minutes on the bus or while you’re waiting for something to download. You can get it here. You might like it a little bit. I think this is possibly the worst article I’ve ever written. Even worse than that fucking pub joke. Don’t ask.

As a white man living in a nice neighbourhood with a decent part-time job and a loving family and girlfriend, it is my duty to defend ethnic minorities who are not fortunate enough to be blessed with an internet connection or the sense of self respect necessary to do so themselves. So, I vowed to seek out and expose all the racism in video games. In the past, I have used my journalism to journalise the racism in the racist Japanese video game Pikmin. Now I will use my piercing Internet integrity once again to call out the popular trend of racism in videos like the flighty rebel that I am.

Left 4 Dead takes place in Pennsylvania, Africa, which is highly insensitive after the tragic events of Resident Evil in which thousands of Africas lost their lives. There are corpses from that tragedy still waiting to be buried, and yet we have ‘entertainment’ such as L4D making light of it for your perverse satisfaction. Don’t take my word for it though; ask the 40,000 people who have been quick to voice their thoughts on this sensitive issue of racism with the boycott of the highly anticipated sequel, Phones 4 You.

This is just the tip of a very white iceberg. I played the game for months, oblivious to how totally racist the game was making me be. My first hint was when I heard that they had called one survivor Francis. This is an obvious reference to Francis West of the 1977 classic Dead Rising - a game made by Copcam, which has Cop in the name and everyone knows cops are racist and only arrest black people. Plus Francis says that he is a policeman in the game, and that made me really angry because if it wasn’t for the law there would be no crime.

But my biggest tip off came when I realised that the only black survivor in the game is a woman, clearly because they wanted to portray blacks as the fragile inferior sex. Louise is a constant annoyance, with her high pitched, whiney voice and the way she keeps pissing off the witch by making snide comments that are hurtful and unwarranted. She also has a stereotypical drug abuse problem which she is all too quick to remind other survivors of. This kind of blatant ethnic bias is the kind of thing that our society should not have to endure, not when I voted for Obama.

Given the difficult financial climate that we’re living in, I find it disgusting that my Xbox 360 has gotten the E74 error just weeks before Brutal Legend is set to release, and that I have to put down my controller for long enough to be subjected to the kind of burning insight that happens when I stop being distracted with pretty colours for 15 seconds. Because all colours are pretty in my eyes, and it’s about time America woke up to the racialocities that is everywhere around you.

Tonnes of Left 4 Dead 2 footage here, the main one showing off the new nade launcher. Can't honestly see it's purpose in-game but who cares; it's a nade launcher. Maybe it'll be useful for clearing crowds of infected from an incapped survivor, or maybe it'll be used to cut down a charging tank. Who knows? Whatever the case, it'll mainly be used to grief people.


This video shows off the new improved AI fire mechanics. Great stuff!


Here is another new gun - not an AK47, but close to it. Gorgeous graphics as well.


This is a nice, slow paced video. Gives you a chance to admire the details.


This is my favourite video; it looks gorgeous fullscreen.

There are a load more, so if you really cannot get enough Left 4 Dead 2 footage, here are some links:
More Gameplay
Chet Faliszek Interview - GamePro
Doug Lombardi Interview - G4TV
Spitter / Charger Gameplay - Gametrailers (the one you've seen already)