If Haggis were a zombie...

For the past couple of months, the Red Army has been playing a weekly versus campaign on Left 4 Dead 2 against their arch-rivals of old, Lowstress. It was a tough, hard slog, and the Red Army picked up the bit exactly where they left off in playing clan matches, typically failing to impress at every turn. Nevertheless, it was for the most part a close-run thing and often a very tight affair, with everything to play for going into the finale.

The first campaign started with some early surprise victories for the Red Army, but eventually we lost on cans in the finale round. And despite technically levelling the series after the second campaign, our victory was only thanks to some splendid play by two temporary allies in the struggle. In the following weeks Lowstress trampled all over us to romp home very easy victories on Swamp Fever and Hard Rain, a combination of our disorganisation and their fielding a strong team. However, things returned to their original tight, tense equilibrium for the final original campaign, The Parish, which was again decided on The Bridge finale, albeit in spectacular style.

Whilst there are still a couple more campaigns to run through, the series has already been taken by Lowstress, so I’m popping this post up now before I forget about it (and whilst I have time on my hands!)

Thanks to Luth, Lütte, P, Rez, [CzR] Dave and [=LS=) Talarin for playing for the Red Army. Many thanks and fair play to our nemeses for keeping the gaming ever fun and friendly, and offering up sacrificial lambs to the slaughter (i.e. mercs) for when we were down a man. Finally, thanks again to Talarin and the rest for helping to organise the matches, and congratulations to all on the well-deserved series victory! We're pulling the Iron Curtain down for now, but it'll be up again for you to kick us in the goolies before too long!

Campaigns

Dead Center — Red Army 1386 - 1531 Lowstress (Match report)

Dark Carnival — Red Army 2464 - 2184 Lowstress (Match report)

Swamp Fever — Red Army 1012 - 2837 Lowstress (Match report)

Hard Rain — Red Army 1300 - 2354 Lowstress (Match report)

The Parish — Red Army 2003 - 2387 Lowstress (Match report)

Awards

The "Methuselah" Award for Longest Time Played

Comrade Lütte & Comrade Chez — For playing every minute of the series.

The "Aldrich Ames" Award for Best Spy

[=LS=) Talarin — For gallantly helping us to win our only campaign on Dark Carnival.

The "Black Sheep" Award for Most Willing to Play

[CzR] Dave — For assisting the Pink Army to victory on Dark Carnival, defeat on Swamp Fever, and turning up to play for Lowstress on Hard Rain before being asked to leave again.

The “Forrest Gump” Award for Most Unaware

Comrade Rez — For typing in after five minutes of play “Versus?” on Swamp Fever.

The “French Army” Award for Most Useless

Comrade Chez — For spending 4 minutes running around as a Jockey on The Park of The Parish, before finally jumping in and dying with 0 damage inflicted.
The Red Army — For dying before even reaching the Tank on Swamp Fever. Repeatedly.

The “Leave No Man Behind” Award for Rescuing Teammates

Comrade Lütte — For leaving the safe room in a valiant attempt to rescue teammates on The Highway of Dark Carnival (amongst others).

The “Jägermeister” Award for Best Hunter

Comrade Rez — For his valiant and failed attempt to jump across the river in the Plank Country of Swamp Fever.

The “Frankie Dettori” Award for Best Jockey

Comrade Luth — For her impressive early kill on The Hotel stage of Dead Center, with just 4 hours’ playing time under her belt, and the super cool call on comms: “Come on you, out the window!”

The “Light Brigade” Award for Best Charger

Comrade Lütte — For the spectacular charge down the narrow alleyway on The Park stage on The Parish, without grabbing a single Survivor.

The “T-34″ Awards for Best Tank

Comrade P — For whipping over the wall with a “Surprise fuckers!” on The Quarter of The Parish.
[=LS=) Talarin — For his sniper rock to finish the round on The Coaster of Dark Carnival.
Comrade Chez — For his CS-style hide-and-seek play on Town Escape of Hard Rain.

Videos [Incomplete]

A selection of videos from my perspective from the earlier campaigns.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I'm a surprise...

As I have mentioned elsewhere, Steam has come a long way since its initial release, but there’s still swathes of potential to be unlocked if only the development team would make some steps in the right direction. So I’ll get ready to eat a couple of my words when I say that there are some very welcome changes being worked on under the hood.

If anyone’s been brave enough to try it, there’s a new beta UI* that was released a wee while ago, which promises various enhancements to the current look, as well as swapping out the IE-powered browser for a Webkit model (same engine powering Safari and Chrome). Aside from being faster, more standards compliant and generally more up-to-date, the browser engine is safely cross-platform. Along with some files hidden away in the new UI, and some leaked adverts and whatnot, the latest information is that Valve plan to port Steam to Mac OS X to be released some time this year, and that the upcoming Portal 2 will indeed be playable on Mac.

Some pretty decent news all round, in my opinion. There are already a number of titles on Steam that could potentially be played natively on Mac, if the service had supported it on release, and this news can only have a positive impact on the number of games sold and released for the system. And presumably if Portal 2 is released successfully, Valve may make it their policy to release games for both systems in future, just as id once did for ‘coding practise.’ Now the question remains, just how long will we have to wait before Linux compatible binaries are released?

*Quick word of warning, when I tried the new UI my fonts disappeared and I had to re-download some games that somehow went missing.

Image via Wikipedia

We’re all fairly used to seeing the deleted scenes of our favourite movies, or at least we know that they’re there on the DVD should you ever actually bothering to watch them, but here’s something you don’t often see: the deleted scenes from a computer game!

Apparently, whilst flicking through the original source code during the development of the Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition remake, developer Adam Bormann (no relation?) came across segments of the game that had been commented out by the original creators. Admittedly, it’s mostly extra dialogue and a few extended scenes, but if you were a fan, you can read it all up here. Makes you wonder what other surprises could be lurking around in commented SCUMM code.

One big game play change being introduced in TI is the appearance of hostages. Expect active civilians within the map that run around, react to events happening around them (bullets flying by), getting in the way, and being used by terrorists as human shields. Another element is introducing dogs — not little Chihuahuas that the civilians carry but big dogs, German Shepherds or Rottweilers that players can command.

Having had a quick look and read over the news, I have to say it doesn’t look all that exciting. The theme and settings appear to be exactly the same, the graphics are entirely dated, and the new features and changes sound like little more than a mod of the original Counter-Strike. Whilst Minh deserves recognition for his achievement with Counter-Strike, in creating a mod that was so intrinsically essential to Half-Life’s extended success and Valve’s continued strength in the gaming world today, I can’t see this release doing anything to affect or attract that large, conservative corpus of CS players, nor offer anything that would appeal to a new gaming crowd.

[Via IGN]

Buffed

The TF2 team have recently posted on their blog that whilst all’s going swimmingly, a number of people have been temporarily pulled off the team ahead of November’s release of Left 4 Dead 2. Although the latter looks to be an interesting release, it has caused some upset being released so soon after the original, and with relatively little downloadable content having been pushed out in the meantime for the original L4D. An L4D2 Boycott group, demanding various efforts on the part of Valve to prevent a split in the community (and promising not to buy the game should their demands be ignored), gained quite a large following. Sufficient indeed that a couple of the group’s key figures were invited down to Valve HQ for a tour, and a proper outing of their views. Of course, once key figures in any dispute meet up for tea and biscuits, there’s bound to be disagreement in the ranks, and charges of the pair being bought out by Valve will no doubt drive a wedge into the group. You can read their (rather reasonably) worded manifesto here.

Of course, that might all be a moot point for the Australians, if the censors have their way. The latest draft of L4D2 submitted to the classification panel resulted in an ‘RC’—Refused Classification. Presumably a little tweaking on Valve’s part and things will all be hunky dory again. But the news does suggest plenty of blood and gore for those of us playing the game in the free freer world.

Meanwhile, for any further updates on TF2 we’ll just have to bide our time. But before shifting emphasis over to L4D2, Valve did at least give us a decent sized patch full of bug fixes and feature improvements to mull over. Sadly, no functionality for swapping backpack items yet, but in the meantime you can show off your own trawl with this handy little site. Or just use it to eye up future swaps—like the wonderful Mallet of Banishment sported by Gabe Newell.