Valve released some astonishing figures for Left 4 Dead 2 today. Over 28 billion zombies have been "shot, bludgeoned, chainsawed and killed — or, for our younger readers, taken to a farm where they can frolic and shuffle around forever." Yes, billion, and if you want to talk specifics, its actually 28,981,249,043 zombies -- wait, now 28,981,249,044 -- and counting. The amazing part is, the game's been out less than three months!
Here's some facts to put that figure into perspective:
The entire population of the planet has been zombified and killed 4.26 times.
With the average height of a zombie being 6 feet, if you stacked them end to end they would circle the globe 1,322 times.
If you placed 28,981,249,043 rulers end to end, they would reach 28,981,249,043 feet in the sky.
Left 4 Dead 2's fictional rock band the Midnight Riders might be making their way into Rock Band. Two tracks from the band, "Midnight Ride" and "One Bad Man," are reported to be in the playtest phase currently on Rock Band Network.
It's not guaranteed that these songs will be reaching the game, but considering how far they've gotten so far, it's looking pretty likely.
Steam has released an update to both Left 4 Dead 2 and the Left 4 Dead 2 SDK, enabling PZ bots and adding some map fixes as well as a few other changes. As always, the update will be applied the next time you login to the game.
Check for the full list of changes after the break.
Valve announced a new update coming to Left 4 Dead 2 that will add some new features to Versus mode. The infected team will now get bots if they don't have a full group of four, which helps to balance the game out significantly. Another big change is auto-spawns are getting removed during finales.
There's also more good news. The update will be arriving on both Xbox 360 and PC
At CES, we had the chance to get our hands on Razer/Sixense's new motion controller for PC, which to this point does not have an official name. These controllers are pretty sweet peripherals. Using magnetic technology, they have significantly more accurate accelerometers than Nintendo's Wii remote, meaning they don't require all the recalibrations the Wii often does.
We were able to play Left 4 Dead 2 using one of the Nunchuk-shaped devices, and it worked surprisingly well. The demo showed off a number of different ways in which the controller could be used -- as a standard mouse with motion functions (swinging it for melee attacks, etc.) to more motion-centric designs.
A Steam forum user by the name of Urik found that it only takes six seconds to kill a Tank with a police baton. Of course, that's assuming the Tank is standing there picking his nose, but still! Urik found the weapon effectiveness against a Tank for every weapon in Left 4 Dead 2, seen in the graphic above. Who knew the melee weapons were so effective against it!
Christmas might have come and gone, but it's still not too late for some classic Christmas music. Left 4 Dead 2's fictional band The Midnight Riders released a Christmas song today, appropriately titled "All I Want for Christmas (is to Kick Your Ass)." I guess this is Valve's way of saying "merry Christmas."
In 1987, the Midnight Riders were asked to participate in a children's charity Christmas album with their rock peers. The Riders refused. In a 1993 Guitar God Magazine article, Dusty explained: "Givin' kids charity just makes 'em weak, man. Teach a kid to fish, he can eat fish his whole life. Teach a kid NOT to fish, he starves to death. Where I come from that's murder, Homes." A few years later, the Riders grudgingly agreed to participate in a 1998 Christmas album in exchange for not having to do 30,000 hours of community service. "All I Want For Christmas is to Kick Your Ass" was written, recorded and mailed in less than one hour.
Valve announced today that the authoring tools for Left 4 Dead 2 are now available. If you're looking to design your own custom campaign, now you can! Go into Steam, open up the Tools tab, and install the Left 4 Dead 2 Add-on Support. "This download is sizable, but will update your L4D2 installation to allow running ANY map, including custom maps made for the original Left 4 Dead," writes Valve on the L4D blog.
Everyone's going to benefit from this, whether you're a designer or not. We're about to get a whole lot more L4D2 content.
For more info on the authoring tools, check out the blog post on it.
No, we didn't get hacked by Russian spammers. Left 4 Dead 2 got a patch that adds Russian subtitles. The update also fixed up the lobby system and made it so dedicated servers are preferred when searching for matches. Here's the full list of fixes:
Reduced Dedicated Server max search ping to 150 ms
Teams that prefer listen servers will no longer be matched with teams that prefer dedicated servers
Official dedicated servers are now preferred when searching for team matches
More populous lobbies are now preferred over less populous ones when searching for games
Players who crash or have failed to load are no longer banned if they have been kicked
Update Russian subtitles
Fixed not being able to interlink teams in team-on-team mode
Fixed not being able to properly migrate team lobby after team leader would leave the lobby
Fixed not being able to invite friends if player was not team leader in a team-on-team game
