Gungen

Call me a cynic, but all this does is further motivate game developers to make games for the casual crowd, the numbers certainly don't lie. I get the feeling each year that more and more games are being dumbed down to appease the casual crowd instead of the enthusiast crowd. Take Left4Dead for an example, GREAT game, but there are things in the game that annoy me. For one, there is no ping number in the tab menu, only that 'signal strength' lookalike that really tells you nothing on how it's rating. They completely removed the lobby menu, so you have to completely rely on auto-join and friend-join. Not that the auto-join and friend-join are bad concepts, they are great. The trouble is you should not remove a standard of how we choose where we play and replace it with something that is not better. Auto-join by itself is not better than a server menu, together they would be perfect but with no way other than using the console (the only saving grace they have) it is annoying to join a specific server when it should not be. I have to imagine that a lot of these sacrifices were because of the artificial restrictions of the Xbox 360, as L4D was also developed for that in mind.

Left 4 Dead patch today, you can view the entire patch notes at http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/56767 Highlights include.... Versus Changes * Added HUD elements to show status of other infected players. * Changed color of infected player name in chat to red. * Fixed exploit where players could spawn infected bots * Fixed instance where a Survivor changing to the infected team would be attacked by infected bots. * Normalized special infected melee damage. * Made the following client commands cheat protected: "Kill" and "explode". * Fixed exploit where infected players could run away and teleport back to gain health. * Players can only change teams once per map. * Players can't change teams while other players are still loading. * Tank spawns at the same % through the map for both teams in versus mode. * Made the Tank and Witch spawn directly on the escape route. * Increased chance of getting the Tank or Witch. * Fixed team swap issue. Tank * Bashable objects now appear with a red glow. * Tanks hitting a car with an alarm disables the alarm permanently. * Tank frustration timer is only reset by hitting Survivors with rocks or fists. * Reduced autoshotgun damage against Tanks. Witch * Witch spawns at the same % through the map for both teams. * Avoids spawning within a certain % of the tank. * Fixed an exploit where the Witch could be woken up and tricked into attacking Survivors.

One of the suggestions I saw on the left4dead411.com forums is to actually remove the map files from the server, so that it can not even open the co-op maps. I do think more options need to be available for servers. I'm also not entirely liking the lack of a server browser, it smells of consoleitus.

Over the years I have switched back and forth from being an ATI fan to a Nvidia fan, etc. With that said, the last ATI card I used that had no problems was the 9800 series cards, which were great cards for a long time. However, ATI's drivers have always been suspect, to say the least. Nvidia's drivers have usually been more stable and they provide easier to use driver packs for entire series of their cards. Since then, I have used only Nvidia cards, mainly due to their great drivers and as far as my experience, no problems with the actual cards themselves. Hopefully whatever tiff they have with Intel can be resolved.

Officially signed up. Can't wait to play some L4D, I've been playing it non-stop since it came out. Pursuit, how's the server creation going now that you have the cvar list?