I unlocked Shiny's game this morning. Minor issues. Also unlocked mine.. major issues until I turned off UAC, disabled my firewall and rebooted. Not sure which combination of those 3 finally got rid of my errors, but it works now, so I'm not too irritated.

So, what'd ya think of it? I played a part of the first campaign with bots, and it looks pretty damn awesome. Looking forward to playing with you guys very much.

L4D2 pwnz0rs. It feels a lot more frantic and even harder than the original. The first level, with the smoke and fires, is freaking great.

Shiny and I beat the first campaign on normal yesterday. I think the difficulty level has been ramped up. Normal is actually fairly difficult. And the finale is a whole new animal Definitely a great deal of fun, and I love all the new options like lasers on the guns and different types of ammo.

Overall, it's a lot like the original with great, zombie-killing fun, but better in almost every way. BTW, I was hosting in my game and there was no hitching like there was on the demo. So either they optimized some code, or wipiing my machine fixed the problem.

Maybe they even fixed Peltz' ultralag then, who knows.

Only thing I don't like about L4D2 is the bigger weapons (in the FOV) but maybe I can tweak that in an ini file somewhere.

From what I can tell the other campaigns are even better than the first, and yeah, definitely harder. The new special infected are incredibly effective, except maybe the jockey (but I can imagine he's a nightmare on expert). The charger has pushed half my party off a ledge on occasion and is pretty darn tough to kill and the spitter's acid does CRAZY damage (don't even wanna know how much on expert, but on normal it drains your health like there's no tomorrow).

Oh and lol @ Jimmy Gibbs Jr. I like the party banter tremendously...also, nice details on how they don't know the "proper" names for some of the SI yet in the first few maps ("tongue!!").

Intriguing: at the end of Dark Carnival, one of the L4D2 campaigns, you make a stand on a rock concert stage. The band billed to play are the 'Midnight Riders'.

Now, it seems there is a website 'coming soon' for their band

http://www.midnight-riders.com/

That website is owned by Valve itself (just do an info grab if you don't believe me ), and so far features nothing but the 4 (!) band members posing.

Now...the steam achievement for completing all campaigns says 'complete all 6 campaigns' when there are only 5 in the game (Dead Center, Dark Carnival, Hard Rain, Swamp Fever and The Parish).

I'm fairly sure we can expect a campaign featuring the Midnight Riders band members soon.

I had a jocket jump on me and run me out of a window of the sky scraper in the first campaign. So yea, they can be effective, the bastards. We played part of dark carnival yesterday, but got beat down and murdered. On normal! The game is so much harder now. Expert is going to be scary.

Look at it this way: as long as Derf hasn't bought the game yet, we're spared at least one FF spasm wipe per try. Sorry man, I lub you really! Please revive me with a defib once you tk me!

Hehe, you can count on it. Don't blame me if I defib you from the nuts though.

Hey, it's best to have rare moments of uber-spaz-FF compared to frequent-"go-unnoticed"-FF. At least that's what I keep telling myself.

I don't notice when I FF half the time. Does that count?
I finished dark carnival on normal with bots.... man, I swear this game is so much harder. Great ending though.

Ox, we gonna run L4d2 this weekend or?

We can try putting on a game tomorrow, sure. Today is still DA territory.

Me and Peltz tried playing but his ping issues popped up again. He started out at a decent enough 115 or so (decent considering the distance and me hosting locally) but after a few minutes it spiked to 500+ and would stay there even after reconnecting and resetting his modem. Sigh. Sucks man. Is it only in campaign games with us or on every server?

In other news:

- Derf is being a bitch about spending cash in L4D2, even though it's a mere 30 quid in the UK

- When are Shiny and Satis off? I seem to remember them saying they would be home this week. I could find an evening or two to play during the week..


And yes, the game is harder, for a variety of reasons:

- zombies come from angles/spawn points
- waaay more special infected appearances, sometimes two of the same kind at a time (seen 2 hunters and 2 smokers eg)
- the crescendo events are HARD
- just generally being unfamiliar with the maps so far

Oh and Nick is a dick.

Exit Left 4 Dead, Enter Doom 3, lol, that was my impression after some playtime yesterday.

Ox when you get home, lemme know, i messed around with my modem settings so i would like to give it a few minute test run to see if the ping is still high. I got the multiplayer for Borderlands working so i would like to see if it makes any difference to L4D2.

I'm out for a drink after work, but I'll probably be able to play a little in the late evening. We'll see.

We're off this Thursday and Friday due to Thanksgiving, so that would work for us. Plus the weekend, of course. I plan on avoiding any familial entanglements.