As revealed last week, two of video games' biggest zombie-centric franchises will be bumping uglies when crossover content for the PC versions of Resident Evil 6 and Left 4 Dead 2 hits in in two weeks. This video shows what it looks like when Coach, Nick, Ellis and Rochelle take on the BOWs of Capcom's global apocalypse, with Special Infected enemies from L4D2 popping in to mix things up. Remember this undead mash-up won't cost anything so look for it as an added option on April 5th.

Valve has announced that they are adding an "experimental virtual reality mode" to their multiplayer first-person shooter Team Fortress 2. It will be playable by anyone with an Oculus Rift developer kit. The mode will be released in the coming days.

The full release from Valve:

Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Counter-Strike, Half-Life, and Left 4 Dead), today announced the addition of an experimental Virtual Reality mode to Team Fortress 2. The new mode will be released in the coming days as part of an update to the popular Free to Play game.

Anyone with an Oculus Rift Developer Kit will be able to use their device to play all of Team Fortress 2 on the PC. All game modes and classes are supported with the new Virtual Reality mode.

"When we first played an early version of Virtual Reality mode in Team Fortress we were blown away by the immersion we experienced.", said Joe Ludwig at Valve. "VR is just getting started, but it is going to have a big impact on gaming. This update will let us share that experience with more of the Team Fortress community."

"Valve's done an incredible job bringing Team Fortress 2 to virtual reality! TF2 is the most-played game in my Steam library, so you can imagine how excited I am to play it in the Rift with all of our backers," said Palmer Luckey, Founder of Oculus VR, Inc.

In addition to gaining access to the new Virtual Reality mode, owners of the Oculus Rift will also be granted a unique Oculus Rift in-game hat. Steam codes to redeem for this item will be sent out by Oculus.

Team Fortress 2 is Valve's Free to Play team-based online game. The game has had more than 350 updates since its release with The Orange Box in 2007.

Okay, step one: Get an Oculus Rift dev kit. Step two: Play this. Step three: Get that Crysis mod that Nathan Andrews made and play that.

Suddenly, the mother of all zombie apocalypses is about to happen. This just wound up in our inbox:

Capcom and Valve are pleased to announce the Resident Evil® 6 x Left 4 Dead 2 project. This crossover project between two of the interactive entertainment industry's most respected publishers will see characters from Left 4 Dead™ 2 featured exclusively in the forthcoming PC version of Resident Evil® 6, while enemies from Resident Evil 6 will invade the PC version of Left 4 Dead 2. All content will be made available completely free for fans of either game to access and play.

Owners of Resident Evil 6 PC will be able to select one of four survivors from Left 4 Dead 2's iconic cast – Coach, Nick, Ellis and Rochelle – when playing PC exclusive mode, The Mercenaries No Mercy. Each character will have a special customized weapon load-out created just for use in Resident Evil 6. In addition to the four survivors, two of the infamous Special Infected zombies from the Left 4 Dead franchise – the Witch and Mini Tank – will also make a cameo appearance in this mode, relentlessly attacking players regardless of whether a character from Left 4 Dead 2 or Resident Evil 6 is chosen. This new and exclusive content will automatically be downloaded in the background to all owners of the PC version of Resident Evil 6 from April 5.

Making the leap to the PC version of Left 4 Dead 2 will be some of Resident Evil 6's most fearsome enemies – Lepotitsa, Napad and Ogroman. All three characters were brought to life in Left 4 Dead 2 by Valve's renowned developers using its Steam Workshop tools. Owners of the PC version of Left 4 Dead 2 will be able to face a new deadly challenge when Resident Evil 6 characters infect Valve's classic zombie title this spring.

Commenting on the crossover project, Chet Faliszek from Valve stated: "We're huge Resident Evil fans, so when the opportunity arose to work directly with Capcom to combine L4D2 and RE6, we jumped at it."

Resident Evil 6 Producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi added: "The Resident Evil 6 team really enjoyed working on this crossover, and we're confident that our fans will have a great time with it too! We hope you enjoy this unique content."

More as we learn it.

Update:


Here's a developer diary from RE6 producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi, courtesy of Capcom.

Nobody likes movies based on video games, with very few exceptions. That said, we're far from giving up on fan-made web shows based on video games. Case in point: this trailer for Machinima and Wayside Creations' Portal series, Aperture R&D.

Evidently Machinima is calling it Portal meets The Office. As long as they don't run that concept into the ground like the real The Office, we're okay with that, especially with the creators of Fallout: Nuka Break in charge. Here's the description from the Youtube info:

Based in the world of Portal 2, the idiosyncratic scientists of Aperture Research Labs are in an endless battle for the meaningless title of Lab Team of the Month.

Aperture R&D Coming To Machinima! (Portal Live-Action Series)
[Machinima]

Thanks Magnum357.

Cartoonist Stephen Lester is "currently on a mission to fill his home with vintage video games and video game memorabilia". Part of that involves his guest bathroom, which is becoming a themed shrine to Valve's Portal series.

Colour-coded and filled with merch, it's... certainly... something. Especially since I'm pretty sure that's a talking Cave Johnson portrait. Which, I don't know, could cause some people problems.

Portal Bathroom [Viva Las Segas, via Gamefreaks]

Sit back and watch two decades of video game graphics flash before your eyes. YouTube user drloser333 has uploaded a video from French site NoFrag that unfurls the graphics of more than a dozen first-person shooters, from 1992's Wolfenstein 3 to 2011's Battlefield 3.

Did the FPS get better-looking? They have at least become way more realistic, But maybe you're more of a fan of older, more abstract styles?

Graphic evolution of First Person Shooters: 1992-2012 [YouTube, uploaded by drloser333; more details (in French) at NoFrag.com]

There's no company quite like Valve. Super successful and with an organisation some would call crazy, there's also no company quite as interesting. So hearing about how Valve hires, and fires people, is far more educational than it would be for just about any other video game company.

Writing on Gamasutra, the company's economist Yanis Varoufakis has lifted the lid on some of the company's employment policies, which should be useful for anyone hoping to one day work there (and find out what the hell is going on with Half-Life 3).

When it comes to hiring, they don't usually have interviews. They identify needs/vacancies, form teams, come to a consensus on the best available people out there then go head-hunting.

As for firing—which took place recently, and had people wondering—seems it mostly takes place not with under-performing employees, but those who may not fit with the company's famous "boss free" structure.

How Valve hires, how it fires, and how much it pays [Gamasutra]

Portal may not seem like the most romantic game ever, seeing as how it's populated with a bunch of robots and only a single human character. But even all these years later, people still haven't gotten over protagonist Chell and her doomed relationship with the heart-decorated Companion Cube.

The folks at Random Encounters Entertainment (not to be confused with Jason's weekly JRPG column) have put together this heartwarming duet between Chell and her cube. They seem so happy! Ah, but happiness is fleeting.

The DS still is home to a robust homebrew scene, as we see here in this Portal port that modder Smealum has been working on for about the past six months. "Still nowhere near playable," he writes under the latest video, but it's brought along Portal staples like turrets, cubes, switches and energy balls.

"This is still extremely early footage so please don't be too harsh," smealum writes. "Lots of debug features are present, including the ability to fly, see portals through walls and move cubes from a distance. Also, keep in mind this was shot in an emulator which provides good but still less than perfect rendering. As such, be aware that most (not all, but still) of the graphical glitches you can see in this video don't happen on hardware (mostly the portal transition is a lot nicer on an actual DS)."

YouTube video uploaded by smealum

Random Time! - How about a homebrew version of Portal for the DS? [GoNintendo]

You may have gotten awfully excited today when you read that not only is JJ Abrams talking to Valve about making a game, he's also talking about making a movie with the studio.

That's OK! Perfectly understandable. He's a talented guy, and the prospect of seeing Gordon Freeman on the silver screen is enough to get most people smiling.

But reading the news, I couldn't help but feel that Abrams and Newell had shown their hands too early. And in doing so, they're setting up a whole lot of people for a whole lot of heartache.

If you actually look at what Abrams and Newell said, it's a relationship at the earliest, most tentative stages. A game idea they'd like to work on, a pair of movie projects that Abrams is "going to be bringing on a writer" for. That's it. No contracts, no titles, no press releases.

As we've outlined before, the chances of a project advancing from this early stage to the silver screen are remote. At best. Hell, even most movies that get directors and writers officially attached, and studio backing, fail to materialise.

And that's before you even take into account how busy Abrams is going to be over the next decade doing, oh, Star Wars and Star Trek.

That's Hollywood for you. Budget realities and schedule conflict are bad news for the majority of aspiring projects. But it's also how the video game business works. There are way more games that are killed off in their early stages than ever reach the market. We see, on an almost monthly basis, how games with large staffs, completed assets and trailers are canned; if you could see the bodies of the number of projects terminated while still on the drawing board, it would make you weep.

So Abrams and Valve boss Gabe Newell coming out and "announcing" both projects so early is an odd move. Maybe they're trying to drum up interest/support amongst fans. Maybe they're trying to show movie studios there's a market here. Whatever the reason, the mere fact they spoke about them (and yes, I know Abrams dropped caveats like "it's as real as anything in Hollywood ever gets") is setting a lot of people up for disappointment if, as the laws of probability would have it, either one or both projects fails to ever materialise.

Who knows, though. In the year 2027, as we mourn the death of home consoles and play games in our flying cars, we may also look back on how awesome JJ Abrams' Half Portal Trek Wars was on the St3ambox, and only regret slightly how much money we spent on the 4K 3D home version of the Half-Life movie trilogy.

If after all this salt you still want to dream about that future, go ahead. I just don't see it happening.

Sorry if you see this as pissing on your parade. I'm not trying to hurt you in the short-term. I'm just trying to help your poor heart out in the long-term! It's hard enough waiting for Half-Life 3 as it is. Adding more Valve projects to the watchlist might just be too much to bear.