Halloween is on its way, and while ghosts and ghouls may have been the undead horrors of decades past, here in 2012 it's all about the zombies and their ilk.

What better way to get in the mood for spooky doom than with this weirdly lovely, thoroughly instructive image from Left 4 Dead 2? See zombie, apply flamethrower. Now that's useful advice for the ages.

Click the image to expand to its full hi-res gory glory.

Open Up [Dead End Thrills]

Here's the problem: Borderlands 2 has a ridiculous number of lootable things. Like, they're just everywhere. And even if I loot them, next time I boot the game up, there they are again. Full. Waiting to be opened. So I do it again, and again, and again. It never ends.

Picture this: a frenzy with badasses flanking me left and right, friends down and needing reviving, and what is my dumb butt doing? Getting shot in the face while elbow deep in shit: bullymong scat is also lootable.

It didn't used to be like that. But then I took a look at Borderlands' challenges, which award you badass tokens that you can redeem for stat upgrades. One of those challenges is called "Open Pandora's Boxes," and it involves opening any and all lootable objects.

It's so simple, and I can get perks for doing it—so of course I indulge. Under normal circumstances, Borderland's challenges, like those in many games, are okay: they encourage you to step outside your comfort zone and try new things, or they reward you for something you already do. I can get behind the well-crafted challenges.

"Hurly Burly," for instance, requires me to shoot bullymong projectiles out of midair—it's not something I would seek to do on my own, and it's a difficult thing to do, so I appreciate it's inclusion. Games like Left 4 Dead 2 in particular have countless number of amazing achievements and challenges: CL0WND has you honk the noses of 10 clowns, which you do by meleeing, (silly but amusing!) and Chaos Generator requires you to have all of the generators running at once in "The Sacrifice" (extra challenge, because each generator gives you a wave of zombies!)

But why give me incentive to do something that's not fun or meaningful? It's one thing to open a chest with guns in it—who doesn't get a little wide-eyed and single-minded when they see a chest? Chests are great. I want to open chests. There might be awesome guns in there.

The only reason I open the toilets scattered around the game is because I need ammo: a necessity, but not something I enjoy doing necessarily. But the second you introduce an achievement or a challenge, everything changes—regardless of how enjoyable it actually is to do. I'll do it anyway—and I think game designers sometimes abuse this compulsion.

For example, there are countless games with achievements like "kill x number of enemies with y gun." The issue is that the reason I don't use the gun in the first place is because it was awful or because there's a better gun. But instead of giving me a gun that's fun to use, I get a challenge to use the gun instead. So I'll use it, but I'm not going to be happy about it.

Stop that, game designers. It's a shortcut. You get me to do what you want, but it's not because you designed something worthwhile. You know you've got something on your hands when the player gravitates to do something, to experiment, without being explicitly told to do so. Not that I'm saying that's easy to design or anything—if it was, I'm guessing that more games would achieve it!

It's not all mechanical stumbles—sometimes, the problems rewards pose are more ideological. Bulletstorm has a special system called "skillshots", which give you extra points depending on how creatively you kill your enemies. The points flash up on the screen, and the whole idea is to try to one-up yourself with more elaborate kills as you go along. It turns out that the love of points above all else can be betraying. Brendan Keogh puts the experience of playing Bulletstorm best when he says:

It's all good fun. It's all satisfying and violent and everything you want from a shooter. But then my partner walks into the room while I am playing and sees what I am doing. Or I write it out in an essay like I just did, and it feels kind of… wrong. Whereas most shooters attempt to justify the endless violence with some kind of framing narrative or an unredeemably evil enemy, Bulletstorm is more honest. It is a murder simulator, and it doesn't try to be anything else.

Similarly, I get uncomfortable thinking not so much about what the game has me do, but the way in which it has me do it: points. Points change things, give me incentive, yes—but more alarmingly, in this case, points help dehumanize what's happening on the screen all the more. In Brendan's case, being rewarded for killing creatively turns out to be revealing inasmuch as it is betraying: it forces him to wonder if he enjoys the murder and the mayhem after all.

Bulletstorm doesn't tell me that I should feel bad for what I do in violent videogames. On the contrary, it tells me without a flicker of irony or doubt that this is and should be enjoyable. Actually, that isn't quite accurate. Bulletstorm doesn't tell me anything; it forces me to admit that I enjoy this. It's a strange, non-judging passive-aggression. Oh, you like murdering people in gory ways just for more meaningless points? That's nice. Here is a guy you could decapitate for twenty-five points. You don't have to, but I think we both know you want to.

The game acknowledges that we like what it has us do, doesn't it? Maybe points have nothing to do with it. Or maybe points just end the charade and make it all blatant. Where does the sadism begin, organically with the player, or via the encouragement that the reward brings? Are we just kidding ourselves by trying to draw a distinction?

Reward with caution, game designers: challenges, achievements and the like change everything, but not always for the better.

Video spoilers

...is pooping.

From one of my favorite YouTubers—and in the spirit of zombie week—comes this short and sweet clip of a very...unique encounter with Left 4 Dead 2's tank.

I never thought I'd feel bad for a zombie until now. There he was, minding his own business on a flushable porta potty when Coach decides to shoot him immediately after violating his privacy. Now, if he was reading a quantum physics book on the other hand...

Two in the Tank [YouTube]

Brothers Colin and Connor McGuire wanted a Left 4 Dead movie... so they made one.

The home project took them the better part of two years, including 3000 hours of editing. The final product is about the length of an "hour" long television show, clocking in around 40 minutes, and looks at least as good as several TV shows I've seen.

You can find out more about the making-of from the video listing and the McGuires' Facebook page.

Eagle-eyed gamers watching the tricksy horror flick Cabin In The Woods might have noticed a cool shout-out to Valve's Left 4 Dead in a sequence in the third act of the movie.

Talking today in a Reddit IAmA, the film's director Drew Goddard said we almost got a lot more than that: If MGM hadn't gone bankrupt, we would've gotten a downloadable Left 4 Dead expansion pack based on the movie.

Cabin In The Woods Spoilers Follow.

Here's Goddard:

We actually were going to do a downloadable L4D2 expansion pack, where you'd fight in the Cabin world, but then MGM went bankrupt so the delay squashed it. But the people at Valve were still cool enough to let us use some of their monsters to fill the cubes in the background (I had a lot of cubes to fill.)

By the way — the game was gonna be amazing. You were gonna be able to play in both the upstairs "Cabin in the Woods" world and the downstairs "facility" world with all the monsters. Believe me, I HATE all video games based on movies, they always suck, but porting Cabin into Left For Dead felt like the right fit. It pains me that it didn't happen.

I already think that Cabin in the Woods had a lot of fun playing with video game tropes, so it hurts my heart that we almost got to take a four-player run not only through the cabin but through the monster-filled facility underneath. I wonder if there would have been a merman? Or if Sigourney Weaver would have been the final girl-boss?

I guess now we'll never know. But we can always imagine.

Drew Goddard IAmA [Reddit via Tom Francis]

Skin Pack #2 is out for the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft today. It'll run you 160 Microsoft Points and come with the following skins, via Microsoft:

1. Enderman Man – Minecraft
2. Pig Man – Minecraft
3. Sheep Man – Minecraft
4. Naked Sheep Man – Minecraft
5. Spider Man – Minecraft
6. General Akamoto – Skulls of the Shogun
7. Otus – Owlboy
8. Meat Boy – Super Meat Boy
9. Agent Cobalt- Cobalt
10. Zapp – Gamma Bros
11. Buzz – Gamma Bros
12. Glorg – Glorg
13. The Player – Retro City Rampage
14. Spelunky Guy – Spelunky
15. Green Knight – Castle Crashers
16. Orange Knight – Castle Crashers
17. Blue Knight – Castle Crashers
18. Red Knight – Castle Crashers
19. Marcus Fenix – Gears of War 3
20. Skorge – Gears of War
21. Anya Stroud – Gears of War
22. Damon Baird – Gears of War: Judgment
23. Joanna Dark – Perfect Dark
24. Joanna Dark (dress) – Perfect Dark
25. Joanna Dark – Perfect Dark Zero
26. Elvis – Perfect Dark
27. Juno – Jet Force Gemini
28. Vela – Jet Force Gemini
29. Lupus – Jet Force Gemini
30. Horstachio – Viva Piñata
31. Pretztail – Viva Piñata
32. Fizzlybear – Viva Piñata
33. Bill – Left4Dead
34. Louis – Left4Dead
35. Francis – Left4Dead
36. Zoey – Left4Dead
37. Hunter – Left4Dead
38. Boomer – Left4Dead
39. Witch – Left4Dead
40. Agent Level 5 – Crackdown 2
41. Pilot
42. Sailor
43. Pirate
44. Ninja
45. Elf

I like the sound of Meat Boy. And Elf.

Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition Skin Pack 2 Now Available! [PlayXBLA]

The add-on campaign created by the loyal Left 4 Dead community was supposed to launch about a year ago. It's finally hitting Windows and Mac platforms today as a free update. The official site teases that the DLC will land on Xbox Live soon.

Cold Stream [Left 4 Dead 2 official site]

With dual joysticks and motion-sensing accuracy, I'd say playing a few rounds of L4D on Sony's newest handheld device doesn't look too shabby.

Thanks Kenneth!

After being out for nearly a year on PC as a beta you'd think Xbox 360 gamers would have given up ever seeing a new campaign for L4D2 on their beloved console. But Valve is not one to make people wait any longer than they have to! /s

According to the L4D Blog, come July 24th, 360 gamers will finally get their hands on the "Cold Stream" campaign that has been in beta testing for PC and Mac users since March 2011. The DLC also brings with it updated versions of all the maps from the original Left 4 Dead, just to sweeten the pot.

Valve is also promising some "surprise" updates for all platforms so look forward to that as well. Hell, I might even jump back into L4D on PC if that wasn't the same week Dawnguard was coming out.

So, if you can round up three friends and an Xbox 360, you too can now experience the Left 4 Dead franchise in all it's gory glory.