Left 4 Dead

To celebrate Halloween, we are unleashing L4D2 on the world. Starting this Thursday, the entire game will be free to play for the whole weekend. New players can begin pre-loading now. For long time players, it is time to welcome your new found friends and help them survive the zombie apocalypse.

Left 4 Dead

The Strange Beauty of Killing Zombies In Horrible Ways


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]


Left 4 Dead
The Left 4 Dead community has created a wealth of movies. They range from a simple collection of Nick’s profanity, to animated shorts, to full feature films.

Previously we would have to hunt around on Youtube to find all the movies but now with the new Steam Game Hubs, we can find all the movies in one place. To help us have all the movies in one place – if you created a movie for the L4D world - add it to the L4D2 Game Hub (We don’t have a way to attach the movies to a franchise so we are using L4D2 which incorporates both games). To do that, click on the "Videos" link on your profile page and associate your Youtube account with your Steam Id and then select the L4D themed movies from your channel and attach them to the L4D2 channel.
Left 4 Dead
Half-Life 2
bonk


Since its launch, Valve's Source Filmmaker has helped budding directors create literally hundreds of movies - some good, some bad, most.... incredibly goofy. The Team Fortress 2 cast especially has sung seemingly every song, played out every meme and worn every hat and every expression - sometimes at once! But what are the ten best creations? We've scoured YouTube in search of the funniest, the most dramatic, and the just plain prettiest Source Filmmaker movies.

Scout vs. Witch



Easily one of the best directed SFM movies out there, mixing Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead and a fine sense of timing. Scout (no relation to Scout) is one of the more popular TF2 mercs, with his cockiness the perfect antidote to all that zombie misery. At least, while the moment lasts.

Just One More Hat



And he's back, in this fashion-conscious spin on one of Disney's most parodied songs. More worksafe than Dirty Little Mermaid, more morally conscious than Slaughter Your World, it also wins bonus points for having an original TF2 version of a song instead of just looping in a more general one.

Meet The Family



Mostly made (naughty naughty) with the leaked SFM, this was one of the first epic projects to be finished and still one of the best. Scout and Spy team up as literal brothers in blood to kick off a perfectly choreographed race for that all-important Intelligence. Guest starring music from The Incredibles to add pace and more than a little style. No "da-da-da" sting at the end though.

Adventures Of The F2P Engineer



He's smart enough to whip up teleporters and sentries on the battlefield... but he didn't pay for the privilege, so he's probably doing it with his flies open and his shoes undone. When he's having this much fun though, can you really begrudge him? The answer is yes. Even if you're on the other team, sometimes it just gets... sad. Luckily, there are other engineers on hand, like...

Practical Problems



An epic war between two professionals who know what they're doing, but don't know when to quit. A little parable about the importance of good manners, respect, and most importantly, not ****ing with another man's sandvich. A true Lesson For The Ages, with some fine music right alongside.



Meet The Soldier (Directed By Michael Bay)



We're firmly back in parody territory for this one; a relatively straight replay of Meet The Soldier, but with rather more boom and a surprising (though not unwelcome) lack of Alyx, Zoey, Rochelle or Chell forcibly being draped over a motorbike or anything at any point to complete the picture of one of cinema's most successful nostalgia murderers. Love or hate it, it's better than Transformers 2 any day.

The First Wave



It's not just a game mode... it's war! Mann vs. Machine gets dramatic in this epic four minutes of the mercs facing their durable doubles for the first time. Bonus points for a return of the disembodied Blue Spy, and a death scene with the power to spawn a thousand bits of erotic TF2 fan-fiction. Which exist. You'd better believe they exist. You have been warned.

DOTA Hero Pals: The Mysterious Ticking Noise



Not so much a 'parody' of the Potter Puppet Pals original as a straight copy with DOTA characters in it, this is still one of the more accomplished movies to come from that game. We just need another eighty or so instalments to cover the other characters, and I see no reason new players shouldn't have enough data to compete at professional level/troll like champions.

Heavy Doo, Where Are You?



I never understood "Scooby Doo, Where Are You?" as a show title. Admittedly my memory is a little fuzzy about the actual cartoons, but I definitely remember Fred, Daphne and Velma doing most of the mystery-solving gruntwork, with Scooby's role being to blunder into helpful things. If you called him, you'd prevent him from doing that. The song makes no sense, is what I'm saying. This movie is more reasonable. If you had to fight Old Man Peterson, having a Gatling wielding Russian psychopath on hand definitely beats anything Scrappy Doo could serve up. Admittedly, so would a crouton.

After Aperture



Chell's life after Aperture isn't exactly unexplored territory, but this Exile Vilify backed slice is one of the more interestingly melancholic SFM movies so far. A little clunky in terms of animation, largely due to the poor Chell rig (at least one other movie opted to reskin Zoey instead of using it), but it makes up for it with a different kind of atmosphere to most and that lovely outdoor setting.

Those are our picks, but there are many more SFM movies out there. Have any particularly caught your attention, impressed you, or just made you laugh? Share their names below...

Oct 4, 2012
Left 4 Dead
With today’s update and Steam’s Beta update we should have all of the “error 55” issues resolved. If you are in the Steam Beta program, make sure to accept the update to the beta today as that was causing a conflict.

When we had the issue with "Remove plug-ins” many players added “-insecure” to their command line. After we resolved the issue, if you still had “-insecure” in your command line it would continue to give you the "Remove plug-ins” error. We have updated this error text to give you the correct information. If you get an error that you are trying to connect to a secure server in an insecure manner remove –insecure from your command line launch options.

You can view the complete release notes here.
Left 4 Dead


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.


Left 4 Dead

We Almost Got A Left 4 Dead Expansion Based On Cabin In The WoodsEagle-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]


Left 4 Dead
Left 4 Dead 2


The Steam Workshop is coming to Left 4 Dead 2. That'll make it even easier for players to sample user created campaigns, but Valve are planning to take things a bit further and release an "expanded scripting tool" that will let modders create "deeper and more varied experiences inside of Left 4 Dead 2." That includes new rule sets that can be integrated into new campaigns, or traded as custom mutations through the workshop.

"To compliment the new access to maps, weapons, and items, we are also creating an expanded scripting tool to allow deeper and more varied experiences inside of Left 4 Dead 2," say the Left 4 Dead team on the Left 4 Dead 2 blog, though no further details are provided. Perhaps this'll take the form of an auto-update with a community spotlighted mutation of the week, but who knows. It might integrate a Spitter into your lounge for all I can guess. I really hope it doesn't do that.

The news heralds a change in this week's official mutation to a fresh one called Follow the Liter, which will only let survivors salvage a single can at any one time. This ought to focus the action a bit on those scattershot Scavenge mode maps.

Update: Oh yes, these bonus features are planned "also for Linux users as well starting in the middle of next month and rolling out from there." Woot!
Left 4 Dead

The Steam Workshop website will allow you to browse, rate, and discuss thousands of community created add-ons and even install them directly to your game with just one click of the mouse. We are also going to try an experiment with the L4D2 Workshop that will allow content to appear in the L4D2 world even more seamlessly based on the community’s response.

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