When you get to the end of a hard-fought round in Left 4 Dead 2, you're usually crawling towards a rugged red door. Maybe there's only two of your zombie-slaying quartet left... your health bars stripped away by the horde, your eyesight drained of colour, signalling that one more knockdown equals permadeath. If you're lucky, you push through the pain and make it into the safe room on borrowed time, grab some ammo and shoot the charging zombies to carve a safe route for the rest of your team.

That's unless you're playing Funny Doors. Funny Doors dictates that if you get into the safe room before a fellow survivor, in spite of earning those precious 25 points for letting them live to see the next round, you must hammer the E button to open and close the safe room door as they approach, turning the final moments of each round into one hilarious test of strength.

Left 4 Dead 2's safe room doors have a serious heft to them, and as such, each swing animation creates a tiny window of opportunity for the survivor to get past your self-flagellating trap as they howl at you on comms. Usually, they'll get pummeled by a charger and you'll have to head out and save them. It's an evil habit. Barbaric, you could say, but it's one of many peculiar bits of communal context that have ensured this game has become a weekly inevitability where many modern titles have failed to hold our attention.

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Techland's four-and-a-half year-old zombie kill 'em-up Dying Light is getting a surprise crossover with Valve's 10 year-old zombie kill 'em-up Left 4 Dead 2.

The announcement was made over at the Dying Light Twitter page alongside an image showing Left 4 Dead 2-style weapons raised and ready for action.

It's a surprise crossover, but a welcome one - and it's worth remembering both games remain popular on Steam, where they're in the top 100 games by current player count.

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I popped into London's Barbican Centre last week to see the new exhibition about artificial intelligence - AI: More than Human, it's called. I considered myself peak target audience, not because I've read a couple of Isaac Asimov stories and not because I've seen Deus Ex: Machina, although that was a good film - Poe was great wasn't he? It's not because I'm a particular AI geek at all. It's because of video games.

We hear about AI in the games world all the time. Every year, it seems like we're being promised the most realistic villagers ever, or the cleverest footballing opponents, or the most aggressive baddies with guns. "They will learn and adapt to your style of play!" God, how many times have we heard that? So when I walked into the Barbican exhibition, I expected video games to be everywhere.

And I looked. And I looked. But I couldn't find them.

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Valve veteran Jay Pinkerton has returned to the developer a year after he left the company.

Pinkerton left last June, following other high profile departures from Erik Wolpaw, Chet Faliszek, and DOTA 2 writer Marc Laidlaw.

Now, thanks to eagle-eyed Redditor OWLverlord (via PC Gamer), it seems Pinkerton is back on Valve's staff page, listed under the "Other Experts" category.

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Valve has stepped up its anti-cheat measures and issued almost 95,000 bans in the last week alone.

In July 2017, we reported that on 6th July Valve banned over 40K Steam accounts for cheating, making it the single largest banhammer the company had ever deployed.

Emphasis on "had", though.

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Portal 2 was more successful on the PC than it was on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, Valve boss Gabe Newell has revealed.

Speaking in an interview with Gamasutra, he explained that the studio never sets out to make games to specifically appeal to PC or console gamers and is often surprised to see which version fares better.

"We can never predict; I mean we just try to build good games and then we tend to be surprised," he said. "Portal 2 did better on the PC than it did on the consoles; Left 4 Dead did better on the consoles than it did on the PC."

Newell didn't clarify whether he was referring to units sold or total revenue earned.

"So you know we don't try to guess, because we're not sure what value there is to guessing," he continued.

"We've never had a situation where we said, 'We really, really want to build something that is more popular for the console guys.' Because usually we have a bunch of other higher priority problems we want to solve. So we're glad that people want to play our games wherever they want to play."

Valve will release Dead Air from the upcoming Cold Stream Left 4 Dead 2 DLC on 22nd July if 20,000 people can earn the Stream Crosser achievement by the end of this Sunday.

To get the Stream Crosser achievement, you need to survive a campaign of Cold Stream on any difficulty.

"Normally on an internal project we would have the whole company take a part of each day and do nothing but play the upcoming game or DLC and submit bugs," Valve wrote on the L4D blog.

"To add to the fun we often give out prizes for participating. Since Cold Stream is not just being developed internally but also with the community - we want the community to help pound on the campaign and look for bugs."

The Cold Stream DLC, which has been in beta testing for a few months now on PC and Mac, is a collaborative project between Valve and the Left 4 Dead community.

It started life as a community campaign created by modder Matthew Lourdelet before catching the eye of the folks at Valve who then decided to jump in, buff it up and give it a full release.

Tom gave Left 4 Dead 2 a 9/10 for Eurogamer in November 2009. "It's an amazing volume of new modes and features for a game that once kept things simple, but it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise to see them," he wrote.

"Whereas once we treated Left 4 Dead as a stopgap between Half-Lifes, this is no longer a weird little side project with modest expectations, and Valve is confident enough to play around with it, safe in the knowledge that you can trust your players. Left 4 Dead proved it. And whereas that game had a personality, this one is overflowing with it."

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Left 4 Dead 2's forthcoming Cold Stream DLC expansion is open for PC and Mac beta testing now, publisher Valve has announced.

Next time you boot the game up you should notice the new addition to the campaign list. Valve wants you to take a look and then offer feedback and bug reports via the add-on's official forum. The finale in particular demands your attention as that is set to "change massively" following the beta.

First announced last month, Cold Stream started life as a community campaign created by modder Matthew Lourdelet. It caught the eye of the folks at Valve who then decided to jump in, buff it up and give it a full release.

"Matthew has been hard at work on the map and the initial release looks a little more polished than you may have expected," read a post on the Left 4 Dead Blog.

"The reason for that is the difference between how we work on a campaign compared to modders. When we work on a campaign, we normally work in a rougher state without textures for a long period. Level design artists come in later and give the game its finished look with textures.

"Modders often texture early as they have to create the structures based on the available artwork. They don't have a team of artists coming in after them. So don't let the level of texturing fool you. The campaign is still in flux."

There's no console beta planned but, as previously announced, the finished campaign will be released for Xbox 360 along with the three remaining Left 4 Dead 1 missions. No official date has been set, but it's not expected until after Portal 2 ships.

Techland's eye-catching Dead Island trailer, which shows a reverse-time account of a young girl on a tropical holiday island being torn away from her parents, become a zombie and eventually be flung out of a window, turned heads - but what did Valve, the maker of Left 4 Dead, perhaps the best zombie game of this generation, think?

"It's pretty awesome. It's really good," Left 4 Dead writer Chet Faliszek told Eurogamer.

"I think it's great, but I just had a baby this year and I just had a weird feeling," offered writing partner Erik Wolpaw. "The violence towards kids is unpleasant. I'm not offended by it, but it's unpleasant in a way that makes it difficult to watch.

"But it looks cool. An open world zombie game would be awesome."

Left 4 Dead is a four-player co-op first-person shooter that sees players battle against hordes of zombies as they desperately head for safety.

Dead Island, due out this year, is also a four-player co-op zombie survival game, but it takes place on an island.

It has a heavy focus on melee fighting - lopping zombie's arms off with sharp objects and staving their rotten faces in with blunt objects. Guns exist, but ammo is scarce.

The game's also got RPG guts - character classes, skill development and weapon customisation.

While the trailer got gamers talking, and indeed caused Dead Island to trend on Twitter, some remain sceptical that it does not accurately reflect the video game it promotes.

"That's what I'm curious about as well," said Faliszek. "But I'll tell you what, it brought me in and I want to know more about the game."

Wolpaw agreed: "Telling it in reverse was a neat filmic thing. Coming out of it, I still don't know anything about the game, but as a way to reintroduce... hey guys, remember this game we talked about three years ago? Here it is.

"It was hardcore. It'll be interesting to see what happens in the game."

Dead Island was revealed way back in 2007, and despite Techland announcing that everything was well and good in 2009, it had been assumed to be in limbo. Some suggested Techland was waiting for Left 4 Dead and L4D2 to come and go.

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