The zombies are here! The zombies are here!

Earlier this month we pointed out that Left 4 Dead 2-styled Hunter and Tank plushies were joining the adorably-engorged Boomer in the Valve store, but that they wouldn't start shipping until Dec. 27.

Well, they're shipping now and we've got our hands on them, along with some wonderful Team Fortress 2 plushie sticky bombs.

Check out our little video tour and the pics we snapped. These have officially beaten out my plush Giant Microbes as my favorite plushies in the house.

Steam is ringing in the season with ridiculous savings on some of the best games available for the PC and Mac, with weekly and daily specials from now through January 2. Now how much would you pay?

I don't feel I'm exaggerating in the least when I call the sale prices Steam is putting on PC and MAC games and publisher bundles ridiculous. They've got the newly-released Oddworld Oddbox at 50 percent off, for example. That's Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, Abe's Exoddus, Munch's Oddysee, and Stranger's Wrath for $12.49. Ridiculous, right?

Along with normal sales, Steam will also feature a Holiday Bonus Sale each day, which will require users to qualify for additional savings. For instance, players that own Team Fortress 2 will gain an extra 10 percent off on Portal today.

Here's a list of the titles kicking off the first round of saving:

F1 2010 50%
Battlefield Bad Company 2 66%
Fallout 3 (Game of the Year) 33%
The Deus Ex Collection 85%
LEGO Batman 75%
Peggle & Peggle Nights 60%
Prince of Persia (Franchise) 75%
Portal 75%
F.E.A.R. (Franchise) 75%
Titan Quest Gold 75%
Super Meat Boy 75%

Why are you still here? You should be shopping.

Valve celebrates Australian Christmas the way our antipodean friends have done for hundreds of years—by releasing a new Team Fortress 2 update. This one's stuffed with 20 hats, new store items and the olde weapons-only "Medieval Mode."

To play Medieval Mode, a mostly melee affair, you'll probably want to head to DeGroot Keep, a capture point map where TF2 players are currently hacking each other to bits with knives, swords, axes and bonesaws. The medieval themed update also includes new weapons, like... *deep breath* The Claidheamohmor, The Back Scratcher, The Boston Basher, The Fists of Steel, The Amputator, The Crusaders Crossbow, The Ullapool Caber, The Loch-n-Load, The Buffalo Steak Sandvich, The Brass Beast, The Warriors Spirit, The Candy Cane, and The Jag.

Those new, stylized weapons for a handful of classes are purchasable at the Mann Co. Store if you don't feel like waiting for them to drop. For the full list of changes, additions and patch notes, fire up Steam and start playing.

Australian Christmas [Team Fortress]

WETA, the special effects team behind the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and District 9, have given Team Fortress 2 developers Valve a very special gift: a sentry gun. That works.

OK, so it doesn't shoot bullets, but it is life-size, does move, does track your motion and follows you, and does play authentic sound effects from the game.

It's now sitting in the entrance to Valve's headquarters. What's just as interesting, though, is why the gun is there; Valve say the gift was the result of a request, made "a few months ago we got a chance to visit Weta Workshop".

Why would Valve be flying down to New Zealand to visit Weta?

This Portal player can beat the game in less than ten minutes, with many levels flying by in mere seconds. How can a Portal speed run happen so fast? Break Portal apart at the seams, of course.

This sprint through Valve's first-person puzzler is a combination of speedy backwards jumping, slipping through cracks in the world and screwing with Portal's rules. It's a great watch, even if you spend most of your time looking at elevator doors, wondering "How the hell did he just do that?!"

DemonStrate - Portal Done Pro - Speedrun - 9:25.567 - WR [YouTube via PC Gamer]

While the church downstairs prepares to celebrate the Christmas season, Tripwire Interactive has been busy creating an expansion for Killing Floor that lets you kill Santa Claus, along with a special present for fans of Valve's Team Fortress 2.

Killing Floor is a cooperative multiplayer Steam game that plays a little like Valve's Left 4 Dead series, only with mutants in place of zombies. It's developed by Tripwire Interactive, a development studio located on the top floor of a church in Roswell, Georgia. A church whose attendees might have serious issues with Killing Floor's Twisted Christmas event.

Running from December 14 through January 4, the Twisted Christmas event is free to everyone that owns Killing Floor. It replaces the game's regular collection of super-powered specimens with festive holiday-themed creatures hell-bent on your annihilation. It's got evil reindeer, evil gingerbread men, and yes Virginia; there is an evil Santa Claus. Santa even gets his own level, Santa's Evil Lair, which seems a little out of character for the jolly old elf but hey, we'll play along.

Players that participate in the event will unlock a Baddest Santa as a multiplayer character. Players who participate in the event and own Team Fortress 2 will also score an extra bonus: A playable red or blue Pyro. Team Fortress 2 players will score Mr. Foster's trademark gas mask and business tie as equippable items for Pyro in that game.

Head over to the official event page for more on Killing Floor's Twisted Christmas event.

The head-chomping, zombie-making alien of Half-Life looks good in a powdered wig when painted by Gearbox Software artist and Team Fortress 2 hat maker Shaylyn "ChemicalAlia" Hamm, as seen at deviantArt.

Valve is giving Steam users a new way to win video games—up to a hundred of them!—and even score some new headwear in Team Fortress 2. The "Great Steam Treasure Hunt" is a game for winning games.

From December 6 to 19, Steam users are tasked with completing online and in-game objectives, like setting up a Steam avatar and unlocking The Heavy's Iron Curtain in Poker Night at the Inventory, which can lead to winning free games. Prizes will be handed out bi-daily to lucky winners and at the end of the whole affair, Valve will hand out 100 games to three lucky Steam users.

There are also deals to be had, like cheaper copies of R.U.S.E. and even cheaper copies of Chime. Begin the hunt!

The Great Steam Treasure Hunt [Steam]

Dean Fraser hits it out of the park once again. As seen on Springfield Punx.

It's happened again: I spent 100 hours on Dragon Quest IX and I'm running out of things to do before I can just go beat the game. Funny thing is, I probably never will.

I have a problem finishing games, and I'm not alone. 
 

It doesn't make a lot of sense. I've poured tons of time into Dragon Quest IX this year, carefully tailoring my characters' vocations, exploring extra grottoes with the aim of getting stronger and accumulating rare items, and going to absurd lengths to gather materials I need to alchemize special clothes for my little team of heroes. What's it all been for, if not for that one final battle that the story's been leading to all along? 

It happens to me all the time. The games in which I invest the most time are the ones I'm least likely to complete. And when I griped about this on Twitter, I heard from an overwhelming number of people who said my phenomenon is something they also experience, much to their own bafflement and frustration. 

My Precious Time, Curiously Spent

We hear so much about how precious is our time these days, and how the amount of attention we have available to invest in massive, sprawling video game experiences is ever-diminishing as we grow older and the obligations of life encroach. Which means if I'm spending 60, 80, 100 hours or more on a game like Dragon Quest IX, then I have less time to devote to the barrage of new titles I want and need to play for the year's end.  

This makes me anxious, even guilty. And yet when I reach an endgame, when I sit down to try to wrap up the long, long journey for good, inevitably I find myself dithering around, grinding even when I know I'm strong enough, searching for extra dungeons I don't even particularly feel like doing. I feel like an addict. What the hell's wrong with me?  

It's not just RPGs, either. Even action titles seem to plague players with an inability to finish – you know the end is coming and you just stop. Maybe you're been defeated by the last boss just once and you don't want to try again, even though you battled with focus against earlier challengers. Maybe you never even get there. Some games are worth heaps of hours of our time – shouldn't it feel good to cross that final threshold? 

Blame The Boss?

Darius Kazemi, a developer at Massachusetts-based independent games studio Blue Fang Games, says sometimes the problem is with boss design. Players spend all their time learning certain skill sets, and then the boss battle doesn't require them – it demands a feat of brute strength rather than acquired skills. Or it's just too easy, as an over-leveled, over-powered, did-everything-already player knows it's going to be unsatisfying, a matter of ritual rather than value.  

"Old school boss design is supposed to liven up repetitive gameplay," Kazemi told me. "The problem is that it often feels like the game is training me on a particular skillset for 10-40 hours and then the big ‘payoff'  is that I don't have to use those skills to beat the boss. Which totally sucks." 

That's why Portal is a game you rarely hear anyone complain about wandering off on; its progression lets the player feel stronger slowly, and the end fight requires a spectacular final showcase of everything that's been learned along the way. 

Other players seem to feel like most games haven't got that pacing down. You know the final boss is coming simply because you've finished most other evident tasks, so you're given two choices: take one last cruise ‘round to make sure you haven't missed anything, find the ultimate this-and-that, and go challenge your final rival. It's in that endgame content that many games seem to lose their urgency. The boss is waiting in his zone, and he'll be waiting there for as long as you need him to wait while you run around and do a few more sidequests. There's no more story. 

Responding to me on Twitter, reader Matthew Marko wrote me an email that laid out this principle well: "Right before the final boss,  you're often kicked out into the world and left to your own devices," he notes. "You're supposed to grind, tackle optional bosses, explore the final dungeon, etc.  Fatigue at all of this single-mechanic gaming sets in, with little to break it up. 

"There's the carrot on the stick of the final cutscene, but so rarely does that actually provide a satisfying ending, and I think we as gamers know this," he adds. "What end can there be to our 20-80 hours of work that can reasonably cap the experience without leaving us wanting more?" 

In that regard, the game is simply failing to top itself; no story ending can be that good as to reward hours stretched into weeks and months of immersive "work", so why see it through and be disappointed? Better to just fiddle with the late-game content until you can get properly bored of it and then move onto another game?  

And then what of all that immersive work? 

Not Wanting To Say Goodbye

I'm one of those adults you read about complaining she has less and less time for long, deep experiences. An entire market has surfaced around folks who want brief sessions of bite-sized but satisfying play, and the interesting thing about modern RPGs is that they tend to allow for that. This year I've pulled out my PSP on the subway to do 15 to 20 minutes of grinding at a time on Persona 3; I've taken half an hour to do an optional dungeon grotto in Dragon Quest IX while I wait for friends to come over so we can go see some bands together.  

This means those games have been my  "friends" in quiet moments for months and months. What will I do with my spare time when I finish them? We turn to games in those moments in life when we need a little engagement, a little escape from the world. And then we have to say goodbye? 

Writer Ryan Taljonick thinks of all the games he hasn't finished: "Looking back, I don't think it had to do with loss of interest," he says. "I think it had more to do with me not wanting to kill off those virtual people I had grown to care so deeply about. Once the game's over, they all disappear." 
"While beating an RPG had always resulted in a huge sense of accomplishment, it was often coupled with a feeling of loss and disappointment." 

We can spend all the time we want in imaginary worlds, triumphing over invisible accomplishments, but eventually it does have to end, and maybe we can't help but resent the game for that. When the end approaches, we realize it's just a game we've been playing, and that it's going to be over soon, and that the ending will not be emotionally valuable enough to give us closure, to give us a good reason to let go.  

When I don't beat a game – when I burn out on the endless end-gaming that I can't seem to see through and I put it aside – it stays forever incomplete. That disc or cartridge is sitting in my collection with a little bit left on it to enjoy. I'll probably never go back to it, but maybe it's enough to know that I can. And when I do, I can return to the gameworld exactly how I left it; a world still oppressed by evil, that still has a place and a use for me and my character, that still needs me to save it. A story that never ends, because I've never let it. 

Leigh Alexander is news director for Gamasutra, author of the Sexy Videogameland blog, and freelances reviews and criticism to a variety of outlets. Her monthly column at Kotaku deals with cultural issues surrounding games and gamers. She can be reached at leighalexander1 AT gmail DOT com.