For the past 15 years, Sweden's Yami has been cosplaying. While others might favor cool or cute characters, Yami specializes in zombies, gore, and the stuff of nightmares.

In these images, she cosplays as characters and zombies from Resident Evil, RE5, Left 4 Dead, and The Walking Dead.

"I love to cheer my love for zombies to the world," Yami told Kotaku.

Yami's currently planning a series of new cosplays that range from Left 4 Dead 2's Ellis to Mass Effect's Female Shepard.

For more photos and more zombie love, check out Yami's site in the link below.

YAMI_NO_COSMOS WEBSITE! [Official Site]

Iain Andrews' site Steam Postcards has long been my wallpaper supplier of choice. Why? Because he plays games and takes screenshots that aren't the kind of thing you'd find in a magazine or popular internet video game website.

He instead takes, well, postcards. Scenic shots of the background, or the walls, or the sky, or whatever, finding stuff that just looks good, instead of stuff that makes the game look good.

His current subject of choice is id's RAGE, but scroll down the Tumblr page and you'll see games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Mirror's Edge, Mafia II, Team Fortress 2, Red Orchestra and even Kane & Lynch.

The images maybe aren't nice enough to print out and frame, but like I said, they're perfect for wallpapers!

Steam Postcards [enwandrews]

"We hang together, or we fucked." Truer words have never been spoken, in or out of a co-op trailer for Dead Island.

Whenever you see a ragtag group of survivors banding together to try and survive a zombie apocalypse, comparisons to Valve's Left 4 Dead series are inevitable. So I won't make any. You folks will get around to it, I'm sure.

The importation of original Left 4 Dead maps into Left 4 Dead 2 rolls on, with the latest update to "Dead Air" delivering a new version of the Terminal map. Valve says the update brings matters "pretty close to being complete" but "at this stage what we really need is more testing." It's found a way to get you to do that.

Play a complete game of Versus in "Dead Air" and you will get an achievement, Valve says. When 60,000 people earn that achievement, the beta version of "Blood Harvest," the next map to be released, will be unlocked the following weekday.

"60,000 is going to be hard," L4D2's team writes on the official blog. "You can't rage quit and you need to work together."

Valve asks that gamers who get the achievement help others reach it as well, and post feedback and bugs to the Steam Forums and on the game's Facebook page. Progress toward 60,000 will be announced via Twitter.

Connecting Flights [Left 4 Dead Blog]

People make all sorts of weird stuff in Minecraft that I just don't get, but playing Left 4 Dead inside of Minecraft, that's something I can get into. Mine 4 Dead: Blockhawk Down isn't just a Left 4 Dead level in Minecraft a full Left 4 Dead campaign complete with zombies, safehouses, 4-player coop and pills. Modder Bananafone31 brings even more terror to Minecraft with custom textures and sounds to skin the massive zombie-killing survival mod.

Mine 4 Dead: Blockhawk Down [via Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

Toy company NECA revealed at Comic-Con today that its range of merchandise based on the intellectual properties of Valve will start shipping in 2012. Oh, and they also let us know what they'll be!

While there are sadly no pictures yet of the figures or merch, here's what you'll need to be saving your money for next year:

HALF-LIFE 2

Gordon Freeman action figure

PORTAL 2

Atlas & P-Body action figures, replica Portal gun, "resin and plush" weighted companion cube

TEAM FORTRESS 2

Pyro, Heavy & Demo action figures

LEFT 4 DEAD 2

Boomer & Smoker action figures

So, mostly good news then! Bit of a shame about the L4D ones, though. I'd have liked to see the humans, Bill especially, up first.

In next week's episode of the AMC hit Breaking Bad, Jesse convinces two of his pals to dip into a little cocaine, spawning an insightful conversation about Left 4 Dead, Resident Evil 4, and Call of Duty: World at War.

They're not just zombies, they're Nazi zombies! Seriously, if this is the sort of conversation you get into when you use cocaine, I never have to use cocaine. This is pretty much me whenever I visit a video game store, though I sweat a little bit more than a junkie.

Thanks king_e_dawg for passing this along!

Earlier this week, Valve issued a challenge to the Left 4 Dead 2 community: if 20,000 players beat the in-development "Cold Stream" campaign by Sunday, they'd get the re-release of "Dead Air" early. That goal was met in about four hours.

That means Left 4 Dead 2 owners will get the tweaked Left 4 Dead campaign early. No later than July 22, Valve says—barring an outbreak of Valve Time, naturally. The developer says its testing and finalizing the "Dead Air" re-release, as it's not yet ready for prime time.

Also interesting is that the Left 4 Dead team says it's "working on and testing a new version of the 'Dark Carnival' finale and some gameplay changes for finales in general." Dark Carnival clearly has its own final quirks, but I'm interested to see what Valve has planned for other finale changes.

[L4D Blog]

Valve's asking players to test Left 4 Dead 2's Cold Stream campaign. If 20,000 players finish it by Sunday, they'll release the Dead Air campaign early! Coincidentally Left 4 Dead 2 is on sale for $5 on Steam.
[L4D.com]

Spoiler alert? Only if you planned to play community made campaign "Suicide Blitz 2" in Left 4 Dead 2, currently the officially featured fan-created add-on for Valve's zombie horror first-person shooter, the game that has a very neat Portal 2 Easter Egg buried within.

Watch as two Left 4 Dead 2-loving ladies discover the existence of a portal into the world of Aperture Science, commenting excitedly along the way about every machete, Companion Cube, propulsion gel and special infected zombie they run into. Really, you may want to turn the volume down just a notch.

You can grab the "Suicide Blitz 2" campaign right here, straight from Valve.

Left 4 Dead 2 Suicide Blitz 2: Portal 2 Easter Egg [YouTube via NeoGAF]