http://store.valvesoftware.com/productshowcase/productshowcase_L4D2-BoomerPlush.html 

Mind you, a tank plush... 

Do you get the Killing them Swiftly achievement?

I must have activated the various radios at least ten times by now. 

Jukebox only, hit the thing a few times.

Also, Ellis is now not such a crappy character - SPOILER:

/wading through sewage

'Hey guys, I found a candy bar!


...false alarm.' 

They have some pretty nice stuff on that page, I like the sunset survivors hoodie. 

Left the work PC on over the weekend :P 

Only played it with bots. Cool, but short. Could have used another map and perhaps an ending that was less blatantly setting people up for Scavenge.

Survivor zombies - cool.

New machine gun thingy - extra cool.

Supply chests - completely unneeded.

Map 1 is nice, map 2 is cool to start, gets a bit....bland later on, but interesting atmosphere. More l4d2 = more coolness. 

Who'd have thought that removing the common zombies would make the game more tense.

Finally, a real single-player mode. 

Word homie. Only played a little bit of that mod but thought it worked really well. Completely different atmosphere and effective gameplay mode. 

I disagree. Admittedly I only played the first two levels of the first campaign, but that's because I got too bored to continue. I just ran through, shotgunned whatever got in my way, lit a tank on fire and ran away until he died, done.

I find a lot of the tension was actually removed, and many of the items become useless as well. The bile bomb/pipe bombs completely worthless, defibs worthless, melee is worthless, etc. (I would assume they would be taken out of this mode because they are worthless, but I didn't stop to verify.) 

You're wrong. I can live with that. 

I'm surprised you'd even consider playing L4D without some poor survivors to shoot in the back and then go bugger off somewhere. 

Anyone mapping for this game? I decided to take a look at it over the long weekend and I really liked what I saw. I'm enjoying building little spooky areas... 

The tools are a bit shite, not Hammer, but specifically the in-game navmesh stuff is just sooooo damn cumbersome and time consuming. I'd like to make some Scavenge maps for it and then string them together into a campaign, but I always spread myself thin and I never complete anything. :( 

That's funny, I just read a blog post about that:

http://www.worldofleveldesign.com/categories/wold-members-tutorials/nexusdog/l4d-campaign-design-why-less-is-more.php

I'm going to attempt a few survival maps to get my feet wet and see how I like it. I'm enjoying it so far but, admittedly, I haven't had to mess with the nav mesh yet. 

But does the navmesh work by voxels? 

No, floor aligned polygons. 

Voxels are the future... 

How are voxels better for navigation purposes? I don't really know much about them but I suppose if you had flying creatures I could see some advantages of a 3D space flood fill ... but other than that, I don't see why you'd need them. 

3D Dot Game Zombies 

Quite fun. More strategic/stealthy and somewhat challenging on higher difficulty.

This would probably also make for a good 2on2 versus mod. 

I was trying to play that mode but as a fairly new player to L4D2 ... what can I do about the Jockey? When I'm alone, he basically rides me until I fall down. Is there a way to shake him off if I'm by myself? 

The thing about Hunter, Smoker, Jockey, Charger, is that if they 'get' you by yourself you're screwed. But you can try to knock him out of the air with your gun-bash-thing before he rides you. 

That kind of makes this "last man on earth" game type a little janky then, doesn't it? That means that the game is loaded with insta-fail - if I don't nail that jockey before he gets to me, I'm done. Seems like they should have told the director not to spawn that sort of thing for that game type. Just give me zombies I can handle alone. 

Oh, and thanks for that tip, I hadn't considered trying to melee him. I'll give that a shot.