Also hanging out in here - Ste Pickford on the Bond approach to plotting, a Georgia Tech project about how video games can be used in journalism, how people coded games in 1991, the IFComp results, and quite a few more besides.

Link tast ick:

Montreal Mirror - 'Indie gaming on the rise'
'The future may belong to indie games, but for now GAMMA 3D will serve to introduce gamers and non-gamers alike to interactive entertainment that really doesn’t bear any resemblance to the Halos and Grand Theft Autos of the world.'

Cowboy Programming » My coding practices in 1991
'I wrote this in 1991, when I was writing Amiga and Atari ST games for Ocean Software in Manchester, UK. I think at the time I was working on Parasol Stars. It’s an interesting look at a simpler time in games programming.'

Media Coverage: The Case For Games Journalism - Video Game Features, PC Game Features
Missed Gus Mastrapa's hearty bravo for game writing: 'When I browse my RSS reader everyday, I'm consistently impressed by the quality and originality of the reporting being done by the video game press.'

TwitterCrit » PixelVixen707
Really interesting analysis of how games are discussed from the, uhh, fictional ARG character. (Yes, it's odd.)

Ste Pickford's Blog - 'Don't Start With Story'
A fine point, even for demos: 'If we're going to copy movies, then at least copy the right ones. Bond movies tend to start with a massive, stupid action sequence (almost like the end of a previous story), before settling down for the new story to begin.' This (Bond story structure!) coincidentally just got covered on Gamasutra.

VGPC.com Blog: 30 Rare & Expensive Gamecube Games
Prices are a little inflated here (highest ever new price is cited), but it's interesting to note the mix of uncommon but boring titles and actually interesting rarities.

Georgia Tech Journalism & Games Project
'This research project, made possible by funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, seeks to understand the ways videogames can be used in the field of journalism, providing examples, theoretical approaches, speculative ideas, and practical advice about the past, present, and future of games and journalism.' Bogost-impelled, v.cool.

Dollarshort: The Definition of a Slow News Day
Not strictly game-related, but the same tabloid-related problems occurs. Also, it's depressing cos they are all great headlines. all hail the tabloid apocalypse!

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/VG Chartz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Some interesting chatter in here: 'We don't base arguments for keeping articles on the accuracy of the subject—we base it (in part) on it the sources available.'

Results of the 14th annual Interactive Fiction Competition
Hurray, IFComp winners again!

FunCom has rolled out a major content update for Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures. Players levels 55-63 will now find Ymir’s Pass open. This new outdoor area features quests that include new storyline elements. The Amphitheater dungeon has been added as well. FunCom is promising the Age of Conan community “one of the most epic and memorable monster encounters ever created for the game.”

“This is an important update that opens up a lot of new gameplay content for players who have already passed the level fifty mark,” says Game Director Craig Morrison. “In the months ahead we will introduce even more new content, and coming up soon are two exciting new high-level dungeons intended for players who have reached the maximum level. At this stage adding more content and keeping people entertained is very important to us!”

There are many other tweaks including a solution to female avatars squinty eye issue. Its not as big a deal as the earlier breast reduction bug, but I’m sure it will be appreciated. Full update notes follow the break.

---
Related Articles at Gaming Today:

• Age of Conan Servers and Beta Update
• Age of Conan Character Creation on "Set" Frozen For Time Being
• Age of Conan: Community Q&A #2
• The Age of Conan Comic Now Available Online
• Age of Conan: The Barbarian Class

In news which had the odd but entirely pleasant effect of really cheering me up, Square-Enix will be publishing Frontier Software’s fabulous WiiWare title LostWinds in Japan.

The reason for the warm feeling? Well, because LostWinds is a game fully deserving of every success it gets, and it’s actually quite eastern in its approach in many ways, which should help its chances of decent sales in Japan as it is. The fact that a publisher so hugely popular in Japan should have picked it up can only assist even more.

That, and it’s always nice to see crossover hits - Japanese titles which are unexpectedly successful in the west, and western games which crack the Japanese charts. It’s always nice to think such wildly different cultures can embrace each other’s work, and I wish Frontier and Square-Enix all the success in the world with this one.

Still no news of a LostWinds sequel, however, which perturbs me greatly. I’m sure it IS happening, but I’d like to hear an announcement pretty soon please, Frontier.  

Bookmark to:

There’s an interesting article on BioWare Blog that gives gamers pause to examine what they really want in a game. Part one of the Immersion vs. #’s article asks whether you prefer immersive descriptors in games or if you just want to know how powerful your shocking infernal reaver is on a scale of 1 to 10.

So I’m leading a troop of Grim-mages across the wastes of D’rann when we get dive bombed by the Nalmerre aliens in their swooping zagoid ships. They’re raining chain bombs down on us and my Grim-mages quickly begin an ancient and dread chant…

Or maybe I’m actually staring at an array of tiny lights that are either red, green or blue. And maybe those lights are controlled by a much vaster array of numbers that are either one, zero or in the process of changing from one to the other.

Which version of reality do you prefer?

Personally I think both have their place in games even when the number crunching does bring you out of your gaming trance. It’s reminds you to hit the head and order pizza. Check out the pros and cons of each approach in Immersion vs. #’s on BioWare Blog.

---
Related Articles at Gaming Today:

• Microsoft Files Suit Against Immersion
• Sonic RPG Q&A with Bioware
• Sessler's Soapbox: Thank You, Bioware
• BioWare on Romance in Future Video Games Post "SeXbox" Accusations
• Bioware Hiring MMO Level Designers Via Contest

During the Montreal International Game Summit, Far Cry 2 technical director Dominic Guay painted procedural content generation as an increasingly important game development technique, not just to control costs as games get bigger and bigger, but also to retain the crucial ability to make changes throughout the production process.

"This talk is not about Far Cry 2 the game," began Guay, who populated his talk with development examples from Far Cry 2's creation rather than descriptions of the end-user goals of the game's features.

Guay defined "procedural data generation" as "techniques and algorithms of runtime or highly automated offline data generation," but noted the term refers not just the algorithms and code that comprise systems, but also the surrounding tools that enable designers to make use of them.

The Evolution Of Proceduralism

Procedural generation is "nothing new," Guay pointed out, citing Bethesda's 1996 game The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, which boasts a "land mass twice the size of Great Britain."

Going back further to 1984, he praised "the granddaddy of space trading games," Ian Bell and David Braben's influential Elite. It consists of eight galaxies of 256 planets each, generated procedurally using data tables and "pseudo-random sequences" -- the code for which can today be downloaded via Bell's website.

Moving to the modern day, Guay noted that particle systems, now widely used, are really a form of procedural generation. "It's a procedural approach to creating content that has become pretty common," he said.

However, "the industry in general tends to favor brute force approaches," he said. The Far Cry 2 team found itself butting up against that tendency, due to the vast size of the game's world.

"The first big draw of generating procedural content is to save on cost and time," said Guay.

"When we started conceiving Far Cry 2, we didn't have a senior animator on board, so we didn't really have an idea of what would be possible for an animation team," he recalled, and noted that the number of discrete animations required turned out to be unfeasible, "so we moved many of those animations up into a procedural animation system."

That approach allowed the team to blend animations that change based on the player's influence on the world -- early in the game, a character might perform certain acts in a way that demonstrates contempt of the player, but later on, when the player has gained notoriety, that same character could perform those same actions while "tainted" with visual cues of fear or intimidation.

Opening Up Innovation Fields

"Another big benefit [of procedural content creation] is that you end up being able to do stuff you simply couldn't do otherwise," Guay continued. "It opens up innovation fields. If you're creating things through code, you have a deeper understanding of what you're doing, and you can bake in some limitations."

"Our artists needed to be able to build not a random tree, but a type of tree," he said by way of example. "It's actually much closer to building a particle system than building traditional art assets. Artists play with parameters more than they play with vertices."

Creating those tools allowed artists to define trees based on characteristics gleaned from extensive photo reference, more than to create a number of discrete tree variants based on those references.

That approach led to a huge amount of control and unique systems -- Guay showed an internal video of trees in Far Cry 2 growing from sapling to their full adult state. Those systems are not available to the player in the game, but they allowed the team to convincingly populate the world and deal with realistically regenerating trees that have, for example, been destroyed by fire.

"Another benefit of procedurally-generated content is the time you gain on turnaround for changes," he said, distinguishing that advantage from the more straightforward time saved in initially creating content.

"Level designers love to move roads around," he said as an example. "Typically, this would drive artists crazy. But [here], what will happen is that the terrain will actually smooth in according to how the rules were designed, and the vegetation will move and regrow." The designer can then drill down and more explicitly tweak the positioning of elements that have been adjusted dynamically.

Retaining Artistry

Procedural content isn't perfect, Guay admitted. One difficulty associated with the practice is retaining artistic control alongside the dynamic processes.

Initially, the team created a procedural sky rendering approached based on algorithms -- which led to a totally unconvincing skybox that was clearly inferior to what a hand-authored skybox would be. "We considered it to be a total failure," he said.

He explained that a great deal of focus must be put on the tools that surround the algorithms, to allow the systems to be properly harnessed. In the end, the game shipped with a revamped procedural sky system that ended up much more effective than the first attempt. It takes into account myriad weather patterns, atmospheric conditions, and other variables.

To demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach, Guay showed an image made up of rows of in-game screenshots essentially forming a color palette, with time of day on one axis, and "storminess" on another axis, representing the full spectrum of skyboxes that the player will see with all the combinations of time and weather.

Unfamiliar Complexity

Another drawback is simply the complexity of the pipeline and tools. Putting the focus so much on systems and rules can be shocking to artists, who are accustomed to much more straightforward, linear art tools.

"It's not always clear what the parameters actually do in the simulation," he said.

On that same note, "the guy with the great idea for procedural data not necessarily the guy with the right mindset to make the tools," Guay added. The Far Cry 2 team dealt with this by setting up teams that paired those "idea people" with technical staff capable of executing on the ideas.

Still, despite the improvements over early development, he said there is still a lot of room to improve the tools.

With most elements of the game, the amount of time spent on developing and refining tools was vastly greater than the amount of time spent on actually developing and refining the underlying engine. In the case of the environmental tools, 15 times more time was spent on the tools rather than the engine. The only exception was the skybox tools and engine -- which points to the team's difficulties in that area.

Another hurdle was that "everything depended on programmers," since such a great deal of the game's assets depended on underlying algorithmic systems that had to be programmed.

In the end, it took about three years for the asset pipeline for the vegetation system to reach a state where it was considerd "mature and flexible," after an eight-month prototype period.

A Testing Nightmater

Procedural content can also be "a testing nightmare," Guay noted.

When a team member made a seemingly minor after-hours change to the ecosystem, it ended up increasing the asset density of the game world by 25 percent -- resulting in more than a few headaches.

"If I'm tweaking a jungle procedurally, maybe I'll just tweak it in my test map," Guay said. "But when I integrate it into the game, somewhere in the 50 square kilometer game world, maybe in just three small areas, it might cause problems, and we won't find those problems until QA uncovers them."

Still, there are ways to mitigate those problems, such as automated information gathering that searches for discrepancies in performance, memory validity, and other areas. Towards the end of the project, the team also locked generation to stabilize the world.

Looking Forwards

Though he said he was loathe to delve too deep into predicting the future, Guay did try to extrapolate some general development trends that will affect procedural content.

Amount of content in games, he said, is increasing at an exponential rate, just as team sizes are increasing more linearly. Complexity of tasks, he said, are fortunately increasing more linearly.

"I still have some long-term fears," he said. He painted a picture of a potential future where these kinds of procedural systems have improved to the point where games can run essentially complete physical simulations, where items must actually be built according to real-world physics and architectual principles.

This would then begin to make it harder and harder to "significantly, or usefully, change the game content during production," he said, particularly if it means teams must start working with trained architectural engineers.

"Processes sound like the silver bullet," he said, referring to the idea of "failing early and failing often," with the aim that more and more mistakes can be pushed into pre-production so that by the time production begins, very few mistakes and changes are made. This idea comes from film, Guay said, where the production process is much more quantified and defined than it is in game development.

"But I think we need to preserve the idea of making changes during game production," he said, claiming there is a fundamental difference between a linear medium like film and an interactive one like games, noting that the role of creative leads during production depends on the ability to keep making changes.

"The bottom line here is that I'm not trying to say creating content procedurally is... the [only] solution, but it's an interesting avenue," Guay summarized, noting that a highly systemic attitude to asset creation can preserve the important game development property of allowing for important creative changes throughout the whole production process. In conclusion, he added, "After working on Far Cry 2 I'm interested in taking it further."

It may have occurred to many readers that I am an avid Bond fan. In fact avid might be putting it lightly; I’m pretty much obsessed with Bond. In that light one might think that for me to review a Bond game wouldn’t be quite right. The general assumption being that since I am such an avid Bond fan I would go easier on the game and only notice the good things thanks to my overwhelming appreciation for the existence of the game at all. This assumption would be false. As a rampant fan of anything Bond I come down twice as hard as I probably should on anything involving him and expect more than is fair in most cases.

So this review will by hyper-critical, because in my mind Bond should be the best out there (despite the fact that he hasn’t been since GoldenEye). In case you want a refresher course on every Bond game up to this point you can head over here and do so. It may help you to know where I’m coming from on this review, especially when I open with the fact that I think Quantum of Solace has regressed the Bond franchise back to the point it was at when EA first got the franchise and those were dark, dark times my friends.

Now that I’ve got everyone interested with that inflammatory statement let me explain myself. What EA had done with the franchise after their initial failures was to actually make it their own and in so doing they actually made it feel pretty Bondian. In other words, the games became more than just a licence that EA was spitting out. Quantum of Solace feels like a licensed game. Not necessarily a bad licensed game, but one none the less. What do I mean by this? I mean that it doesn’t stand on its own, but on the mimicry of other games. It was developed because the license existed, not because an idea for a game existed. This is exactly what EA was doing when they first received the Bond license and it’s the exact wrong way to go about making a Bond game (or any game, for that matter).

What this approach does in general is leave players with a game that doesn’t suck because it is based on games that don’t suck, but also doesn’t do anything to make someone want it. What it does to a Bond game is suck the soul out of it. When you’re playing a game that feels like every other FPS out there and doesn’t differentiate itself except for a cover system that plays like every other cover system out there, then there’s nothing to make the player or the game feel like Bond and everyone knows that the worst Bond material is the material that loses what Bond is. In short, for a Bond fan, who expects his Bond games to at least have some cool Bond moments in them (EA actually had Bond moments that players could find in levels, all Activision has is exploding barrels) Quantum of Solace is as flat as the plastic look on almost every character in the game.

I suppose, though, that not every gamer is as avid a Bond fan as I, and that some people are just looking for a shooter. Just to be clear, we’re talking about the 360 version from here on in until stated otherwise. Overall Bond is a decent shooter and does shooting well, thanks largely in part to the COD4 engine. Though if you’ve played COD4 then you’ve played a better game. Part of this stems of the inclusion of a cover system which brings Bond into third person. I was hoping that this meant that players would be able to do some cool things in third person, but really it just means that levels are designed around cover mostly and not FPS shooting. It works out OK for the most part, except when the AI suddenly decides that it doesn’t want to play like a third person cover AI and wants to play like an FPS AI. Suddenly duck and cover gameplay goes out the window as the bad guys charge and swerve. I had many a cheap death because I was shooting bad guys who were playing duck and cover and suddenly an enemy, clearly thinking in FPS mode, came up and put a bullet in my head.

Control wise the game plays perfectly fine. The COD4 free aim into zoomed aim method works great and when players are behind a wall aiming, a position you get into by tapping A near a wall so there aren’t any sticking problems, the transition is smooth and the only real difference in aiming is that Bond won’t get hit as much. I did find the lock-on that worked so well in COD4 a bit ineffective in Quantum, but it was far from a deal breaker. Other than shooting your foes in the head/body/foot/arm/whatever, the only other truly unique way to kill them is by a physical take down. These basically replace melees and are triggered with the press of a button when the player is close enough. The screen then swings into third person and a single button QTE occurs, which, if pulled off correctly, takes out the enemy in a multitude of cool Bond moves. I will admit Treyarch managed to capture Craig’s no nonsense movements very well for these. While QTEs are nothing new it is one of the few aspects of the game that reminds players that they are playing a Bond game and not just an FPS starring Daniel Craig.

The game also has a few stealth aspects in it that are mostly based around crouching and using a silenced weapon (most can be silenced) or one of the QTE take downs. Sadly the only penalty for getting noticed is that three or four easily dispatched henchmen come to whatever location players are at. After players have got rid of them the fact that Bond was discovered has no outcome on the rest of the level and since players can pick up better guns from the elite forces stealth becomes almost a moot point. There aren’t any levels that can be accomplished better with stealth actions either. No matter how silent the player is, a room where a shoot out is taking place will have a shoot out take place in it.

In that vein, there are no multiple paths in any portion of the game. One of the great things in previous Bonds, and most truly great shooters, is the chance to defeat a level in multiple ways. It gets even better when one of those ways is a really awesome Bond move or something tricky. It was one of the coolest features in the EA games and it is not only lost in this version, but the game runs in such a linear style I started to wonder if at one point that game had actually been a side-scroller. Just another aspect that sort of took the Bond out of Bond.

What also doesn’t help the game in any way is the feeling that it pretty much came in second place to COD5 development for a large chunk of its development period. Level design is only remotely interesting in the beginning of the game and doesn’t truly pick up till around the last two levels. Making it seem like they cared even less is the fact that most of the game’s story is presented in what is basically narration over a computer screen displaying images of satellite scans and characters who are speaking. It’s kind of like COD4’s cut scenes, but instead of working it fails. Once again this changes near the end of the game, when it appears the developers all walked into the office and realized they needed at least one real cut scene and that maybe actually working some of the story into the gameplay a bit better would be a good idea.

Of course the story they based the game around, which follows both Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace in a loose way, is lacking at best. Of course they had to change things around in order to warrant Bond shooting through each level, but they basically eliminate half of Quantum’s plot and stretch Casino’s out into an actual game. The latter part being perfectly fine, but the former making the overall story weak in almost every way. Even EA’s final Brosnan outing, Everything or Nothing, which had a plot about nano-technology, made more logical sense than the mish mash of shooting levels presented in Quantum.

Graphically the game does its job relatively well, despite the cut scenes looking a generation old. Bond looks like Craig, M looks like Dench and everyone else kind of falls into their character. I didn’t switch the game on and get blown away by the look of everything, but I wasn’t about to turn it off because it looked bad.

That all changed when I switched over to the Wii version of the game. Few words can describe the train wreck of a game that is the Wii version of Quantum of Solace but I believe I have found the perfect one: Abomination. I do not know why a gaming company (Treyarch farmed it off to Beenox) would even want to put their name on this turd. The graphics are so low grade that I thought I might as well be playing GoldenEye, and I’m being dead serious here. The above image is supposedly from the Wii version, but if that image isn’t touched up in some way then I’ll eat a shoe. Switching from the 360 version to this was like getting punched in the face by a guy who just gave you a shiny cake. Now normally I wouldn’t give two shits about graphics as I’m an avid supporter of design over appearance, but when you can’t see the enemy because the colors and polygons all blur together then there is a serious problem.

The game unfolds exactly the same as the 360 version except it sucks on levels that made me want to take back anything bad I had ever thought about the 360 game. The camera zoomed crazily in and out, sometimes unsure where to sit itself and probably too afraid of the low res Bond it was supposed to be showing to come out of first person for the third person cover mode. Of course this didn’t matter since the enemy AI had been turned into artificial idiocy (still AI, I realize). Add to this that collision detection for bullets and almost everything else was off, that the graphics glitched at almost every chance they could and the fact that nothing, absolutely nothing, was timed right and you’ve got a game that is literally the worst game I’ve ever played.This was only doubled by the fact that many of the checkpoints that were present in the 360 version had disappeared in the Wii. In one level there were absolutely none and I had to replay the entire thing multiple times, which in a good game isn’t so bad, but in this game made me want to melt my eyes. I will admit though, that I don’t make a habit of playing bad games, so there are most definitely worse games out there, I just haven’t played them.

But don’t worry, it gets better: the game froze on me three times. Just out and out froze on three separate occasions at seemingly totally random moments. Oh, and the small changes that were made for the Wii version are mostly for the worse. Many of the interactive objects in the 360 version are no longer interactive and explosive objects don’t shimmer like they do in the 360 letting players know that they’re explosive. This wouldn’t have been such a problem if gas tanks and other exploding items didn’t blend into the background like almost everything else in the muddled world of Wii Quantum of Solace.

I really wanted this version to be good too. Unfortunately it is not the FPS that will prove that the Wii should get more FPS action (maybe COD5?). That being said there are one or two rays of light, mostly which deal with the controls. Shooting is done well enough and turning was fine. I always find it more fun to play an FPS with the Wii remote and if the rest of the game hadn’t been so poorly made I would have had the same opinion here. Also the QTE hand-to-hand combat isn’t QTE, instead the player is tasked with aiming at a certain point on the opponents body and pressing A before time runs out. It’s way more fun and interactive then just the button tap. That is it, however. Nothing else good and I didn’t even mention the lock-on system that the game forces you to play with. I suppose that could be a benefit since you wouldn’t be able to see half the enemies without it, but for those of us that actually like to aim, it’s just a pain in the ass.

The only thing I truly enjoyed in the Wii version, in one of the most ironic moments in my gaming life, was the multiplayer. The Wii version has four-player online multiplayer and is the only version to feature split screen. It is so rudimentary in its design and gameplay (only two modes both of which basically require you to shoot the other people) that it reminded me of GoldenEye multiplayer through and through. Of course it could have been the bad graphics too. Whatever it was, I had fun playing it in a way I hadn’t had fun in an FPS for a good long time. Maybe it’s because it was on the Wii, so the pressure was off to be the best Haloz player evarz. The 360’s multiplayer is far more in depth and actually has a bit of the same run and gun gameplay that made GoldenEye so awesome. It won’t be stealing anyone away from Halo or Gears 2 though.

I guess my biggest disappointment, and here we’re talking about the 360 version as I’d rather have my fingers cut off then bring up the Wii again, is that it isn’t a special game. Bond is an event in both film and literature, but here he has been relegated to the likes of every licensed movie game created. As far as games like that go, this one is no slouch, but that’s not Bond. Nobody does it better is Bond, hopefully Activision learns that.

+ (360)

• Decent FPS and third person action
• Quality level design, eventually
• Isn’t the Wii version
• James Bond

-

• Bland story
• Weak level design
• Doesn’t feel like Bond

+ (Wii)

• People who don’t own a 360 or PS3 can protest by not buying the game at all
• Multiplayer, but mostly because it exists at all. Does something get credit simply for existing?

-

• Everything

Continue reading Massively's exclusive pre-launch Moria interview with Jeffrey Steefel

Massively's exclusive pre-launch Moria interview with Jeffrey Steefel originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Um, it's Microsoft's right to decide where they wanna put their money. Personally we all disagree with the decision. Um, it's Microsoft's right to decide where they wanna put their money. Personally we all disagree with the decision.

[...] Yeah, it honestly doesn't make a lot of sense. But that's their prerogative.

It was more broken up than [just factions between the Covenant and the UNSC]. The Covenant weren't quite the Covenant yet.

That idea of that sort of stylized approach to Halo was something that we were very interested in, in terms of the art. Some of the art that leaked out wasn't art that was actually in the game, so people were a little more torqued than they needed to be.

But it felt very Halo--we had a combat demo that felt like a very action-oriented MMO, but still had that MMO depth. So it was very analogous to the RTS that we worked on.

[... ] It was definitely more of a classic MMO, but it still had that very action feel. Definitely more actiony than WoW.

There's at least one studio that's starting with a good chunk of the Ensemble people, about half. And that's the studio that's contracted for support for Halo Wars. So the cool thing about that is, from a buyer standpoint, Halo Wars isn't going to just be shoved out there.

[...] Losing your job is never good, but the best thing about the team's dedication is, we had a hundred full-time people when the announcement was made--we've lost three since then.

[...] Everyone at Ensemble is important, we don't want to lose anybody. But we had feared losing 30 or 40, and I think it's a testament to the strength of Ensemble

• OXM (95/100): "Come to think of it, with a handful of levels and unpredictable events happening within them, Left 4 Dead has more in common with Ms. Pac-Man than just the eating. It's the same thing over and over - but when simple ingredients are perfectly prepared, what could be a mere snack becomes a feast. This one just happens to be on human flesh."
• IGN (90/100): "Left 4 Dead is also a completely different kind of game, and it feels as much of an experiment as it does an amazing gameplay experience. Valve has moved against convention and delivered a game that is built almost entirely around cooperative multiplayer action. This is a game that comes to life when you play with at least one other human player, and it's even better if there are four humans in each game."
• GameSpy (90/100): "One need only look at Left 4 Dead for proof that the gaming landscape is fundamentally changing. This is a game that was obviously envisioned from the very beginning as a co-op experience, even modeling its single-player campaign to mirror that approach. The inventive and highly entertaining competitive multiplayer mode just adds to the experience, and we're looking forward to seeing what Valve's got planned for the game's future."

Metareview -- Left 4 Dead (360) originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 18 Nov 2008 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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