This is why I don’t like to play on public servers:

S. : no no
Limlik(Survivor) : arent you glad?
S. : u got no penis
{COF} CHIMERICAL : you and “a.” are bum buddies
A. : No
A. : Were butt pirates

So remember: When this is the first 5 seconds of conversation on a server you just joined, back away slowly and leave them to it. It’s probably for the best.

L4DMods reposted an article today from qj.net warning that a recent XBox 360 dashboard update may be causing consoles to ‘red-ring‘. The article reports that ‘over 30′ people posted on the xbox.com forums claiming that their console red-ringed after applying the update.

Firstly, why would a 360 L4D player be reading a site about user created content? The SDK (when it comes out) will be a PC only affair. Ok, that’s beside the point and not entirely true. I just enjoy poking fun at 360 gamers. But my second point is entirely true:

The plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data’.

Come on people, really. The 360 is known for the RRoD hardware error. Many many people have experienced it, and Microsoft have acknowledged that it was a design flaw in the original hardware. To date, over 28 million units have been sold since launch. In any given week, if one in a million consoles failed there would still be about 30 people to post about it on forums. So does ‘over 30′ represent even the smallest statistical increase in the average? No! Even if this number represented double the number of reported failures, it would still only amount to a correlation. There is also a correlation between Global Warming and a decrease in the number of pirates worldwide.

Please people, we get enough scare-mongering stories from the regular media. Let’s not allow the gaming media fall into the same hole.

Going through the videos that have been popping up left, right and center since L4D was realeased reveals quite a lot about the player base. There are those whose sole aim seems to be to break the game in as many ways as possible. The cheapest of these are the 360 cheat videos. I will concede that setting this up on a console requires some degree of knowledge and dedication. Using cheats in an online match though? Not cool. Thankfully this has mostly been stamped out with a recent update. The video embedded below is only really worth watching for the gigantic Francis at the beginning:

In an adjacent sub-group to the outright cheaters are those who love exploits and glitches. By now, I suspect that every single ledge, piece of rubble and telephone pole has been climbed on, scrambled over or edged down by intrepid survivors. While I have to admire the tenacity and ingenuity of the players who find these map glitches/exploits, those who take them and use them to skip large sections of the map confound me with the action. Here’s an example: On No Mercy 3 (Sewers), the crescendo event is a marvelous spectacle. You’ve got the slow climb of the lift, followed by a rooftop dash across a loading dock into the warehouse opposite. Brilliant. Sure, you can use your melee attack to break down the rolling garage door at the bottom and bypass that entire section… But why? One of the major draws of L4D for me is the cinematic nature of the encounters, as well as the stories you end up having to tell afterwards. The huge set pieces are the entire point of the levels, and definately not something that you should be proud of skipping. At least when people post these glitches up on sites like youtube it publicizes them, so hopefully they can be fixed in an upcoming update. Here’s hoping.

That video also made me go ‘huh?’ by putting the TF2 music over a L4D video. Huh?