It was only a matter of time… Someone has made a Left 4 Dead porn movie. I’m not going to go into details here, but you can read all about it on Destructoid. For the record, I haven’t watched it.

Just a quick update with some cool L4D links that have been thrown my way recently:

• First off is a T-Shirt that’s available from Split Reason: Cocktail Party
• Then there’s this GMod picture which I have been unable to source: Team 4 Tress
• Finally, I came across a neat L4D podcast called The Survivor’s Diary. Their site appears to have exceeded it’s bandwidth at the moment, but I listened to the most recent episode and enjoyed it so I subscribed to their feed. I hope the site comes back soon, because it’s good stuff!

Definitely worth a thousand words:

Valve is putting Left 4 Dead on sale for 50% off this weekend:

This Friday the 13th brings us a little closer to the zombie apocalypse. Whether or not you’re superstitious, Left 4 Dead is 50% off this weekend only. So grab a shotgun and make a run for the next safe room.

It’s the zombie apocalypse. Bring friends.

If you’re reading this blog, I suppose you already have a copy… Hmm, maybe you have friends who would be able to take advantage of this?

Breaking news: The upcoming ‘Survival Pack’ downloadable content for Left 4 Dead will be free for both PC and the Xbox 360. If you couldn’t figure that out from my cryptic post title, shame on you. Go away, and don’t come back til you’ve learned your TLAs.

Anyway. This is good news for 360 owners, who typically get stiffed with this sort of thing and have to shell out for any extra content for their games. It is also good news for Valve fanboys (such as myself) because the announcement shows that Valve have considerable weight behind their position, even when dealing with giants like Microsoft.

Part one of this series can be found here.

There have been a lot of people saying that the real-life inspiration for Zoey’s character model is Sonja Kinski. Personally I don’t see the resemblance. Looks aside, she’s known primarily as a model not an actress. As I see it, casting her as Zoey would be a big mistake. Here’s my shortlist:

• Kira Knightly
• Kate Beckinsale
• Natalie Portman

Best known for her role in the Pirates of the Caribbean films, Kira Knightly also played a gun-toting bounty hunter in Domino. Kate Beckinsale kicked some serious ass in the Underworld films.Both of them are serious action-chicks. However, I don’t think they have the range to portray Zoey doing anything other than shooting zombies. Her character has much more depth than that, and I don’t think either of these two actresses would be able to explore it.

Ok, what about Natalie Portman then? She showed off her vulnerable side in V For Vendetta and from her performance in Leon we can see that she clearly has a talent for portraying believable characters in unusual situations. However, she still doesn’t get the role. Whilst the previous two actresses are too hard, Portman is too far the other way. For all her depth as an actress, I just can’t see her wielding a shotgun against hordes of zombies. Although she did look HAWT with all her hair shaved off.

So who is it then? Who has both the guts and the tears to give Zoey a proper representation on the big screen?

• Summer Glau

Summer Glau could have been born to play this role. She is known for her ass-kicking roles in Firefly/Serenity as River Tam and as Cameron in the new Terminator TV series. In character as River she also displayed her ability to show vulnerability and fear, proving that she isn’t just a one-dimentional action heroine. I think she has what it takes to show off both sides of Zoey’s character that we see in-game: The zombie punching, gun wielding team player and the scared, nervous wreck that we see when she or another survivor gets seriously injured. And of course, she’ll look GREAT while doing it.

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.

Hot off the press from L4D411: Valve press release detailing an update that will drop in the Spring. It is reported to contain the SDK, Dead Air and Death Toll as versus maps along with a new mode called ‘Survival’.

I’m hoping for defence style gameplay with the Survivors holding out against waves of zombies and player controlled Special Infected. Maybe we’ll even get some sort of barricading mechanic. That would be pretty awesome in my opinion.

Valentines Day is coming up soon, whether you like it or not. It would appear that even zombies have a heart, if the following thread on the Penny Arcade forums is anything to go by. It may be a decaying, rotting, putrid heart, but it’s the thought that counts. Except when the thought is ‘Braaaaains’.

If you’ve watched the rough drafts of the L4D intro video you may have noticed that Zoey and Francis appeared to have a ‘thing’ going on. Someone with mad Gmod skillz has decided that this is a relationship that should flourish:

My Left 4 Dead pose.. by ~azfar90 on deviantART

Left 4 Dead: Love Edition by ~azfar90 on deviantART

Aww, ain’t that cute?

‘You know what I don’t hate? I don’t hate Zoey.’

Just came across this over on DeviantArt. PURE GOLD:

Left4Dead – Aperture Science by ~FireOps on deviantART

Why has no-one thought of this before now? Ok, the chances are someone has, but why did no-one tell me?! The whole secret-underground-research-facility setting is begging for a zombie revamp but neither of the Resident Evil mods that I’m currently aware of (here and here) deal with the Umbrella Corp’s lab beneath Raccoon City.

Clearly any campaign set in Aperture’s labs would lack the portal gun itself (we’ll just have to hope for multiplayer in Portal 2), but there is ample room for exploration of other areas in the Aperture complex. I see a potential campaign being executed in one of the following ways:

1. The players are the survivors of an experiment-gone-wrong in the Aperture labs and must escape to the surface. This option is too much like the Resident Evil option for my liking.
2. The survivors are part of an experiment involving huge numbers of zombies controlled by an Artificial Intelligence that actually exists in game. They are put through a series of ‘tests’ (chapters) and eventually find a way to escape their confines and destroy the A.I. in the finale.

I’ll repeat the last point in case you missed it: You get to kill the A.I. Director. How rewarding would it be to dispose not only of the mastermind behind your imprisonment in the Aperture labs, but also a personification of the entity responsible for killing you in every single L4D game you ever played?

I really hope there is a mapper or modder with enough free time out there capable of taking this on. I really do. So hurry up Valve, release the L4D SDK already so that someone with talent and time can implement my dreams.