As for the dedicated servers on MW2, I’m not noticing much issue so far, although I’m not a daily player or spend all my free time gaming.  The fact that there are people already with prestige makes me wonder, can someone really do that in a few weeks unless they’re playing constantly?  I guess I know some that do it in WoW so anything is possible.  It is nice that people are “supposedly” earning their achievements unlike the debacle that World at War was.  I admit I played on some of the servers that had an ungodly amount of points for a kill, etc. but it grows old but so does having games like MW that casual gamers got the hell beat out of them because they didn’t play daily.  The nice thing with MW2 is they have perks for casual gamers who aren’t great (AKA me! heh).

Anyway, I need to do something with screenshots since I have 100′s that I’ve not uploaded including stuff from these two great games.  I have a crap load on my xFire profile which I’m finding is more and more useful as a gaming social site even though a lot of gamers don’t use it.  It keeps all my shots in their 1920×1200 glory so that’s a bonus and does the uploads in game rather than having to do anything with them here and spending precious space.  Still using FRAPS tho and have that subscription.   If you’re not into xFire, you should at least check it out.  Cheap product for a lot of usefulness… Videos, Frame Rates  & Screenshots.

Check out the xFire Screenshot page.

The Left 4 Dead Survival Pack is now available for the PC and Xbox 360, free of charge to all owners of the game. The full change list for the PC release is below. In addition, both the retail and Steam versions of the game (PC and 360) are now available for a special price. Check Steam and local retailers for pricing details. For more information about L4D, please visit www.l4d.com

Survival Mode

• New gameplay Mode
• 16 maps including Last Stand
• Leaderboards
• 7 new achievements

Versus Changes

• 2 new versus campaigns
• Fixed a case where versus team score would continue to be recalculated after the score panel was displayed
• Fixed an issue with recalculating the versus score health bonus for a player when they are rescued from being incapacitated
• Fixed being able to start a swing as an infected, then teleport to the survivors and have the claw swing hit a survivor
• Fixed a case where teleporting to the survivors would not reset the ability timer
• Fixed an exploit where you could load the chamber of a weapon with bullets by holding down the melee key
• Fixed a case where it was not possible to join a game while it was in a finale
• Fixed a rare case where listen servers would speed up the game over time
• Removed convars related to melee fatigue
• Fixed a case where infected players would get a respawn time on their initial spawn into a map

Server Changes

• Made ms_force_dedicated_server not require cheats
• Add a message when queuing a heartbeat
• Simplified setting of game mode
• Removed convars director_no_human_zombies and director_holdout_mode
• Added mp_gamemode [coop,versus,survival]

General
Added lobby join and leave messages

Versus Mode Changes

• Tank melee attack can now hit multiple Survivors in one swing
• Fixed Tank punch being able to hit targets behind walls
• Fixes to ‘Tank parking’. The Tank will now run back and attack the Survivors if he becomes AI due to two players expiring the frustration meter
• Fixed a case where a Tank frustration meter could run out right as he was in his death animation and he would come back to life
• Fixed a case where the Tank was moving too slowly while crouching and being shot
• Tanks now have the possibility of spawning in a slightly different position for the first and second teams
• The order that the teams play as Survivors is now determined by which team has the higher overall score. The winning team will play as Survivors first
• The Smoker tongue can now target and grab victims through common infected
• Increased the cone in which a Smoker can grab a target
• The Witch no longer cuts Smoker tongues in a radius around her
• Boomers that explode in mid-air will now hit Survivors directly below them with Bile
• Reduced the damage that burning Hunters do to pounced victims
• Adjusted the time at which players take over from bots to avoid 5 seconds of the bot standing idle while the player finishes connecting.
• Fixed some cases where versus score was not being recalculated properly. It is no longer beneficial to pass pills between players at the end of the round or heal other players and then shoot them
• Fixed a case where it was possible to spectate an AI infected and hit +use to take them over

Server Changes:

• Added convar sv_gametype that allows server operators to limit the types of games that will start on their server. Default value is ‘coop,versus’. Can be changed to just ‘coop’ or just ‘versus’ to limit to those game types

General Change:

• Fixed a case where players would join as a dead Survivor when a living Survivor was still available
• Fixed a case where restarting a level due to the team dying would give more than the max primary ammo on restart
• Fixed the speaking icon showing up on the local player during level transition if voice_vox was set to 1
• The scoreboard now shows the numeric value of a player’s ping

GameUI:

• Quick match will now try to match to any campaign. Removed the preference to match to games according to the player progressing through all campaigns
• Games in a finale are now joinable via the Friends and Steam Group games list

Anyway, here’s a list of the fixes if you missed the update news…  Left 4 Dead has been updated with a host of fixes, tweaks and new features, including enhancements to Versus mode for improved competitive play. The full change list is below. For PC users the update will be applied automatically via Steam. Meanwhile, the update will be made available to Xbox 360 players in the coming weeks.

General

• Fixed Survivors being able to climb surfaces marked for versus infected only
• Fixed a class of SurvivorBot bugs dealing with rescuing downed players
• Players can no longer grab ladders while flying through the air after a Tank punch
• Shooting near a car with an alarm that has already fired the alarm will no longer make chirping noises
• Improved loading time
• Fixed mini-gun physics exploit
• Fixed propane tanks (and other physics objects) causing players to fall through elevators
• Fixed rare achievement bug issues
• Fixed several map exploits
• Fixed various match making issues
• Fixed NAT traversal issues

Versus Changes

• Added HUD elements to show status of other infected players
• Changed color of infected player name in chat to red
• Fixed exploit where players could spawn infected bots
• Fixed instance where a Survivor changing to the infected team would be attacked by infected bots
• Normalized special infected melee damage
• Made the following client commands cheat protected: “Kill” and “explode”
• Fixed exploit where infected players could run away and teleport back to gain health
• Players can only change teams once per map
• Players can’t change teams while other players are still loading
• Tank spawns at the same % through the map for both teams in versus mode
• Made the Tank and Witch spawn directly on the escape route
• Increased chance of getting the Tank or Witch
• Fixed team swap issue

Hunter

• Easier to pounce a Survivor who is meleeing
• Increased Minimum damage a Hunter pounce does

Smoker

• Fixed Smoker tongue tolerance
• Smoker now has to be killed or the tongue destroyed for the tongue to break
• Survivors cannot bash someone off the tongue until the Survivor being pulled is paralyzed or hanging
• Tongue attacks that fail to paralyze or hang a Survivor will use the shorter ability delay timer
• Fixed cases where the ability timer was not using the correct time
• Fixed case where you could point at a Survivor but not register a tongue hit
• Fixed Smoker tongue not targeting and landing properly through PZ ghosts
• Smoker tongue does damage every second while dragging paralyzed Survivors

Tank

• Bashable objects now appear with a red glow
• Tanks hitting a car with an alarm disables the alarm permanently
• Tank frustration timer is only reset by hitting Survivors with rocks or fists
• Reduced autoshotgun damage against Tanks

Witch

• Witch spawns at the same % through the map for both teams
• Avoids spawning within a certain % of the tank
• Fixed an exploit where the Witch could be woken up and tricked into attacking Survivors

I updated the gallery, you can check it out here.

Also, here’s a few of my favorites and the “movie” posters:

Anyway, Valve has announced that the SDK is coming very soon as well as downloadable content and the other 2 maps for vs.  While I really want to play Dead Air and Death Toll in vs, I’m really excited to see the SDK coming soon!  This opens the door to user created content and some excellent mods that are already being worked on and just waiting for the SDK release including Dead Before Dawn from Darth_Brush.

A lot of the information can be found over at L4DMods as well as Left4Dead411.

Check out this video regarding the progress on the upcoming Valve release:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s Darth_Brush’s intro to Dead Before Dawn