Developer Turtle Rock Studios had been working for some time on Left 4 Dead before the company was bought out by Valve Software (Turtle Rock helped out on various Valve projects in the past and was using Valve's Source engine for Left 4 Dead). So that means that opportunities to play builds of the game have been fairly frequent in the past year or so. However, shooting zombies never really gets old and at E3 2008 today we got yet another chance to make a lot of blood go on the walls (virtually speaking of course).

Along with some human teammates we got to play the first level of Left 4 Dead's first scenario (there are four such scenarios in all, each with five levels). Our goal was to get basically from one point to another without being taken by the zombie horde. After each of our characters loaded up with head, weapons and ammo we left via a rooftop and went down the stairs through the building. It didn't take long for the zombies to start swarming all over the place. They acted like they need a human fix. By the way, these zombies are of the Dawn of the Dead remake variety; they are fast, relentless and hungry for your brains.As our team proceeded through the building, shotguns and machine guns a-blazing, we could "see" through walls to get an approximation on where our teammates that were not directly in our eyesight were located. We moved down through the abandoned structure and at every turn and corridor we had to blast through the undead and their vicious attacks.

After several minutes of corridor fighting we finally got outside and into the street where we quickly found even more zombies to deal with. Our goal was to make it into a nearby subway station but unfortunately one of our team members managed to shoot a car that was just in the street. So what? So shooting the car triggered its very, very loud alarm and that was basically all she wrote; sounds draw even more zombies out of the shadows and into the streets. One of our number became overwhelmed by the tons of rotting undead and then encountered one of the more unique zombies; a "smoker" that has a massive tongue that shoots out 50 feet and drags humans into their nasty mouth. Needless to say, four people started the mission but only three made it to the safety of the subway station.

Valve recently announced some changes to the survivors' character models, mainly because play testers had trouble seeing the difference between their teammates and the zombies some of the time. As far as weapons, Valve revealed one new item; a pipe bomb with a sonic sound attached that draws zombies to it and then explodes when it gets caught by the mean but not terribly bright enemies.

Valve has some kind of plan to have a beta test of Left 4 Dead on the PC before its release, similar to what they did with the beta test of Team Fortress 2. While the Xbox 360 version of the game will have achievements, PC owners will be happy to know that those same achievements will be translated into Steamworks achievements for the PC port. And as with all of their game look for Valve to release new content for PC owners of Left 4 Dead but specific plans were not announced.

As we said it never gets old shooting zombies and doing so with three of your buddies is even more fun to do. We hope to get more info on Left 4 Dead before Valve and its publishing partner Electronic Arts releases the game later this fall.