Does anyone ever visit this site? there are about 3 total comments from all the news storys on the front page. Also, why do i have to cycle through the images to read the rest of the article? is that normal here? Posted at 4:24PM on Nov 21st 2008 by greg

I agree with most of these. The main ones for me are the lack of story - I wish they had at least explained a little bit about the infection and why these four people are together.

The other is the demo. I was on the fence about this game since I don't usually like zombie stuff but as soon as I played the demo I was hooked.Posted at 5:48PM on Nov 21st 2008 by sorensilk

#1: The gallery stories bury comments onto each photo. You have to cycle through the images ... I don't know why either? Page views? Who knows. And that is very normal here.

The full article:

We Love: The Grindhouse Movie Theme

Left 4 Dead could have been just another zombie game in terms of its feel but Valve made a decision to embrace the B-movie factor in its presentation. It features "grindhouse" style movie posters for the game's four main sequences.

There's even a "grain" feature that you can adjust in its video options so you can make the game look and feel more like you watched a 1970s film in a nasty run-down theater with a print that has tons of issues.

We Love: The AI Of Your Co-Op Buddies

Valve has been working on making good AI for their games since the original Half-Life. In Left 4 Dead it's not the AI of the enemies that's the revelation; it's how your friends work well in the game's single player element.

Expanding from having the Alyx character in Half-Life 2: Episode 2 follow you around, the co-op buddies in Left 4 Dead stick with you. They are actually good in a firefight and don't (usually) get stuck in corners or other points. Valve has always led the way to improving AI in first person shooters and Left 4 Dead is yet another solid notch on their belt.

We Love: The Witch Boss

When we first played the Left 4 Dead demo we got our first glimpse of the Witch character. She looked from behind like just another regular zombie with her back to us but when she turned her head...oh boy.

Her rage and her super-quick attacks made us jump like we haven't in a game in some time. In both single player and in regular co-op the witch is just frightening. We try to stay away from her as much as possible.

We Love: Seeing Tons Of Zombies

There are not many games that show lots of characters on screen at once. The high polygon counts of most first person shooters usually means we only see a few enemies on screen at once.

That is certainly not the case for Left 4 Dead. Valve's previous games don't usually have more than a few enemies showing at once but when the horde of zombies comes rushing at you and your friends it's freaking frightening to deal with all those bloody corpses coming at you.

We Love: Developer Commentary

Valve has led the way in making behind-the-scenes material more than just a few EPK promo videos on a DVD. They started having in-game developer commentary trend on Half-Life 2: Lost Coast and added it to Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2.

They continue this trend for Left 4 Dead with team members going into detail on why they made the choices in making this game. If you are at all interested in actually making a game yourself, listening to these optional audio tracks is a must.

We Hate: Lack Of A Real Story

Hey, we know that Left 4 Dead is supposed to be a co-op multiplayer game at its heart but we are not talking about an Unreal Tournament or Battlefield game here. This game looked like it would have something of a story driven element in it and, well, it doesn't

Left 4 Dead has been in development for a while and we think a little more effort should have been made to make the single player flow better in terms of connecting all the levels and sequences into an actual story instead of just a bot match. We don't think it would have been too much to add a little more to the game and Left 4 Dead would have been a better game because of it.

We Hate: Zombies In Walls And Doors

Valve's Source engine has been updated and improved with lots of new visual features since the original Half-Life 2 debut its use in 2004. However it's pretty clear in Left 4 Dead that character models, especially zombies still have a tendency to be shown as passing through walls and doors.

Seeing zombies who are trying to eat you also passing through doors instead of crashing through them just takes you out of the game experience. Valve's clipping issues can't all be solved but when you has as many characters on screen as you have for this game you expect better than this.

We Hate: No Choice Of Zombie Bosses

In Versus co-op there's no real point in choosing one of the humans; they are all the same and have access to the same weapons. That's not true for the zombie bosses which each have different attacks and abilities.

Valve, however, decided that the zombie bosses in Left 4 Dead were not character classes as such. So people who pick the zombie side are randomly assigned a boss to play in. That means you may be stuck playing a zombie boss that you may not want to play in a round. Some of the game's achievements are also tied into specific zombie bosses. We don't quite know why Valve made this decision but maybe they will fix it in an upcoming patch.

We Hate: The Console-Only Interface

Hey, we know that Xbox 360 owners of Left 4 Dead have to have a super-fancy UI to have their controllers operate the game but PC owners like things dirty (so to speak) so the lack of a regular game server browser up front is a little disconcerting.

Sure, you can bring up the browser via doing a few things in the developer console but we think PC owners of the game should have the server browser option as the main interface with the console UI as a secondary use (especially if they decide to use the Windows Xbox 360 controller).

We Hate: No More Free Demo

Valve giveth and then they taketh away. We were so happy when the demo for Left 4 Dead appeared via Steam. It really gave us a big taste of what the full game offered. But after the full game released this week, Valve cut off access to the free demo

Having a demo has always been a great promo for the full game and we wonder if Valve should reconsider their decision not to offer a Left 4 Dead demo anymore. Maybe just one level in single player only without any of the multiplayer options. We believe it would be a good thing to provide folks who are still on the fence on this game.Posted at 11:16PM on Nov 23rd 2008 by elle