left-4-dead-pc-demo posts

Last week, Valve announced that they would be adding an all new "Survival" mode into their hit zombie co-op shooter Left 4 Dead as part of a free content update for the game later this spring. Now GameTrailers.com has posted up more info on the new mode via a video repeat of the latest Spike TV episode GameTrailersTV.

According to the clip (which is near the end of the episode) Survival mode is a bit similar to the Nazi Zombie mode in Call of Duty: World at War in that players will have to survive waves upon waves of zombies for as long as possible. As with the game's other modes, there is support for up to four players in Survival mode. 12 maps will support the new mode, although the clip does not make clear if the maps are all new, made up or existing Left 4 Dead maps or a mixture of both.

As people continue to play the Left 4 Dead demo they have found some interesting things that are either hidden in the code or really hard to spot in the game itself. Kotaku spotted a box in one of the rooms in the demo that shows an ad for a Team Fortress 2 action figure. The box says "Collect all 10" which has led Kotaku to speculate that there may be a 10th Team Fortress 2 class planned in the future (the current game has nine player classes of course).

Meanwhile the fan site Left4dead411.com has posted up word that they have discovered what was apparently a new boss character in the game that was dropped from the final version, the Screamer. There's even a concept art drawing in the code. Meanwhile the demo, which ends on Nov. 17, has a new patch that fixes some issues and adds the ability to tie in game servers to Steam Community groups.

If you like your games to have full co-op mode in the single player campaign then this year is a good time to be a fan of PC first person shooters. This week developer Treyarch and publisher Activision release Call of Duty: World at War, which finally adds co-op support for the first time in the series. Next week is even bigger as Valve finally releases the full version of Left 4 Dead, a game designed from the ground up to be a co-op shooter.

Today we look back at the history of co-op gameplay in first person shooter titles.The genre actually had quite a few games that supported such features when it first started but the last few years have seen a decline as FPS have emphasised more popular multiplayer features like deathmatch, CTF and more recently big team based gameplay. But with Call of Duty: World at War and Left 4 Dead out this month co-op gameplay may be coming back.

Click on the picture above to continue reading Playing Together: Co-Op in PC FPS Games.