After playing Left 4 Dead for about 8 months, there seems to be a pattern to the types of players and their choices of weapons.

The auto shotty lover uses the automatic shotgun for everything. Regardless if its the construction site of Dead Air, or No Mercy hospital – they always pick the automatic shotgun. The tactical player picks their weapon based on the map. Shotgun for up close work, and either the assault rifle or hunting rifle for longer shots. The precision shooters pick the assault rifle or hunting rifle for everything. The final player on the list might be the best rounded – they pick their weapons based on what their team members picked. That way the team is balanced.

The auto shotty in left 4 dead is not a one size fits all solution. It has its purposes – but its a spray and pray weapon. Meaning, that the player sprays an area with buck shot, and prays that they hit something. The one thing that makes the auto shotty so powerful is when its carried by the whole team. As soon as the smoker is seen on a roof top, the area is sprayed by 2 or more survivors. This creates a wall of buckshot that will kill anything pretty quick.

One thing that makes the auto shotty so popular, is because of the physics flaw that allows the buckshot pellets to pass through the target and keep doing damage to whatever is on the other side. When the buckshot pellets hit a target, such as a regular infected, they pass through the infected and do damage to the ones behind it. This makes it really good for mowing down hordes of infected. If the shotguns and the buckshot used real physics, the pellets would stop when they hit a target. But that is not the way it is.  This has caused complaints that the auto shotty in left 4 dead is overpowered.

The Auto Shotty “spray and pray” type of player does not worry about precision shooting, they just want to throw as much lead at the target as possible. And the physics flaw in L4D makes that pretty easy.
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Tags: l4d, Left 4 Dead, left 4 dead forum, left 4 dead weapons, valve software

Todays high speed connections are nice. And they are really nice when compared to dial up. But, not everyone realizes the risk associated with a high speed connection. A lot of people install a software firewall and they think that is good enough. Sometimes it is good enough, but a lot of the times its not. Some people do not even take the time to install a software firewall.  For the best protection against external attacks, its best to have a hardware firewall.

This is one example of what can happen if you do not have a hardware firewall, or if your software firewall is configured wrong.

If you are into computer sciences, or just want to read an interesting part of computer and internet history, go read up on the SQL slammer worm.

The worm was originally designed to start a denial of service attack on certain websites – including the Microsoft Update page. From the time it was first released, it infected around 75,000 computers in 10 minutes. As the worm spread around the world, it shutdown airports, banks, ATM machines,,, it was pretty bad there for a couple of days.

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Tags: hardware firewall, internet security, linksys, netgear, sql slammer worm

The History of Command & Conquer spans some 14 years, and still counting.  If you have never played a C&C game, its well worth the time and money to pick one up, especially if you see it on the discount rack.

It all started back in 1995 when Westwood Studios released Command & Conquer for DOS.  The game was not even designed for Windows 95, mainly because win95 had just been released, or was getting ready to be released.

The first expansion was called Command & Conquer: Covert Operations and was released in 1996.  And from there, things took off like a whirlwind.

At one time, Blizzard and their Warcraft series was competing against Westwood to be the leader in the Real Time Strategy (RTS) market. Westwood folded and Blizzard won the battle.  The questions as to just “why” blizzard won has been asked over and over for the past 8 – 9 years. I made a small post about it here – Blizzard VS Westwood.

With the release of Red Alert in 1996 the C&C universe took a different direction.  Instead of the time line being in the future, Red Alert went back to the 1940s and  tried to tell the story before the brotherhood of NOD and the GDI were formed.

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Tags: Command & Conquer, Electronic Arts, westwood studios

This evening I was in the mood for some classic gameplay, so I installed Command and Conquer Gold for Windows 95. But instead of win95, the game was installed on Windows XP service pack 2. Long story short, the game would not play.

After a few searches on google, I found a solution. First install right click and set C&C95.exe to run in windows 95 compatibility mode. Then download and install this C&C Gold patch for windows XP. And that should be it.

Post your comments in this thread on Command & Conquer Gold thread of the forum. For those of you that have never seen the original version of C&C, here is a random video grabbed off youtube.

The story plot goes something like this – The Brotherhood of NOD controls 50% of the worlds tiberian supply. Well, the Global Defense Initiative (GDI) has been ordered to destroy Cain and the botherhood and take control of the tiberian fields.

The player looks at the playing field in a top down view and can play either the NOD or GDI side. C&C Gold is considered one of the classic Real Time strategy games from the 1990s.

Tags: C&C gold, C&C gold for windows 95, Command and Conquer

Talk about some teamwork in Left 4 Dead. The timing is perfect, but it takes every team member to kill one player. If just one person is just a second off, especially the hunter that makes the kill pounce, then the guy takes a lot of fall damage.

I wonder how damage he would take from just the fall alone? I bet it would be enough to almost kill him.

Tags: l4d, Left 4 Dead

There has been a lot of talk here lately about Diablo 3. So the questions is, what are you expecting? Before I post my opinion, lets review the past 10 years of the Diablo universe.

Diablo – Was released in November of 1996 and was like a firestorm that swept through the PC gaming community. Finally, here was a role playing game that had multiplayer internet support. Most of the games during that time period only had IPX/SPX for local area network support.

It was a combination of several things made Diablo a great game. Such as the sounds, the graphics, the online support, how simple to game was to play.

One item that really stood out were the sounds. It was as if the developers put a LOT of time into making the sounds match the look and feel of the levels.

Another thing that made Diablo so great was how the levels got more eerie looking as the player went deeper into the caverns. The first couple of levels looked like a medieval type of church. But as the tunnels went deeper, the walls looked rougher and unfinished until the player was finally in lava filled caves.

One of the complaints about D1 was the limited inventory system. The player could only carry a few items at a time. Most players kept a spare armor, couple of spare weapons, gold and health potions took up the rest of the room. Each slot in the inventory could only hold something like 5,000 gold. Anything over that and the extra went to another slot.

Another thing that made Diablo so unique was that the levels were randomly generated. Every time a player went though the levels, it was different. So every time it was like playing a different game. The bosses were pretty much on the same level every time, but the design of the level was different.

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Tags: blizzard entertainment, Diablo, diablo 1, diablo forum, diablo II, Diablo III, rpg forum

Most (but not all) of the Left 4 Dead community is a cesspool of team killers, cheaters, spoilers, rage quitters, mic spammers, sore winners, and bullies.

In all of my 13 – 14 years of online gaming, I have never seen a community with such a poor attitude and childish behavior like what I have seen with majority of the Left 4 Dead players. The only exception might have been Diablo 1 and the battlenet cheaters, or the Command and Conquer Red Alert rage quitters.

Diablo 1 was the first multiplayer online role playing game. Being the first also has some drawbacks, such as not being able to stop cheaters. Shortly after the release of Diablo, the hack programs started to be released. These gave the player everything from unlimited spells, to unlimited health. It was normal to see a Player Killer (PK) to join a game, kill everyone and then leave. It was like they killed other players just for the fun of it.

Red Alert was probably the first online multiplayer real time strategy game. Cheating was not that big of a deal, but the rage quitting was. It was almost normal to see people leave when they knew they were going to lose.

With left 4 dead, it seems that cheating is a problem, so is rage quitting, Player Killers (now called team killers) and spoilers – who are not new to online gaming. Spoilers are people who join a game, and kill themselves, or get themselves killed. They will either jump off of a building, or run way out in front of the team and get pounced by a hunter.

Then there are the bullies. These are the people that join a server, then start a vote kick on other players to make room for their buddies. If you you do not play like what “they” want you to – they start a vote kick. If you have the lowest score in a round – vote kick.

The spammers – because the developers at Valve Software did not include a mute option, this left the mic open for voice spam. People will mic spam music, foul language, hate talk, and sometimes just leave their mic on for the fun of it.

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Tags: l4d, Left 4 Dead, left 4 dead forums

A lot of Left 4 Dead players are not sure on just “how” to kill the witch in Left 4 Dead. Thanks to Xezium, we now have a visual guide on how to take care of this complex task.

The video covers just about every aspect of how to kill the witch.  Every weapon is covered, and every tactic is covered.  This has to be one of the best videos I have seen in a long, long time.  Excellent work there Xezium.

Post your comments in the witch killing video guide thread of the left 4 dead forums.

Tags: l4d witch, Left 4 Dead, left 4 dead witch

It seems that the scammers never stop trying to steal your Steam account.  This new attempt involves Left 4 Dead 2 and claims that the L4D2 beta has been leaked.  All you need to do is go to a certain website and you can download the leaked beta.  This is typical of the phishing scams on Steam.

This is where things get a little fuzzy. The people that have had their accounts highjacked did not supply the following information:

1. Whether they downloaded and installed a file.
2. If page used a browser exploit to install the program.

These are 2 totally different types of phishing schemes.

Download a file – never ever download and install a file that someone sent you a link to over steam. Even if you know the person – their account could have been highjacked and it could be the scammer sending out the links.

Some programs store the password in the system registry of windows. The program finds that registry key and reads your username and password. The program then sends that information back to the scammer.

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Tags: l4d2, left 4 dead 2, left 4 dead 2 beta, left 4 dead forum, left 4 dead phishing

All of your Spore fans read up, Spore Hero and Spore Hero Arena are scheduled to be released in North American on October 6, 2009 and Internationally on October 9, 2009.

Spore Hero and Spore Hero Arena are supposed to have been rebuilt for the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS systems.

Personally, I wonder how good its going to be on the wii. Even though the wii is a good gaming platform, players need to be able to customize the controls.  Just because some Nintendo engineer thinks the controls should be a certain way, does not mean that everyone in the world likes the controls set that way.  One example is Resident Evil for the wii and how it lacked the ability to customize the controls.

Ever since the Nintendo wii has been released there has been a shortfall of Role Playing Games.  It seems that the people at Nintendo have been more focused on pushing the Zelda franchise, then offering a variety of RPG selections.  Maybe the people at Nintendo have listened to the fans, and are finally going to release some RPGs for the wii.

Lets hope that Spore has some basic options:

Customized Controls – come on Nintendo, lets get with the times.  Let the players customize the wii controls.  This should be a basic feature.

Quality Game Play – A lot of games try to cash in on their past reputation.  And as a result, quality slips a little bit.

Wish list:

Now if we could just get something like World Of Warcraft or Warhammer Online for the wii.

Tags: Nintendo, spore hero, spore hero arena, spore on the nintendo wii, wii