Valve does it again. Over the past month they’ve released two packs of Downloadable content for their game of the year Left 4 Dead. A few weeks back they released The Survivor Pack – an alternate play mode with more maps. It’s a time based resource management mode. There are a ton of extra zombies as well as larger quantities of special zombies. While reviews on it are mixed, it always tastes better when it’s free. Both L4D and Team Fortress 2 continue to have free downloadable content long after both games original release dates.

Additionally, a couple of days they released the Developer Tools Beta for L4D. While user created maps on the whole for First Person Shooters tend toward the terrible, there’s bound to be a few gems. We all wait in fervent anticipation for over a million geeks strong to create some swank new maps. The shortage of maps up until recently had been my only real criticism about Left 4 Dead. That and everyone is always trying to let Louis die first.

The basic strategy for Survivor Mode seems like the zombies just keep attacking until the humans run out of ammo. This takes about five minutes, then the zombies feast on their bones. While the games are over a lot quicker there’s also very few other ways to strategize for this version. I’m hoping that some new map designer steps out of the woodwork and designs up something that will shake up survival game mode and add a few more variables to it. And if not, just a couple more regular versus maps would be much appreciated. What are you doing reading this blog? Go knit me some maps.

-Matt

Edit: Special Thanks to Stephan and the guys over at http://www.l4dmods.com/ for posting an article about us. Now then, you guys specifically go knit me some maps.