The combination of incredible graphics and low price (especially during the regular Steam sales) has created an active Crysis modding community. Crysis servers aren’t stuck with people playing Predator killing each other over a tropical island - and the fact we can write that as some sort of limited activity reminds us of why gaming is so awesome. Nomad’s Nano Suit (effectively “Lone Hero’s Sciencey Cool-Stuff-Excuse”) isn’t the only high-tech component of Crysis. In fact, it’s barely the beginning:

1. Back To The Crysis

In the single coolest and most pointless (two terms which often go together) modification ever made, CryModder Tirido has built a time machine out of a DeLorean out of a Crysis vehicle out of a physics simulation. And it is glorious.

Only and utterly YES

The mod shows off Crysis’ spectacular shading and light-level alterations, otherwise known as “different times of day.” Activating the time circuits throws your vehicle through the fourth dimension, and can be enjoyed from any viewpoint as many awesome times as you like. Particular attention has been paid to the interior of the car, complete with time circuits and the flux capacitor itself. This is the sort of thing only a love-based mod can achieve: Tirido probably spent longer on something you have to enter a vehicle and turn backwards to see than most web developers spend on their whole sub-standard flash game.

I don’t think Nomad’ll have as much trouble with Biff

2. Turbo Cars!

If the above got your engines started, install this mod to keep them running. And driving underwater. And exploding things with infinite ammo. At turbospeed. Climbing into a Crysis car is awesome fun, climbing out of it again a second later because it flipped on a pebble less so, which is why Duck delved into the code and removed everything that could reduce your speed or toughness.

Pick a car, any car. Also: UFO

The Turbo Cars mod turns your Crysis server into the ultimate demolition derby, with super-strong soldiers and vehicles racing around with unlimited explosives. Want a jeep that’ll actually survive? Feel like flying over roads apparently paved with C4 by other players? Turbo Cars is wish fulfillment and a fun night out for any clan.

3. Real-Lifesis

What Real-Lifesis loses in unwieldy appellation, it makes up for in style. Note: our website can’t actually show you how good it looks but we’re going to try:

No, you need to go see this full size.

Real-lifesis rebalances the manifold options in Crysis to more truly recreate real life (or rather, a real life where you’re the ultimate killer outnumbered but never outgunned for revenge to the death!) It doesn’t actually add any extra code, but like an artist working with well established paints, or more accurately an engineer tuning an incredibly powerful engine which happens to power pictures, Real-lifesis offers amazing visuals. Which Crysis players like, or they’d have installed something else.

4. Eyefinity Crysis

For the more traditional method of upgrading PC graphics (spending an atrocious amount of money) Maxishine Xtreme Gaming hooked a Radeon Infinity up to three 2560 x 1600 monitors, already more pixels than most people have ever seen, to top out at a truly staggering 7680 x 1600 monster. Then they loaded the graphikingiest game they could find. Crysis.

You bet we’ll include their links. They earned them.

This isn’t for everyone, or indeed anyone when you compare the total cost to almost everything else in the world, but it’s fun to know that this happened.

5. Gears Of Crysis with Bullet Time

It sounds like someone smashed a load of games together, but James-Ryan beat even the fictional US super-secret military by upgrading the Nano Suit. As well as the usual strength, speed, armor and cloak, you can convert its abilities into bullet time - to better appreciate the beautiful physics of blowing things up - or even Gears of Crysis mode, where you stand outside your armored self and admire a man wearing the national budget of most counties beating up foreigners. In high definition.

Dino D-Day hasn’t won the Lifetime “Gravity Gun Throwing BFGs” Award for Best Concept Ever, but only because that award doesn’t exist. And the award doesn’t exist only because we never knew that Dino D-Day would be invented, creating an impossible spiral of awesome which risks destroying the laws of logic by being a better concept than our universe was built to withstand.

This isn’t some trash flash web-garbage where the ‘funny’ title took three-quarters of the development time: this is a full Source engine game pitting a lone hero against the entirety of a Jurassic Reich. With a free demo already online you can go download it right now and be blasting dinosaurs within the hour, for free, effectively making the next sixty minutes an intelligence test. Because anyone who doesn’t do that is a fool.

All your old favorites from World at War, MoH, and Day of Defeat servers are present and correct: the Thompson, the stick grenade, and of course the Garand which - as always - musically ‘tings’ as it ejects a spent clip. What isn’t as always is that it tings because you’re desperately pumping those shots into a charging triceratops, which is exactly the sort of shakeup you need to make these weapons fresh after approximately one million World War II titles.

The only time it’s acceptable to NOT shoot a videogame Nazi.

Because this game doesn’t rely on its gimmick: it’s a real shooter, and if the demo level is anything to go by that’s short for “really fantastic shooter”. In a single level there are several modes of play: standard Nazi-plugging; a three-way armed misunderstanding between you, Nazis and a Triceratops; being stalked through a maze of ruins by a swarm of raptors; and a final battle against if-I-even-need-to-tell-you-what-you-won’t-get-it.

Now you tell me

Particularly pleasant is the tightness of the weapons: like Half Life 2 Deathmatch servers before it, the game really rewards accurate shooting instead of spraying. Yes, that does extend to dinosaur headshots. A phrase so incredible we’re going to say it again without even pretending to have an excuse: DINOSAUR HEADSHOTS.

You can also do this! (If you don’t want to do this please leave our site.)

There’s also real humor and skill in developing the brilliant concept. The website is stuffed with great propaganda material (including an announcement that Eisonhower is serious about sending only one man against the entire Dino horde). The full game will be released on Steam later this year, featuring a full multiplayer deathmatch (so you can see Source physics on something other than Counter-Strike servers for once) and all sorts of goodies. But don’t just take our word for it: watch this, and if you’re not excited by the end please check to make sure that you aren’t dead.

We live in the greatest gaming age that ever was: people can not only plow hours into online entertainment, enjoying every second, they can then show their love by livening up our internet with fantastic fanart on the subject. Even after you filter out the idiots who think a screenshot serves as art (it doesn’t, no matter how many photoshop filters you apply) there are plenty of pictures to decorate your desktop until you connect to your game server.

Twenty-ten’s already here and we still haven’t got HAL nine thousands, but that’s probably for the best.  For one thing he was pretty terrible at graphics (outputting only plaintext and embarrassingly limited vector graphics), and for another we prefer our AIs not to kill us in the real world.  Instead it’s time to make New Year’s Resolutions!

Don’t leave!  They may be traditionally terrible self-scourging instructions to enjoy yourself less, which - for not entirely unrelated reasons - rarely survive to see a second month, but they don’t have to be.  Here at Lowpings we actually enjoy life instead of laying guilt-trips on ourselves, so we’re releasing resolutions which will enhance your enjoyment of online game servers.

1.  Try New Classes

The great thing about game server self-improvement is that you’re never digitally deprived: you don’t need to think green when firing plasma weapons, you’re getting exercise by sprinting every second of every day, and no matter how many health kits and hunks of raw meat your character absorbs he’ll never put on any weight (unless you count all the shrapnel).  Instead of giving things up you should take more on, and nowhere is that more evident than the wallpaper while waiting to connect to a TF2 server: the “time spent as class” chart.

Resolve to do better!

Spend some time as those cursed classes at the bottom!  You might not play them because you hate them, because you only play Sniper (in which case you suck), or because of the “Medic Malady” (if a team of twelve people are stupid enough not to have a medic, you don’t want to be the one looking after them.)  But each class is a whole new way to enjoy the game.  You might find you like them after all, and more importantly, you’ll learn how they think (and how to avoid and kill them when you return to your beloved first choice.)  A few days as Spy and Sniper is the most educational experience a Heavy can have.

2.  Try New Modes

Left 4 Dead 2 servers don’t offer many classes (at least until someone unlocks a way for Coach’s mass to count as extra health, or at least as cover), but there are more modes than the average Transformers episode.  Everyone ends up with a favorite - from the movie-style slog of the campaign to the pick up and play instant enemy action of Scavenge - and they’re all awesome.  But why limit yourself?

Whichever you play, pick a different one next time!  The mechanics may be the same, and the chainsaw might always be the best thing ever, but the mood differs with playtime and the bonding experience over the whole campaign.  Spitter goo detonating the racer’s fuel is an annoyance in Scavenge, but an adrenaline-soaked catastrophe after two hours of versus play.  And adrenaline-soaked catastrophes are awesome.

3.  Counter-Strike New Maps

Not every game rewards different modes.  Counter-Strike servers occasionally offer hostage rescue maps, but you can replicate the experiment by playing bomb defuse, randomly turning on your toaster, then declaring that you lost for no reason at all when the stupid machine goes off.  This will save you from smashing the screen when the hostages ‘hide’ inside a hail of terrorist fire.

No dust at all!

But the best playmode isn’t limited to de_dust, as infinitely playable as it may be.  Sites like FPSBanana offer an awesome selection of user-generated map, many polished by thousands of hours of competitive play.  And “competitive” on CS servers is a lot like “murderous” everywhere else.  Set up a selection, and enable an add-on like mapvote to find out what your players like.

4.  New Games

There’s nothing like a new game, even if it’s old (and therefore much cheaper!)  You’ve a fantastic first-person-shooter spectrum to enjoy, from the chunky gibbage of Quake servers to the frankly unlikely DIPRIP destruction derbies.  It’s a real concentration of joy – the first few rounds of a new game are an array of incredible sensations, literally blowing things up like never before.  We live in an incredible world where we can say things like that.

Enjoy more of it in 2010!

Infinity Ward may have turned their back on the PC, half-baking an XBox adaptation which doesn’t even trust you to turn on your own game server, but Modern Warfare 1 is alive and well. Better than ever, in fact, as a whole host of players realise that if they’re ever going to get more Modern Warfare server content they’ll have to make it themselves. So they did. For free. You’re welcome.

Here we see four upgrades for your Modern Warfare server which won’t require XBox Live, won’t cripple your controls, and don’t treat you like a child who isn’t trusted with the console commands.

1. Galactic Warfare

This Star Wars style add-on is the most exciting Modern Warfare project to date and only possible with modding. Because it requires dedicated work, a real love of both subjects, and if anyone official tried to make money from it the resulting Lucasfilm lawsuit would make a Tactical Nuke look like a healthkit.

German modding group Black Monkeys have done a stellar job: to watch the trailer is to feel a deep longing for the public beta (coming soon). It isn’t the perfect Stormtrooper vs Rebel skins, or how perfectly the Iraqistan dust technologies of Modern Warfare match Mos Eisley, or even the sheer nerd joy of a Star Wars game that won’t suck: it’s the sounds. They’ve recoded all the weapons with authentic Star Wars sounds and visible blasters, and that alone makes this the most perfect mod. But be warned: the psychological shock of seeing a Stormtrooper actually hit someone while firing is pretty severe.

2. Frontlines

The Hajas M0D1F1C4T10N5 group can be forgiven their outrageously 7334 name by dint of pure awesome. They’re a perfect example of how internet rage should be applied: instead of whining about Modern Warfare 2 and playing it anyway like everyone else…

This is why no-one listens to gamer complaints

…they’ve already built their own sequel. And since Infinity Ward aren’t interested, they’re going to keep expanding on it. The Frontlines mod is everything the official sequel isn’t. It doesn’t slap your hands away from the server controls like a naughty child, it offers complete control of your own game server (and really shouldn’t be something extra in any game.) Twenty eight new game modes, optional medic and help systems, and even a full-blown War mode - where an evening of clan battles can be turned into one huge conflict to provide a real motivation for everyone involved to see it through.

3. Zombies

You knew it had to happen. It’s impossible for anything to exist online without zombies getting involved eventually. At least EHD’s Zombie Mod allows you to simulate an outbreak where the survivors aren’t idiots who insist on returning for pets, refusing to believe in zombies, and the unforgivable careless of not being fully trained SAS operatives with full air support. Taking it turn about as the unarmed undead or armed anti-undead (aka alive) players you gain a true appreciation of team work. And which end of an MP5 is the wrong one.

4. Stargate

In proof that almost anything that can exist eventually will if we only keep the internet on long enough, you can equip your COD4 server with a Stargate. Replicator Warfare is an ambitious total conversion aiming to bring multiple locations and weapons from the series into the well-established Modern Warfare server community. Since SG-1 was one of the only sci-fi series to actually feature real soldiers using guns it’s a good match, but you shouldn’t hold your breath for the mod: there’s been no news for over half a year, usually an indicator that the initial excitement has fizzled out. But that excitement did give us one awesome map!

Stargate Command! A fun location to add to your map rotation, and an objective which makes defending nuke silos look like slapping terrorists’ hands away from the cookie jar.

3D destroyed dozens of beloved characters back in dark days of the late nineties, now known as the “Plague Of Broken Polygons”, forcing them into a third dimension they weren’t ready for. The N64 Castlevania was a catastrophe of careening cameras and clumsy controls, and we’re going to have to pray our secret NES shrines forgive us for even mentioning the Playstation’s Mega Man Legends. But now we have professional 3D rendering tools, an army of innovative internet fans, and people who still love what made the titles good in the first place. Here we see how they’ve brought the old days onto modern game servers.

1. Super Gordon Bros

An awesome modification that’s half parody, half retrostalgic, showing exactly how things look for the Mario Bros in their flattened world. M0rtanius’s Super Gordon Bros teleports Gordon Freeman into World 1-1 of the greatest platform game ever made and it’s a view like no other.

It’s an incredibly fun little level despite being dangerously close to fan-fiction - but with the HEV suit coming out of the mushroom question block, and even the ability to “use” a pipe to enter the underground coin room, it’s about a minute of incredible joy. You can even load the level into a HL2:DM server for some side-scrolling shooting insanity. Not exactly the most balanced (or even possible) level but an awesome idea for a fun clan-server event.

Watch it here, or download it here.

2. TF2 Mario Kart

I don’t think we’re in Dustbowl any more

Teleporting Team Fortress 2 into a game where Mario was adapted into racing - this map involves more worlds than a Starfleet war. The team deathmatch level thrusts players into a psychedelic world of memes, mario karts and moving vehicles. TF2 servers running the map are usually heavily 4channed (meaning they’re not homes of fine teamplay or even coherent thought) but as long as you’re ready to mute the worst of the micspammers you can derive insane enjoyment from this lunatic level.

In fact, I don’t even want to know where we are

Get the files here, and thank the awesome Xenon for making it.

3. Half-Life Vania

We’re back with the best, with M0rtanius taking us to Transylvania - and giving us a crowbar. The instant you spawn you’re transported back in time, not to the days of Dracula, but the 8-bit eighties. The music immediately engages your grin response and the attention to detail is fantastic: you get power-ups by breaking candles, scanners patrol hallways in the classic sine-wave pattern, and the hidden healthpack is still in the right place for those who know where to smash up the wall.

It’s a Source server fantasy for anyone who’s taken the long road through gaming: if you’ve ever blown on a cartridge to make it work, if you’ve ever sighed and started again from the beginning after dying on the last level, if you remember the first time you saw something in 3D, then these treats are for you. And your friends. And the Garry’s Mod server applications are only limited by your imagination.

Watch it here, get it here.

We’re mere moments from Left 4 Dead 2 servers going live, and the zombie-killing community hasn’t been so excited since a lumberjack decided strapping a motor to a chain would be a great way to cut things.  We’ve spent more time on the demo servers than asleep over the last fortnight, and now - in the brief window before we disappear from human society for at least five campaigns four hundred times each - it’s time to see what we’ve learned from the trial run.

1.  People Have No Pattern Recognition Whatsoever

People who pre-ordered were promised exclusive early access to the L4D2 demo on October 27th.  This demo was a day late, and if that surprises you then thanks for reading despite never having heard of Valve (or having just arrived from a parallel universe where Hitler won the war, the sky is green, and ‘Valve time’ corresponds to real time).  Valve games haven’t been on time since ever, with Half Life 2 - one of the best games ever - seventeen months behind schedule.  Left4Dead 2’s demo was only a day late, and of course fans reacted with the calm and collected rationality gamers are famous for.

Clearly Tupinambis* subscribes to the Mafia definition of mano-a-mano promises.  Gabe Newell would doubtless have woken facing a horse’s head, had our brave forum hero not been too busy not knowing how to use the word ‘proportions.’  Or ‘perspective’.  Or ‘life’.

*Unlike him we actually have better things to do than screw around with character alt-codes to make him look more interesting.

2.  People Have No Pattern Recognition Whatsoever

People fear even the slightest change, which is especially odd when they’re buying a sequel (and powers past odd into insanity when they also complain if the sequel stays the same).  Within moments of L4D2 servers starting up, survivors were screaming about how the melee weapons broke the game and made it far too easy to survive hordes.  FUN FACT: every single one of them was playing on “Normal.”  LESS FUN FACT: On Expert you could be using directional nuclear blasts as a melee weapon and still lose.

After all, it’s not like Valve tweak and tune games for years after release, and especially for collecting data during limited demo sessions to streamline the experience.  The very second the first draft is out the door, the entire staff sails into the ocean until they find a place free from any access to the outside world.

BONUS COMPLAINT: Some people are complaining about whacking zombies with an electric guitar, and how it releases rocking noise and the undead’s head in one fell blow.  These people are clearly deranged and should be restrained for their own good.

I’m making music by beating up a security guard with a blood-slick guitar.  THIS COULD ONLY BE MORE METAL IF I WAS ON FIRE (also possible)

3.  Things Can Always Get Worse

Left4Dead’s entire deal is that things are screwed the hell up and getting worse.  The survivors are constantly stumbling through nightmare, while the Crash Course campaign revealed that all four corpse-campaigns are actually happening one after the other.  Add the safe room map basically saying “The US of A:Totally Infected”, and you’ve got a situation which would make a man stuck in a bear trap say “At least I get to sit down.”

New Yorkers are finally correct in thinking they’re the entire country

The writers make Left 4 Dead 2 even grimmer almost instantly: carriers.  It seems some survivors can carry the infection to others without falling sick themselves, meaning that the Army - saviors par excellence in the first game - are now actively hunting and killing humans.  Awesome.

I bet they get ice cream!

4.  We Can’t Wait

Desire for undead-damage leaks across even the bounds of reality, jumping from Left 4 Dead to TF2 servers, where pre-orderers are armed with the experienced headgear of a certain Vietnam veteran.

Pictured: an Australian who would last about four seconds in Left 4 Dead

Let’s be honest:  first person shooters live on PC.  They might survive as crippled console versions, thumbsticks turning at the same speed and accuracy as the average wheelchair, hooked up to auto-aiming life support to stave off Terminal Lack Of Mouse, but it’s only on real computers that the ability to aim actually means something.

Second honesty: single player is practice.  That’s all.  It might be the most cinematic practice you’ve ever seen, with incredible set pieces and innovative action scenes allowing to you to indulge in every Hollywood fantasy, but as long as the enemies are AI it’s just a glorified Tutorial.  You played through Modern Warfare for the fun, World at War for access to the Zombie servers, but it’s all sort of pointless unless you’re plugging people so that victory means “You’re better than someone”, not “The computer was programmed to let you have that.”  That’s what game servers are for, and that’s why we’re looking at the most popular multiplayer FPSs:

1.  Counter-Strike

If this is news then please, stop wasting time here and get your ass onto a Counter-Strike server right now.  Right now there are more people playing CS than there are holding hands, which might sound like it says something scary about society until you realise romance never killed any terrorists.  Various versions take up the first, second and seventh positions on the most-played list - and that’s not just shooters, that’s in terms of every game Valve has (to say nothing of the thousands of pirate players out there).  Counter-Strike: Source is now outperforming 1.6 servers (despite the complaints of purists), and even the relatively unpopular Condition Zero servers are stuffed with several thousand players at all times.  Or to put it another way: statistically speaking, Counter Strike is more popular than Shakespeare.

2.  Call of Duty 4

Things can get a little hectic

Modern Warfare servers continue to crush even their own sequel, with World at War servers lagging behind because of “Less impressive weapons”, “Not being made by Infinity Ward” and the all-important “Being yet another World War II game even though the reason we were excited before was because Modern Warfare didn’t do that” factor.  Cod4 is the top FPS on X-fire’s total playtime charts ranking only behind World of Warcraft overall - and ranking below WoW in playtime is like ranking below the universe in size.

3.  Team Fortress 2

It’s all about class balance

Valve’s magnum opus of online play, and proof that a decade of development time pays off.  Team Fortress 2 servers rank second only to Counter-Strike on Valve’s charts, and even outperforms Football Manager 2009, the biggest non-shooting-people-in-the-face title on their service.  For some reason.  The constant addition of new maps, fixes and unlocks keeps the population pumped up, although it’s still a factor of four behind even the closest Counter-Strike game.  But then, many religions have less devout followings than CS.

4.  Left 4 Dead

This game is fun

Multiplying the number of players by the average game bodycount, L4D servers shoot through three million zombie corpses an hour.  It seems those protesting the sequel were an extremely vocal minority, with most players far too busy “actually playing the game” and “enjoying themselves” to waste much time on such silliness.  It also means that at this very second there are at least four kilo-Louii running around with machine guns.

5.  Day of Defeat

There’s a slight learning curve

Ruggedly hanging in at number five are the Day of Defeat servers (both Source and old-school) - guilty of being set in the same time period as 90% of all known games, but at least with the excuse of coming from a time before the problem wasn’t quite so bad.  It also shares the status of being a Half Life modification, meaning that the altered adventures of Gordon Freeman literally have the entire FPS table surrounded.

Gamers dressing up as the gamees is a tradition dating back as far as disposable income, but what about the characters themselves? Can they cackle in costumes for all hallows eve? Since we don’t waste opening paragraphs around here, the answer is “Yes”, and we look at seven skins to spice up your servers:

1. The Creepy Counter-Strike Skull

Counter-Strike servers are already stuffed with Skullz and Killaz [sic], usually embedded in usernames between clan tags and half the number row’s symbols. Modder “Laca” enables the anti-terrorists to become even scarier than “someone with an assault rifle out to kill you” by skulling things up under the creepily human eyes.

2. Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault

Those playing on Medal of Honor servers shouldn’t suffer because of the age or authenticity of their game - so “Vdog777” has built an in-character costume, and is far better at 3D modeling than coming up with a name. The French resistance fighter adds another option when you’re dressing to impress (and shoot several times in the head) those fashionable Nazi chappies.

3. Team Fortress Halloween

Halloween costumes are something fun and awesome, so of course Valve are involved. We’re only talking about this because we enjoy it, anyway, as anyone on any TF2 server has already enjoyed the new koth_harvest_event map, exploding pumpkins, brand-new hats (to pile on top of all the other awesome headgear), and the incomparable ghost costume of Zepheniah Mann.

PS We love our Gibuses, though proper grammer sometimes makes for odd pronunciation.

4. The Classic Spy

Just because you’re ten years behind the times doesn’t mean you can’t dress up - though it can mean you wish you were more advanced. That’s the lesson behind the awkwardly-named |WS|*Nikon’s smooth spy skin, disguising a Team Fortress Classic server’s Spy as: a TF2 spy!

5. The Red vs Blue Crysis

In the most insanely complicated meta disguise outside of Major Smith in Where Eagles Dare, “not so l337” lets Crysis commandos disguise themselves as the staff from Red vs Blue, who in turn are played by Spartans, from Halo. It would be impossible to add more layers to a costume without forming a human pyramid or dressing up as a double-decker bus.

6. Day of Metal Gear Defeat

Dr. Cloud understands exactly how to guarantee an Allied success on Day of Defeat servers: staff the side of the angels with an endless army of Solid Snake clones. With the Axis forces represented by far inferior GRU cannon fodder it’s quite likely the sheer psychological pressure will force them to fold (despite their advantage in heavy machine guns).

7. Left 4 Dead

The most popular costumes over the last week come from the Left 4 Dead pre-order exclusive demo, with our four favorite survivors sporting spanking new skins.

Bill: Everyone’s favorite armed uncle-figure swaps Vietnam flashbacks for a love of candy, and an incredibly convincing Coach fatsuit.
Zoey: The apocalypse’s only female pulls an incredible double reverse-Michael-Jackson, both turning from white to black AND staying alive to play Rochelle.
Louis: The hard-working everyman goes even further than Zoey to become Elllis’s engineering Suthan bo-ay.
Francis: Why hate everything at random, when Nick can hate and distrust everything as a scumbag conman?

The best bit? Game servers can be dressed up every day of the year!

The “Left 4 Dead 2 Boycott” foolishness is finally over, in an astonishing surprise to absolutely no-one.  If you weren’t able to see that this idiocy would fold like an origami master in a poker championship, you were either:

a) Unable to read the original story, in which case wow, how are you doing this now?

b) Actually one of the boycotters, in which case you’re not reading because you’ve already skipped ahead to scream obscenities in the comments.

The founding members of the boycotting group, “Walking_Target” and “Agent of Chaos”, posted to say that they’d achieved everything they’d wanted to with their group - the internationally accepted signal of surrender.  When someone gives up on the only thing that made them notable, and that thing was trying to prevent people from playing a popular videogame, it’s hard to decide if it makes them more or less sad.  Here we study the stages of the L4D2 boycott - with handy Left4Dead server situations analogizing each.

The upper limit of the boycotters wit

1.  NERD RAGE!

Nerd rage!  The most powerful force known to man, assuming that man is actually an anaemic kitten somehow connected to twitter.  While most reacted to news of a sequel to an incredibly popular game by the same uncountable-awards-winning company with “Cool”, some knew that this was a gross betrayal of everything the glorious “Shooting dead things again online” L4D server community stood for.  Something had to be done - and that “something” meant shouting in CAPS AND ITALICS!  (They may also have used exclamation marks.)

The Witch: A calm, collected disputant compared to internet arguments

We’re not saying that theirs was a hysterical list of nonsensical complaints.  We’re just pointing out how they claimed that two new game modes, the ability to play as the special infected and an entire new map is not “significant content”, and that their seventh complaint of nine is “The fiddle-based horde music is extremely disliked.” You can make up your own mind.

Left4Dead Equivalent: Bill saves Francis from a special infected and gives him pain pills.  Francis starts screaming “FAG!” and trying to shoot Bill, but missing every shot at point-blank range.

2.  The Steam Group Petition

Following on the glorious success of every other internet petition, which all have real effects and certainly aren’t the saddest things ever (or advertising spam e-mail collectors), our two brave heroes set up a Steam group “L4D2 Boycott.”  Because nothing says “We are even remotely capable of not buying this product” like setting up an advanced discussion group, based on intense analysis of trailer videos, on the developer’s website.

That zombie had more chance than the average internet petition.  That zombie STILL has more chance than the average internet petition.

This group reached forty thousand members, which would be even remotely impressive if

1. You forget the standard “multiply by zero” rule for translating online petition groups into real effects
2. The pre-orders for Left4Dead 2, an exclusive group which actually requires you to give money instead of bullshit, far outperformed it

Left4Dead Equivalent: All four survivors write “The Special Infected Shouldn’t Hurt Us” in teamchat several times.  They add many exclamation marks!

3.  Infighting!

The most hilarious thing about internet hate groups is that they’re made of internet haters.  The aren’t actually coherently angry, they’re screaming spitballs of keyboard-pounding poor impulse control and after interacting for any length of time they’ll inevitably turn on each other.  Any implication that the members are nothing but keyboard bashing balls of low self-esteem and poor impulse control should be disregarded, despite being true.  Here’s what happened when the group’s founders were flown in to look at L4D2, which is approximately infinity billion times more attention than they deserved.

Agent of Chaos and Walking_Target get to visit Valve.  As you can see, the boycott group rally in support of this dialogue

Their own group made that, as well as an impressive number of invective variations on the themes “sellout”, “betrayal”, and at least one accusation of being physically violated by Valve staff.

Left4Dead Equivalent: Zoey finds the Tier 2 weapons and calls the others.  They shoot her will screaming “FAG!”

4.  Giving Up

Agent of Chaos insists “Our goal wasn’t to steer people away from L4D2″, which is an odd not-goal for a group called “L4D2 boycott”.  But since they didn’t even remotely do that it may be best that he retroactively redefined their goal to “to get Valve’s attention.”  Which is exactly what they did, and is actually pretty impressive for an internet complainer.

Walking_Target, alas, lets this go to his head with “we have paved the way for Developer-Community relations in the future. No matter what the press or other gamers say, we have made an indelible mark upon the future of this industry.”  You can tell someone’s giving a great quote when they include “People are going to take the piss out of us so hard” in the middle of their own statement, and the only indelible mark they made was on each other’s palms when they high-fived each other when they were invited to play Left 4 Dead 2.

Left4Dead Equivalent: Due to a bizarre L4D server bug, when Bill and Francis die we’re left with two Zoeys, two little girls who immediately go the wrong way, and are both smacked through walls by a Tank with “Reality” painted on its chest.