Last weekend saw the release of the Left 4 Dead, and with it thousands of mindlessly rushing bodies piling onto a brave few struggling and eventually buckling under the immense pressure.  And that was just players trying to log on to the servers.  But Valve soon sorted that out and gamers were able to do what they do best: shooting things that are already dead.

Your first game on a Left 4 Dead server is an intense experience.  You’ll face more foes than every Call of Duty server ever put together, and you’ll depend on your teammates in a way that makes a Team Fortress 2 server look like a rugged survivalist wasteland.  But will you be a Bruce Willis or a Leroy Jenkins?  Here area  few hints to help you in this new land.


1.  Play the single player campaign first
We know you’ve just got your brand new game disc (or download) and you’re really excited about shooting zombies, but you know what?  The other players are really excited about not dying because Forrest Gump joined the team and couldn’t work out which end of the shotgun is meant to be pointed at the infected.

This game is fun

Valve went to all the bother of programming bot players in a single player specifically so you could make all your expensive, game-ending mistakes with companions who don’t feel homicidal rage.  Yes, you have to switch to your medpack to use it.  Yes, reloading is very important.  No, we don’t want to be hacked down by Hunters while you work all this out.  The computer companions aren’t as intelligent as real human players, but considering how they’re armed with shotguns and you’re screwing up, do you want them to be?

2.  Friendly Fire
This is going to come as a nasty shock to you (unless you play on a non-wussy CoD4 server), but bullets from guns actually hurt people.  It’s true!  It turns out that chunks of lead thrown out of metal barrels at high velocity can’t really tell the difference between humans and zombies. �

This means

a) Aim first, shoot second.

b) The best way to knock a Hunter off someone is NOT shooting them both with a shotgun.  Shotguns hurt, a lot, and your fellow player will not be any happier that you granted him death at the hands of a fellow human rather than an evil hoodied gut-ripper.

c) In fact, if you’re swinging a shotgun around the place get out in front and stay there.


3.  No Random fire
Getting Boomered is an extremely unpleasant experience.  You can’t see, you can’t aim, and a zombie horde approximately the size of Switzerland is running in to tear your face off.  You really want to shoot things, but remember what we just said about aiming?  Your friends are even now piling in to defend your dripping self, but if you reward them with a machine-gun clip in the back it’s the last time they’ll bother.  Or do anything else, actually, except curse you out while they wait to respawn.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, this is not the time to panic

Even with the screen covered in green undead-drawing bile you can tell where your buddies are by the blue outlines and names.  Shoot somewhere else, and if you can’t just switch to melee.  You can’t hurt your team with that, and considering that your clip will empty in the first four seconds of the onslaught you’ll have switch to swinging at things anyway.
Yes, we realise that this is basically “FRIENDLY FIRE” repeated again.  That’s because it’s a really important point.

4.  “What’s that white zombie girl?”
The #1 mistake of all rookie Left4Deaders is not knowing what a witch is.  Or rather, not fleeing in terror at the very sound of its name for Lo, The Witch is Made Flesh and the world is ruined, ashes and darkness!  Abandon hope, extinguish your dreams (and more importantly turn off your lamps) and pray to whatever you believe in for deliverance against the Destroyer of All!

There are people born two thousand years ago less dead than you are now

Do not shoot the witch.  Do not point your light at the witch.  Do not look at the witch.  Try not to even think about the witch and how she will kill you all dead should you become worthy of her notice.
Then, when she’s torn you and your team to shreds, know why your team are calling you an idiot.

With Halloween here, the gamer’s mind turns to all the benefits of the season: large amounts of free candy, videogame-themed pumpkins and, of course, the target-rich environment of endless hordes of undead.  They’ve always been the best bad guy for the first person shooter: lots of them, usually slow moving, and they don’t have guns.  But you do.  (They’re also handy if you have to wussify a game like Carmageddon to get an official release).

Not that L4D is the only big-name undead fest on the horizon: Call of Duty 5 servers will also be able to discriminate against the dead in an extremely explosive manner.  The “Zombie mode” looks like being one of the best things to happen to the series - as well as adding some much needed variation to the extremely tried-and-tested World War setting, the bad guys are Zombie Nazis.  Zombie Nazis!  There has never been a better enemy!  You can literally do anything you want to those and not even the most ACLU-ified vegan kitten would object!

If you really can’t wait to get some cadaver-combat going, or you suspect that this Halloween is going to be “The Big One” and want to get some practice in fast, you don’t have to wait.  Logging on to a Zombie Panic server will get you some fast and furious combat, no waiting.  With players as both survivors and zombies you get to try both sides (especially if you suck at the former, because when you die you come back as the latter).

Another undead option is the original idea of Zombie Master.  Here one player, the Zombie Master funnily enough, directs hordes of minions to swamp a desperate team of human survivors.  You get to play either as the brave hero battling against the swarms of an evil controlling intelligence, or - even better - BE that intelligence.  Half Dr Evil, half George Romero, and all fantastic fun.

Get your Zombie-Blasting on this Halloween.  You know you want to.

Deathmatch Classic certainly lives up to its name: seven years old and there are still people logging onto Steam - you know, the place with the finest and most polished multiplayer shooters ever made - and playing this antiquated tribute to Quake.  It’s so Ye Olden Times you could run it on a calculator, but it turns out that no matter the polygon count shooting at people
is still fun.

A lot of fun.  But there are a few things you’ll need to know when you log onto a Deathmatch Classic server.  You’re engaged in truculent time travel here, and some things aren’t what you’re used to:

1.  One man’s modification
People still sticking with this when things like Team Fortress 2 are available are impressively dedicated to what they like: expect to download a horde of customized map and sound files, as hardcore users tweak their servers to their exact standards.  Most of these are designed to obliterate whatever pet peeve the host hates, so expect spawn-immunity and anti-camp-countdowns.  The bulk of the rest will be dedicated to making this as close to Quake as humanly possible.  ID Software’s magnum opus still lives strong in gamers’ hearts, and many will do whatever they can to keep playing it (except for actually running the original, which has an engine so dated you could probably find dinosaur bones in it).

The upside?  If you host your own HL:DC Server you can set it up how you like it.

2.  True Deathmatch
NO-ONE is on your side.  Deathmatch does exactly what it says on the tin and everyone you see is trying to kill you (and more importantly, so are the ones you can’t).  You might think you’re used to that, but these are people who’ve been here since 1996 in some cases, so while you’re still getting used to the distinctive “Brown and more brown” Quake graphics the score leader will have lightning-sniped you from midair while invisible.  This isn’t Call of Duty with alternate routes and camo - this is you and twenty murderers in an open room filled with an improbable amount of firepower.

3.  Unbalanced Weapons
Everyone trying to kill you wouldn’t be so bad - it turns out a lot of games have that idea - except you’re appearing with a wimpy shotgun and anyone who’s been alive longer than five seconds has a better weapon than that.  The old-school gameplay mechanics include balance-breaking items like Quad Damage and the Lightning Gun, so if you see somebody glowing purple and spewing thunderbolt death think of them as an angry Thor and run like hell.

Why put up with that?  Because it’s incredibly fun when it’s your turn.  Exploding enemies just by looking at them generally is.

4.  Bunny-hopping
A heavily-armed three-hundred pound space marine leaping and prancing like his feet are on fire is an odd sight, but in Quake-like games they’re exploiting the game’s physics to move faster than running and make themselves far harder to hit.  Oh, and sometimes their feet actually will be on fire:  Old school levels include huge lava floors, “haha you fell off” ledges, and various other items modern games have evolved out of.

Keep these simple tips in mind and you can have an awesome time.  Just remember: rockets beat shotgun, and Quad Damage beats everything.

“Die In Pain, Rest In Peace” is fast, free, and makes Mad Max look like an old woman pushing a pram of kittens through a flower garden.  Proof that unofficial mods aren’t just model packs and unbalanced levels, D.I.P.R.I.P. is an astonishingly good total conversion for Half Life 2.  So good that the people who actually made HL2 recently announced “That’s so awesome we’re going to officially support it.”  It uses the the Source physics engine to kick more ass than most officially developed games and does a better job of Death Race than Death Race does.

Remember the awesome vehicle sections in Half Life 2?  Imagine that with cars which aren’t wimpy cage-constructions, don’t waste time worrying about the wimpy humans inside, and every other player is a real live human that you can blow to chunks.  The “kill everyone else for poorly explained reasons” plot is eternal as the idea of gaming, and it’s still more coherent here than in the recent Death Race remake. It’s also just as irrelevant.  Gaming like this is defined by what you end up doing, not why, and you will be doing awesometastic things: crashing through barriers and diving off bridges to avoid enemy fire, handbrake-spinning ballets of death, slaloming between crates with heavy machine-gun fire rattling all around and yelling as you unleash guided missile devastation upon ambushed enemies.

Your first game on a DIPRIP server is a learning experience.  Suddenly appearing in a field full of armoured cars with machine guns will tend to be, and at least this way you get more than one go.  The most vital skill is rapid weapon select - you’ll want to redefine those keys to somewhere closer than the number row (like those lovely extra buttons if you have a real gaming mouse).  The mortar is optimistic at best (though it’s a treat and a joy if you can range in on two people distracted by their close range battle), missile fire is for the mid-range (where you can trade between homing ability or sheer explosive force) and the light machine gun is vital for close combat as the only gun you can aim in directions other than “straight ahead”.

This is no clunky blastfest either.  DIPRIP rewards both shooting and driving, with daring skids and tight turns through the detailed environments making the adrenaline-soaked difference between life and death.  Bursting through walls, hay bales, and generally shouting “YEeeeeHAAA!” like a considerably more badassDuke of Hazzard.  The maps are varied, from the vast and lethal plains of Village to the tight turns of the heavily built up Refinery.  The scenery is vital as well as vivid, fantastically grim and detailed settings providing cover, ambush points and sheer speedrun getaways for demented drivers of all stripes.

The best example of DIPRIP destruction delight is the turbocharger.  Yes, turbocharger, as in “Jet streams of fire and jump over hills to ram into your enemies” turbocharger.  The more you turbocharge the higher the temperature rises.  In most games, hereafter to be known as “wimps”, overheating means it’ll shut down and can’t be used for a while.  Developers EXOR Studios cunningly realised that “slowing down” and “not turbocharging” weren’t exactly exciting concepts and you here can turbocharge as much as you like - as long as you don’t mind the likely consequences of overheating a system composed mainly of flammable liquids and fire.

Any game where you find yourself racing for a corner to shake incoming fire, flames streaming from your battered vehicle with “missile lock on” and “turbocharger overload” sirens competing for your attention?  Where a daring escape or overload detonation is a matter of microseconds?  That is an awesome game. A game that will be available on Steam.  For free.  If you love fast and furious firepower, you should play it.  If you don’t, I don’t wanna talk to you no more.

You already know that Half Life 2 is the greatest first person shooter ever made. If you don’t, whatever reason you think you have is wrong. In fact, the only possible explanation is that you haven’t played it - in which case you should leave right now and start. GO!

HL2 has won more Game of the Year awards than you can name (seriously, name thirty awards). Even if Captain MacPicky teleported in from the Universe of Whining, the only thing he could complain about is that the single player campaign isn’t multiplayer. Which is like saying the Space Shuttle isn’t awesome because it can’t go underwater, but the heroes at Merciless Development are fitting submarine systems to the masterpiece by developing “Folllow Freeman” - Half Life 2 co-operative.

Any game that starts with a Bertrand Russell quote has to be a cut above, and the high standards don’t stop there. The sheer level of work that’s gone into this is apparent from the instant you log into a Follow Freeman Server. You appear in ff_readyroom, an entire (and quite detailed) map built to control the server options and level select - you know, the things most modders just use !server console commands for. When you get to a game level it gets even better, replaying epic battles from the single player campaign with human backup (like the defense of the lighthouse tower). The respawns are intelligent, it’s great to know that your fellow rebel fighters are real people humans rather than NPCs, and wow but those Combine dropships really aren’t ready for co-ordinated fire from multiple rocket launchers.

Which is why you can help them! In “Combine Assassin” mode a quarter of the players can be assigned to the dark side, beefed up super-troopers out to sabotage the resistance and destroy every freedom fighter they see. Moving among your computer-controlled backup/cannon fodder, you can wreak havoc among human players slightly distracted by all the regular baddies. Come on, you’ve always known you’d do a far better job than those grunts - and donning the metal Metrocop facemask to dispense “pacification” is always fun…

There are brand new missions too - bz_trainstation sees you and Combine squadmates in the wake of the demolition of Dr Breen’s tower, desperately repairing the perimeter shield around the train station while fighting off headcrab zombies until you can be evacuated by train.

The experience isn’t yet perfect. It’s based on the single-player engine, so you’ll need a Teamspeak server of your own (there aren’t any in-game chat options - not even typing text!) Attempting to move past each other can occasionally be clunky, and the aim in user-made missions isn’t always as clear as in the converted single player stages.

But it’s a damn awesome concept, and now that it’s in open beta (and free!) it’s a project that deserves your attention. How many cool things can you help just by playing games? There aren’t many FF servers online, but a custom Follow Freeman server is a perfect option for the clan looking for a new way to pass the time - and a great way to make one of the best games ever made fresh again. Everyone will enjoy it, and if they don’t? You need to screen admissions to your clan more carefully.

You enjoy mowing down hordes of evil zombies. You enjoy shooting other players online. Zombie Panic: Source allows you to do both, and the fact that you probably haven’t heard of it before is a crime against creativity on par with using the Statue of David as a coat rack.

The joy of Zombie Panic isn’t just the fun of blowing up zombies. Which is immense, by the way. It’s how it’s the closest you can get to being in an awesome zombie movie without hacking off your right hand (which we don’t recommend - chainsaws don’t work so well with mice). As a survivor you’ll find yourself desperately piling furniture in front of doorways, fleeing for the safety of the group, even shouting “Leave him he’s gone!” over your teamspeak servers while abandoning your too damn slow comrade to the brain-munching hordes.

Never mind shotguns and pistols – sofas and stairs are a real weapon.

You’ll also have to do some very strange things. Things like “holstering” your weapon (that means putting it away - you might not have met this concept in online games before) so you can shove the furniture around. You may even have to drop ammunition, as in “not fire it” (we’ll give you a moment to get over the shock). In most games the only way to get rid of ammo is to throw it into enemy bodies at high velocity. In Zombie Panic, hoarding all the bullets just means you’ll be the dessert after the undead eat your under-armed accomplices - because your attempt to recreate Rambo has left you with the top speed of a parked car.

Playing ZP takes a little getting used to - you’re recommended to log on to an empty Zombie Panic Server to get used to the extra controls. Because when a rotting corpse is trying to unwrap your head like a christmas present isn’t the time to be fiddling with bind keys. And, oh yeah, because you only get one life. One. It’s a genius recreation of the desperate survivor scene - every survivor player wants to stay alive, and getting killed means you join the ranks of the rotting. When that happens you switch teams to the zombie side.

A bad day for humanity

Just when you thought the game couldn’t get cooler.

The game also tackles the deep metaphysical dichotomy of zombification, though probably by accident. Movies occasionally address the pain of the infected, driven to kill and eat friends by insatiable hunger - in Zombie Panic the instant you rise again as a hungering corpse, you’re dead keen to start eating your old friends. And you know exactly where they are.

Zombie Vision: because only the living are scared of the dark

For the humans co-ordination is important, but for the zombies it’s absolutely vital. Slower than the living (and with only a couple of seconds of “lunge” ability), the zombies must use teamspeak servers to flank their opponents. It feels odd to charge a machine-gunning foe with nothing but your rotting fingers - but the fact that you’ll come back from the dead is good. Watching your teammates creeping up behind your killer with your meaningless life as a distraction is better. And the fact that your newly-zombified former enemy will then help you kill his former teammates is absolutely priceless.

This is what we call flanking – the other zombie will come back, the human not so much

Did we mention Zombie Panic is free? What could you possible be waiting for?


Official Site

Zombie Panic at ModDB

Zombie Panic Servers

Shipment, aka “The lunatic flesh blender in green and gray.” It looks like this:




though you’ll more often see it as this:




The worst map since a sheet of blank white paper with the word “Antarctica” written in crayon. How this abomination has stayed on CoD4 servers is a mystery, but likely connected to people who somehow feel good about skill-free high scores. For those unfamiliar the Small Square of Screwup, we’ve made the following helpful guide.

Shipment is to Call of Duty 4 as a bar-room brawl is to ice hockey - it may use some of the skills involved, but they’re all the bad ones and it’s nothing but pain for everyone involved. It’s as if after years of crafting one of of the best FPS games ever made, it was “opposite day” at Infinity Ward and they made a map to highlight every single flaw in the experience. The crates are unquestionably placed to provide sheltered niches for spawncampers, those bottom-feeding scum that hide behind your arrival point and machine gun people as they appear. Please not that the only reason spawncampers still exist is because we haven’t worked out a way to electrocute people over the internet yet.

The Containeryard of Crap also accommodates the game-ruining sports of the Three Frag Fling (using the 3x frag perk and throwing them all as soon as you appear) and the ever-terrible Martyr (drop a grenade when you die). You might notice that both of those perks reward people who don’t bother to “aim” or “hit things they’re shooting at”, traditionally regarded as important abilities in a shooting game. Imagine a basketball court that encourages people to hit each other and kick the ball. And where every match lasts three seconds.

The lack of cover and a target density slightly higher than lead bars falling into a black hole, Shipment is also the worst offender in the “Helicopter-helicopter-helicopter” loophole. If someone can stay alive long enough to call down the Chopper of Death (through luck, pacts with the devil, or being a scummy spawncamper), the high turnover of the map ensures that they’ll die, respawn, and have enough airborne murder-machine kills to call down another - certainly no-one can risk taking their eyes off the ground long enough to bring the thing down.

Some insist that Shipment is just a different but equally valid test of ability. Their grenade-spamming-”skill” may give them more points than anyone else, but this preference for “winning” over “the entire actual spirit of the game” makes them the kind of petty failure who’d knock over a Monopoly board, storm out of the room, and then insist they didn’t lose “because we never finished.”

If you do arrive on a Call of Duty 4 server running the Green Death, your best bet is to whip out the SAW and get all those LMG achievements: bullet-unproof walls and a crosshair that changes when you’re killing someone turns this 2007 gaming masterpiece into a child’s motor skills game - keep moving the cross till it changes shape and you win!

Except you’re playing Shipment. So you, along with everyone else on the map, lose.

Goldrush is the most popular map on Team Fortress 2 servers (recent update insanity aside), even pushing the almighty Dustbowl from the top spot. What makes moving a cart along a fixed track so compelling?



It can’t be the novelty - that fades a couple of weeks after each update, along with all the horrible TF2 achievementbox servers (aka “How to turn your favorite game into work in one easy step!”). As well as being added to the main rotation, loads of custom servers have cropped up offering Goldrush 24/7 and most tellingly of all, Goldrush/Dust TF2 servers.

That’s your first hint: the dedicated attack/defense dynamic is tremendous fun. There’s no such thing as a stalemate on a one-way map: if things aren’t moving forward then RED is kicking your weak BLU ass. But with a map so well designed it never becomes an uncrackable Chokepoint Of Death: there are always alternate routes and counter-strategies to however they’re holding you back. Protip: 90% of the time the counter strategy is “You need more medics you BLU dumbasses”. Looking at the win/lose ratio, we can see that this happens a LOT.

Why does RED hold sway on this map so often? Half of any battle is intel, and a look at the valve-provided “Death Map” for the stage reveals a major hotspot:

or as you normally see it:

This one section of corridor is slightly more lethal than a Predator wearing a necklace of nuclear warheads. A great stickybomb point, open to close-range sentries (and snipers from clear across the map), a Heavy buffet of Eety-Beety-victims and so wonderfully custom made for defensive pyros it might as well come with gas nozzles in the walls.

BLU can hide behing the corner and build an uber - but they never do seem to run fast enough when the RED counter-charge comes barreling round that wooden corner. I’ve seen more medics burned up at 90% uber than I care to count - and with so many medikits so close by, there’s really no excuse. Be ready to charge, but be ready to flee with that precious percentage at the first sign of trouble. Remember: a medic life without an ubercharge is a wasted life.

There are other hot spots (the final approach in stage 2 and the terminal corner in stage 3), but none nearly so deadly as that first tunnel. A few hints to help crack any of those hotspots:

- There are other routes. Outside of relay races, spending ten times as long running as fighting is not a good contribution, so don’t just march round the Corner of Instant Explosion trying to headbutt a level 3 sentry.
- Watch your back - and more importantly, watch your medics back! Some of the alternate routes work both ways.
- Are you a spy? Are you in the bottom half of the scoreboard? Then why not try going medic and NOT being hated by the rest of your team!
- If you must spy, be aware that after the first point is capped sapping the tele entrances does nothing but tell them you’re there.
- Don’t be an offensive scout on stage 1. What the hell is wrong with you?

I like to think that I’ve been playing PC games for a long time. I’m still quite young, sure, but even so I’ve been around. A couple of years after I learned to read using a video game (Reader Rabbit 2!), I played my first FPS with Wolfenstein 3D. Following quickly after that was the classic Star Wars: Dark Forces, and I’ve been playing video games, mostly shooters, ever since.

I mention this because, despite what any teammates unlucky enough to have me say, I am no noob. I want that made pretty clear. I’m not new to the shooter genre.

So imagine my surprise when I load my first game of Modern Warfare and completely lose my mind. Without doubt, Call of Duty 4 is the most chaotic war simulation I have ever played. I might have heeded the warnings of another writer on this site, but surely such words as “You will die, and you will die immediately, and you die not knowing why” were for mere other people. You know, the mere mortals.

Sure, it might have been a mistake on my part to go for a 50-person team deathmatch COD4 Server as my first game. But hey, I told myself in a fit of self-delusion, go big or go home! Right? Sure.

Compounding this probably poor choice was the server’s selection of map. Given that I was already in way over my head, the choosing of Shipment as my first map is clearly evidence of some higher power screwing with me. For the unaware, Shipment is the dockyard-style map in which players battle in an area approximately the size of a matchbox. There’s no hiding, and the whole map is meant to encourage run-and-gun.

I was installed, updated and patched. I had my custom class armed with the trusty M16 and was about to enter a slugfest with 50 people slugging it out over real estate that could fit in my backyard. And I had no idea what was about to happen. The map loads. I’m autoassigned, select my class, and the round begins.

Fear. Pain. Horror. I’m cut down so often and from so many angles that I begin to get a mild form of vertigo. My world seems to have become one giant grenade. After dying four times, I decide to just start pulling my trigger randomly. I die several more times. Somehow, probably through sheer pity, the CoD system awards me enough experience to earn a promotion. I must have bumped someone into the path of a grenade, Inspector Clouseau style, because I certainly don’t remember shooting anyone.

There’s a gap in my memory about here, but the experience is vaguely shrapnel-shaped.

Soon after, the game ended. My right index finger twitched listlessly. Holy crap. Somehow I had gained a level and even killed a few enemies. And I was DEFINITELY going to find a nice 20-man game and hunker down for a while. As least until my ears quit ringing.

With over seventy thousand players every day, and that’s just people with legitimate licenses, Counter Strike: Source servers remain the most popular gaming destination among all FPSs. The most popular, the most entrenched, and more resistant to change than a ninety year old turtle embedded in cement. There are still people whining over the change to the vastly superior Source engine, so Valve has wisely refrained from making any further changes. Unfortunately this means this uber-game remains utterly un-achievemented: which is why your friends at LowPings Game Servers have made some for you: