The official release time of L4D2 is 2.5 hours from now, but Valve intended to release it 3 hours early; at least, that’s true if you go by Pacific time.

So technically it’s 30 minutes late but 2.5 hours early still.  I think someone’s having trouble configuring the release:

At least, I’m pretty sure there aren’t seven editions of Left 4 Dead 2…

Edit: A few minutes later, there are still seven copies, but the date has been changed to Nov 16, 2009.  And of course the duplicates were removed just as I typed this.

Edit 2: And of course, now the single listing has Nov 17, 2009 listed as the release date.  They really shouldn’t do this stuff on a production server…

Edit 3: It ended up coming out just one hour “late”.  The nerd rage literally crashed Steam’s forums.  It was definitely worth the wait, though; I’ll write a post later this week about it.

I thought I’d mention a game I tried recently.  Torchlight (standalone demo here, or Steam demo here) is an excellent Diablo-style game (made by some of the same people who made Diablo and Fate).

Basically, they took Diablo II, ground it up into its essence, and then distilled that essence into pure dungeon-crawling ecstasy.  And it looks beautiful.

This is the game to play if you liked the loot-hoarding aspects of Diablo II.  The skill tree is arguably simpler, and there are only three classes (instead of seven), so you don’t have to think as hard about what you want to do with your character – you either hit stuff to death, magic stuff to death, or summon stuff to death.

It also has a few nifty features that I wish Diablo II had.  For example, it has a shared stash.  Anything in it is accessible by any of your characters.  If your fighter finds something your alchemist would find useful, you just stick it in the shared stash – it will be there when you next play your alchemist.

Another feature is that your pet (which you have in place of a hired mercenary) can be sent to town laden with loot.  It comes back with the gold from the sale of said loot.  (Penny-Arcade had a humorous take on the idea.)

Torchlight is single-player only, which is perfect for me, since that’s the only way I play Diablo-style games, and it’s pretty cheap at $19.95 on Torchlight’s official site, or $19.99 on Steam.  I highly recommend it.  (Personally I’m waiting on a Steam sale, because I have other games to play right now, but I’ll definitely buy it at some point.)

The Left 4 Dead 2 demo came out yesterday (for people who pre-ordered the game, anyway), and I played it for half an hour last night.   I noticed several things when compared to the first Left 4 Dead (if you want to find out for yourself, stop reading):

- The main menu is vastly improved
- The in-game HUD is improved
- The full version will have five campaigns and four five game modes at launch, better than L4D1′s four campaigns and two games modes (four and a half campaigns and three game modes, if you add in the post-launch DLC)
- New survivors (of course), and it’s actually a refreshing break from Bill, Louis, Francis, and Zoe
- There are new, improved models for the Tank, Boomer and Smoker (not just new textures)
- New textures for the Hunter and Witch
- New, improved sound effects for old special infected
- Three new special infected
- At least one new type of common infected (some are armored and therefore harder to kill), and I gather that there are more that aren’t in the demo (e.g. clowns)
- Melee weapons – TONS of melee weapons: batons, machetes, frying pans, axes, chainsaws, guitars… you have no idea how satisfying it is to bash a Smoker over the head with a guitar.
- New primary weapons: I must have used at least a dozen new primary weapons in my one play session
- New secondary weapons: Along with the default pistol, a higher-powered pistol was added
- New thrown weapons: Vials of boomer puke to attract infected somewhere (and I think one other I’m forgetting at the moment)
- New utilities: defibrillators to revive dead teammates, adrenaline shots to increase speed (there may have been one other I’m forgetting)

The last six items there should give you pause – there are whole new areas of strategy in L4D2 that simply don’t exist in L4D1.  You have to choose between carrying a health pack or carrying a defibrillator unit; adrenaline and pills; pistol or melee; pipe bomb or molotov or boomer vial… you get the idea… and you have to balance that against not just “hordes and a few special infected”, but groups of different types of common infected along with six types of special infected.

The graphics engine has been greatly improved, and anyone who tells you otherwise is playing at 640×480 with all the eye candy disabled.

The demo lets you play the first two levels of The Parish.  Daylight zombie-killing has a very different feel to it, and the two maps in the demo feel less cramped than (say) No Mercy while feeling less empty and less railroaded than Crash Course.

I didn’t spend time exploring the maps, or fiddling with every weapon I saw.  There are probably things I missed.

There can be no doubt about it.  L4D2 has more new content than L4D1 had at launch, and I for one welcome our new armored zombie overlords.

Last time I wrote about Champions Online, I had just started a new character.  Well, I haven’t gone back to Heron Blademaster yet, and I’ve gone through two more characters.

Michael was intended to be a half-man-half-machine sort of dude, with the power armor power set.  I didn’t really like it, though, so I didn’t play past level 8 or 9.

Silhouette uses the Darkness power set, which is fairly overpowered compared to some of the others.  It’s a set of ranged attacks (which are, without exception, superior to melee power sets in every way) that include a life-sucking ability.  Life-sucking is cheap and unfair, and it means I got a lot further with Silhouette than I’ve been with anyone else.

I stopped playing as Silhouette because when you hit level 28, you run into a few quests that you cannot beat unless you go in with four or five heroes.  Two- or three-man quests I can stomach – it’s fairly easy to ad-hoc a team that size with whoever happens to respond to your shouts – but five-man teams are difficult to ad-hoc.  You have to plan that sort of thing ahead of time.  Remember, I stopped playing Lord of the Rings: Online because I hit the you-have-to-plan-a-group-ahead-of-time-to-keep-playing point at level 13.

So, I started over again with Cold Shoulder.  He’s a guy who uses the Ice power set.  However, when I got to level 20 yesterday, I found that it’s much harder to beat quests than it was with Silhouette at the same level – because he can’t leech life off of his enemies like Silhouette can.  It means Cold Shoulder has to carry around large stashes of healing and protective items just to survive; Silhouette could get away with much less.

What I’m getting at is that the power set in Champions Online is wildly unbalanced.  I don’t like Player vs Player because of that.  (I tried PvP with Heron Blademaster, but melee-only heroes are worthless there, because ranged/flying heroes can just go in circles around you shooting until you fall over.)

I’m not sure what they could do to fix it.  Superheroes in general are unbalanced and overpowered – I think that’s the point.  Spiderman can do just about anything, as long as he has tall buildings to swing around on.  Superman is, well, Superman; he has probably had every power in the book at one point or another.  Batman has enough money that he can make gadgets for just about any situation, meaning he’s always prepared and his set of “powers” is limitless.

Those kinds of things make for entertaining comic books, but my conclusion (after playing Champions Online) is that they don’t translate to video games very well.

I started playing Champions Online over the weekend (curse you, Shamus!) and of course I had to go with a dual-sword-wielding hero.  He does technically have super-strength, but he rarely uses it as a weapon.  Some of you know me as “Heron”; some of you know me as “Heron Blademaster”, and that’s this hero’s name (sorry, no swords in the pictures):

From the front; you can see CO's broken cape physics.

I got these from CO’s website.

From the back

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Sorry, I’m not sure how to get those two to be side-by-side without pasting them together in Paint.  Anyway, I like the design; it’s I-like-killing-things-with-swords without screaming I’m-a-westerner-who-thinks-he’s-a-ninja.

I played through nineteen levels without having to grind (that’s a good thing) and without being required to join a group just to progress (which happened at level 13 with Lord of the Rings: Online, and is also the reason I stopped playing LotRO).  I found that I shared Shamus’ experience in Snake Gulch, though, which means I got frustrated and started a new character.  (I’ll go back to Heron Blademaster in a while.)

Champions Online is a good break from the completely-serious sort of atmosphere of WoW or LotRO; it’s also a good MMO for super-hero fans who like playing alone (like me) because they can’t be bothered to sit there trying to get a group of people together for an hour so they can go spend fifteen minutes killing some guy hiding in a sewer.