I don’t understand why I just can’t get enough of Left 4 Dead! By all rights, I should have moved on to 2 or 3 others games by now, but I have absolutely no desire to play anything else! This is totally insane! This reminds me of another zombie game I became totally obsessed with: Dead Rising.

I have completed Dead Rising no fewer than 7 times and have nabbed every achievement but 1! Well technically I did fulfill the requirements for that one achievement but it didn’t unlock for some reason

Anyway, I decided that Frank West from Dead Rising more than deserves a place on a Left 4 Dead poster if not in the game itself and so I photoshopped him in as a tribute. Enjoy

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So here we are: 1 year, 117 posts, 842 comments and 115,992 unique visitors later and we’re still alive and kicking! What can I say, as I said in the first post, I didn’t know if I had it in me to even keep up with posting on a blog, now I can’t imagine life without it

So what has happened in the last year in my life? My son is 11 months old today My loving wife is still the love of my life! I’m still a game designer and loving that and have thus far worked on 2 released games with a third on the way! I’ve rediscovered two long lost loves: Magic the Gathering and Professional Mixed Martial Arts.  Haven’t touched my “work in progress” novel at all since last year though, and I’m really disappointed about that…

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It’s been a month and a half now of mowing down zombie after zombie in Valve’s spectacular coop extravaganza: Left 4 Dead.

I have to admit, Left 4 Dead disappointed me on day one. I beat all of the campaigns on the normal difficulty setting in 5 hours on the first day. I played them alone since my wife didn’t want to try it and I didn’t know anyone else who had it on the 360. In general, I don’t like playing online with people I don’t know so I went solo. When it was all over, I felt somewhat unsatisfied. It was short and didn’t feel very different from a regular FPS.

Then I finally convinced my wife to try Versus Mode with me online and that was the end of my social life. Now we’re both addicted and play it daily yelling at each other to get the Hunter off or freaking out at the sight of the dreaded Witch! Valve, you’ve got a winner in Left 4 Dead and I hope you don’t take too long to come out with some DLC!

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In my endless trek to experience what the entire internet has to offer, I found myself on a free online comic called Slaughter Inc. I was immediately taken aback by the sheer quality of the comic in both art and writing.  Each page looks like a hand-painted work of art and the dialog feels straight out of a Quentin Tarantino movie.

The subject is right up my alley too. I don’t know what’s wrong with me these days but I can’t seem to get enough of zombies! From re-watching Shawn of the Dead, to being alarmingly addicted to Left 4 Dead … and now Slaughter Inc? What’s next, looking for brains in the frozen food section of my local grocery store?

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Here we are, more than 2 weeks after my initial review and I had a lot more time to find the ups and downs of this game.

In my previous posts, I said I could not find many downsides to this game. I unfortunately found several now but I also found some new good sides.

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A couple of months ago a music executive said that royalty rates for songs used in video games are “paltry” and a game executive replied by saying that really, the music companies ought to be paying the gaming companies for promoting their songs.

This argument could really be applied to any license, music or not. It used to be that a game could profit enormously by having a connection to an established license. But now that media consumption patterns have shifted, those licenses profit just as much by being featured in a game.

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Ever wanted to take a course to learn something that may enhance your ability to get a really really good jobs? But you didn’t have the time or the money to go to school. Ever dream of going to an ivy league school…hmm I don’t know like MIT but didn’t have the marks, money or even knew what the application process was.

Well thanks to the open source era you can now get online courses for free from a miriad of great universities including MIT.

How you may ask? Well MIT developed an OpenCourseWare site. You have access 1800 courses ranging from Engineering to health sciences, they even have cources for Humanities and the arts.

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Last night’s UFC 91 fight between Randy Couture and Brock Lesnar was epic in more ways than one. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who saw the similarity between it and the Rocky series, but I just couldn’t help bringing it up never-the-less.

Randy Couture is a legendary fighter a-la Rocky Balboa. Many believe he is past his prime. He came into the ring yesterday as a UFC Hall of Famer, a 5 time Championship holder, and present Heavy-Weight Champion. As if all of that wasn’t impressive by itself, he’s also 45 years young. His fighting yesterday had “Rocky 5″ written all over it.

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Only two days ago did I procure the Grand Theft Auto clone Saints Row 2, but I already feel the need to write about it.

Yes Saints Row is a GTA clone, but that does not mean its creators should be ashamed of it. Clone just mean someone took a good idea and build on it. That’s called innovation and if people refrained from cloning and improving good ideas then we would still be driving around in Ford model T’s.

Now, let’s take a look at this game from the perspective of its most likely user: a GTA IV player who’s looking for even more goodies from a sandbox game.

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