Valve is the same as SecuROM in that you have to go into your registry to Un-install Steam and what Steam has placed in your computer.

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got past the steam part after 2 attempts, trust me not my problem. but hey, i'll have at it again. nope, reboot.

ok, still i figure with certain problems i've had on my network. those times 2 equal 0, ya know...

anyway, i finally get past the registration portion of this game. yeah, baby my networks working good now. wait but it wasn't my network after all. i could ping ping others in the world but not them. at this point i was just happy i got past that fiasco...

so, i start to install. with high hopes, i trudged on. asking no quarter! long live the king god damsels and country! i forged on! (i hadn't even seen a zombie at this point, so imagine the lag?)

to no avail, my efforts were thwarted at 5 mins to install < the real time <7 mins<12< send it back!!!!!

forgatta bout it,

Dick

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I can't really complain about Left 4 Dead 2. It's a great game and a definite graphical imporovement over Left 4 Dead. My firends and I play it almost every night and it's generally fun. The Melee weapons are great and weapon accessories like Explosive rounds, laser sights, etc are fun. Valve came within 90% of greatness with this game, a game that should have been absolutely fantastic but isn't for these reasons:

Tight FOV:

Yep, Valve has finally embraced the console tradition of a 60 degree FOV. As a result the game is more claustrophobic than the original. Sure sure, they did that for mood right? I'm sure the oversized menus and extra large text provide no indicator of an XBOX360 port.

Cheating AI:

Caught you Valve. The new AI Director 2 doesn't see to it that your game is fun like AI Director 1 did, it sees to it that you lose. Special infected spawn around corners, and some, like the jockey, spawn on your head. No indicator whatsoever of their existence until you're suddenly being ridden. One point I saw a jockey floating in the air above a door! NICE. Don't walk under that. Also, anytime you're within an inch of your life and all other teammates down and youre 3 feet from the safe room, AI Director 2 will spawn Hunters, Tanks, anything to keep you from entering. On normal difficulty of course. The game should be titled, "Annoyed to Death 2." Plus some of the coolest features in the press release I have yet to see. AI Director 2 random path generation? Nope. Changing weather? Nope. Where is this stuff? I've played all campaigns through at least a half dozen times each and haven't seen anything that wasn't scripted.

90% Club:

Valve strives for near greatness. Since the Half-Life series they have dwindled to developing games that arent fantastic, but near-great. For example, one of your weapons is a chainsaw. A chainsaw with limited fuel. Hmm, what litters every left 4 dead map? GAS CANS! Can you refill the chainsaw? NO! Another map, Dark Carnival, features carnival games you can play for achievements. But can you ride the bumper cars? or ride the roller coaster that you actually have to turn on and watch roll away without you? Of course not! That would be fun! And again, you can't drive away your own escape vehicle. I mean how hard is that? Maybe even just a tiny part of one map? Bah. This game is definitely more of an expansion of everything Valve promised for L4D1, rebadged into a new game.

Is it worth it?

Yeah I'm a little harsh on Valve, mainly because they used to be the best game developer hands down. Now? They're resting on their laurels and not delivering the 110% they used to. However annoying, Left 4 Dead 2 is still a great game. It's not perfect, but few games are on release. A recently announced DLC will add a new campaign where the new survivors meet the old survivors from L4D 1. Will this open up cross game play with L4D1 owners? Will it allow us to play as our favorites from L4D1? Will it let us play a 6 survivor campaign? Will it allow us to import the maps from L4D1 into L4D2 if we own both games? Knowing Valve, probably not.

If you're tight on budget and going to buy one game this Holiday season, get Borderlands. But if you're going to buy two, get Left 4 Dead 2.

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I had high expectations for this game but was miserably disappointed. The overall environment is very bland and the level of detail seen in Left4Dead is gone without a trace in this sequel. The maps for whatever reasons, are just big wide open spaces, perhaps in an attempt to counter the traditional camping seen in l4d. However, this made the game more boring in my opinion. The music in this game is very uninteresting and does not provide the thrill nor the adrenaline that came with the prequel. Although the new playable zombies and a wide variety of weapons may keep a player interested enough, I personally found the interest to be very short lived.

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I dont know about everybody else but when i tried to play the game it was like walking and shooting with a stutter, then when you had an objective where you have to press something the game would crash just crash and go back to windows. I have a high end computer and a graphcs card that can handle anything today. I even tried turning off and lowering graphics setting and it would still happen. I will never buy a valve game again! in fact i dont even want to deal with computer games if their going to force you to go online to play! looks like it ps3 for me!

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Gameplay is OK at best; good graphics and the gore factor is quite good, but overall it gets repetitive and dull quickly.

Thats the good part.

The DRM on this absolutely sucks. I will NEVER buy another game that runs on Steam. Its fine if you have a persistant internet connection or only want to play online, but if you want to continue to use the game you paid for, you MUST periodically get online and have it 'phone home' and check back in with Steam every couple days. They should mention that on the box with the game requirements, but they don't.

Even if you just want to play single player offline, you will soon get locked out of using the game until you can go back online and allow the game to re-connect with Steam. How about that? You can't use the product you paid for unless you let it check back in periodically.

I fully understand the need to protect the intellectual property of the game publishers, but this is far more onerous than that. A simple disc check would be sufficient, but when the game needs to check back in the Steam every couple days to keep running, thats simply unconscionable.

Never again. Don't buy into this kind of DRM.

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I like many others could not wait for this game to come out. I played the demo and pre-ordered the game to ensure that i got it as soon as possible.

l4d2 has been installed on my machine for more than 7 days now and i have not played it once due to a buggy update that steam installed on my machine. Everytime I try to open it i get a "incomplete installation error 55" message and am referred to the Steam Forum where i can hang out with the thousands of other users that are having the same problem. from what i can tell there is no fix in the works and no compensation offered for our wasted time and money..

Save your money, or buy a game from a company that knows how to design a decent patch.

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I looked at the picture before I bought it. It showed xbox360, When sent it was pc version. Return service was great.

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Gabe Newell should be PO'd. Give em what we think they want, yadda yada. $39 for an expansion? Gimme a break. They better be using all this cash to fund HL3.

Q: How do they sleep at night?

A: On a bed of money

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Valve did a good job on the pc version of this game, still I wish there were higher settings for effects like explosions which look particularly weak, especially when compared to the cool new fire effects on molotovs.

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I would not recommend the sequel to anyone simply because it does not live to any of the expectations it was amounted to. The new infected characters are lousy and not very creative, it has become overly complicated and lost all of its fun as well as a notable decrease in the quality of graphics. It is no wonder Valve has spent over $25 million dollars advertising the game since otherwise it would have failed, which I believe it definitely deserves to. Instead of adding to the first feature of the game the company rushed through a second production in a year coming up with something that is pretty much useless and much worse than the first game. Left 4 Dead 2 does not really bring anything new, in the sense of concept, it just changes characters which I could do very well by using some skins and provides some new maps to shoot each other in. Not worth it.

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