Cooperative FPS games are the darlings of the genre right now, but they’re popping up so fast that it’s getting hard to tell them apart. However, in a subgenre mostly defined by players reviving each other after tactical mishaps, Left 4 Dead is still the only game where you’ll drop your comrade mid-revival so you can shoot through him. You know, because of all the zombies.

Valve’s upcoming sequel to that game was present on the PAX show floor, and Ricardo Ariza was kindly fielding questions instead of just hitting zombies with guitars. He’s one of the two character sculptors working on the sequel’s 35 man team and was just chock full of information.

If you’ve missed out on the seminal Half Life FPS series (or you just happen to be a dirty pirate), Valve has discounted the whole lot to fire sale prices. This weekend, you’ll be able to download Half-Life, Half-life 2, both episodes, and Half-Life: Deathmatch from Steam for 66% off regular price. For Steam neophytes, that means about $1-6 for each of the games. If you’d like to just up and download the lot of them, it comes out to about $17 (which is probably cheaper than Episode 3 will be whenever it arrives).

The Half-Life series is famous for popularizing scripted events as a way to integrate narrative into gameplay without using cut scenes. Subsequent games made great strides in physics-driven gameplay and facial animations that made characters warmer and more believable. So even if you aren’t a huge FPS fan, you can still have a piece of gaming history for less than the price of a budget game.

Valve’s entire collection is also 10% off, which adds Portal, Team Fortress 2, and Left 4 Dead (among other notables) to the deal for a grand total of $90. Whether you’re in for a penny or pound, there’s a lot of gaming for just a little money over at Steam this weekend.

In the wake of fan outrage that Valve could be so audacious as to release Left 4 Dead sequel a year after the first game hit, the company has announced that a new movie will soon be up for download. Titled Crash Course, the new content will bridge the gap between the first two movies, [...]

In a move you’d expect from the Umbrella Corporation, Valve is trying to merge two zombie concepts into one multi-headed brain-devouring chimera. Marketing VP Doug Lombardi told totalvideogames.com that Valve was “trying to work out the details” to make it possible for fans of the first game to play alongside their sequel-adopting counterparts. This decision [...]

Once upon a time, Valve and Sierra had a happy relationship where Valve would develop games and Sierra would publish physical copies and sell licenses to cyber café players. However, after a royalty dispute, Valve began to move toward its now wildly popular Steam distribution platform, and the developer-publisher relationship strained until it cracked. Soon, [...]

It’s not often that a news update sounds more like it came from a cell phone than from Valve, but a considerable amount of news has emerged regarding the upcoming Left 4 Dead downloadable content. The content was originally billed as expanding the competitive multiplayer options to all four movies available in core game (up from the two movies available in the retail game) and adding campaign development tools and a new gameplay mode called survival.

Since the original announcement, however, Valve has revealed exactly what survival mode will include. The mode will apparently deliver a straightforward action scenario where players will be attacked by endless waves of zombies with the goal of lasting as long as possible. More interestingly, however, the developer announced that all this content will be free.

After the gamer backlash to Twisted Pixel’s announcement that it would be selling bonus levels for The Maw, it seems like Valve made the correct PR choice to make the content free. This is especially true in light of the fact that addition of versus gameplay to two existing movies feels more like filling in missing content, regardless of the logistical realities of producing that content.

That said, if Valve were to add another movie as downloadable content, we’d be happy to pay (let’s see…$60 divided by four movies…) $15 for it.

…Please?

Pirates happen. A lot. For the most part, developers and distributers respond to the ever-present threat of theft with DRM and attempts to foster social change. The logic goes that pirates are the enemy and they must be fought and undermined to prevent the swashing of bucklers wherever possible. They can buy your games, so they should be buying them.

Consider the implicit assumption that pirates can buy the games they’re stealing. Jason Holtman, Valve’s director of business development/legal affairs points out that many of them can’t (via GameDaily):

“The reason people pirated things in Russia, is because Russians are reading magazines and watching television — they say ‘Man, I want to play that game so bad,’ but the publishers respond ‘you can play that game in six months…maybe.’ “

He then went on to detail how Valve has experienced significantly declining piracy when they do simultaneous worldwide releases of fully localized products. Although his anti-piracy plan appears to consist of the radical business strategy of selling products to people who don’t have them, the succinct identification of the western centrism underlying most anti-piracy is a bit revelatory. It’d be interesting to see the geographical breakdown on who stole World of Goo.

Left 4 Dead is more exciting on paper than it is in practice, but the actual game is undiminished for it. It promises an endlessly replayable cooperative multiplayer experience with roguelike procedurally generated content and delivers a brief, intense, FPS game that stays intense even as you become familiar with it. Perhaps not exactly as advertised, but good stuff nonetheless.

Hoary old gamers (read: anyone around since The Orange Box) may recall that it shipped with Peggle Extreme, a standalone Half-Life-themed bundle of levels for casual megahit Peggle. If you’ve ever been curious but haven’t wanted to shell out the cash, Valve is now offering it for free via Steam. For those unfamiliar, Peggle is a gravity-driven puzzle game where the objective is to destroy every peg on a game board by bouncing a ball among them. It’s sort of like pinball without flippers, and has a habit of depriving otherwise productive members of society of their duly-earned sleep. Go have a crack at it.

In what may be the first tactical deployment of sandwich technology outside an RPG, Valve’s Team Fortress 2 has added an unlockable for the Heavy class characters: The Sandvich. Valve advises that it be used to encourage Heavies to defend vital positions, but its full potential is realized in the introductory video.