It’s still pretty easy to be awed by the mod communities that exist. Every once in a while something comes along that still makes me sit back and go “Woweewowow”. In this case it’s a Counter-Strike map made by Nipper that recreates Walt Disney World’s Haunted Mansion ride in excruciating detail. I’m not sure how this would actually play in an actual match but that does not take away from the effort put in to this stunning work. Check out a video walkthrough of the map below and download it here.

Almost forgot that we’ve charted this sort of territory before.

[Boing Boing]

Some people have been complaining about the lack of narrative in Valve’s absolutely brilliant Left 4 Dead. First, that’s a bunch of crazy talk. I’m not saying there is a deep narrative there I’m just saying that you don’t need to know more than there’s a bunch of zombies that are trying to eat you so don’t fucking die. You probably shouldn’t go off by yourself either. That Bill…he’s a weird fella.

This week we were excited to invite a couple of loyal readers, friends and guild mates on to the show: Scott “Xerxes3rd” Rising and Tim “Swiftwulf” Conway! With the launch of the recent World Of Warcraft expansion we thought now would be a good time (ahem, tim) to bring them on and have a chat about our favorite MMO. Big thanks go out to them for taking the time to be on the show!

This week we geek out on:

• WoW
• World Of Warcraft
• A very popular MMO

A Couple Of Notes:

• We had some last minute technical difficulties and we had to record the show in a way that yielded a lower quality than we usually provide to everyone. Our apologies on that front.
• Check out the post that brought Scott to our site.
• Though we never actually mention it you can find our guild on the Lothar server and here on the web.

This Week’s BitCast Music:
Selections from the World Of Warcraft soundtrack by Jason Hayes.

Download Episode 60

So Left 4 Dead drops today and is already playable in Steam. Being that it’s one of the best co-op games I ever played it’s natural to want to connect with you all while I’m balls-deep in wreckin’ some fool zombies. Luckily Steam provides a great way to connect with people through their community groups and I wanted to let you know that we have our very own on Steam. It’s a public group so there’s no invite needed and this will be a great way to be able to connect while getting your Steam gaming on.

Check out the group here.

I also wanted to take the time to publicly thank loyal reader Guruthos for letting me start a new BBPS Steam group. He had started one a long time ago and was gracious enough to let me take over the reigns. If you’re already a member of the old BBPS group you should already have an invite to the new group waiting for you.

When I’d first heard word that a new Bejeweled was on the way, my heart was placed somewhere between optimism and skepticism.  Like most of the modern world I’d sold my soul to the match-3 gods long ago.  And while my poison of choice had always been the Infinite Interctive helmed Puzzle Quest, I couldn’t help but recognize the monumental place Bejeweled held in the genre.  So could this, the first true sequel to Bejeweled in more than four years, do something truly different that we haven’t seen before?  Could PopCap really re-invent the wheel?  After doing some soul searching and countless hours of hands-on research, I’m prepared to share with you my findings.

Continue Reading »

On this week’s BitCast you can listen to me verbally SPOOGE all over this demo or you can go back and read how I can verbosely SPOOGE all up in it. Now you can see for yourself what I’m so hot and bothered over since you can now download the demo on both the PC and the 360. DO IT NOW and meet me on Steam or on Live and we’ll blow the heads off some friggin’ zombies together.

As I was first writing this post the entire thing consisted of one word written as big as this column width would allow:

Though that is entirely accurate of my feelings toward the game I have a conscience nagging at me saying that I should probably elaborate a little bit for you all. Besides, this game has been so damn high on my list of WANT NOW that it deserves more than just a single, perfect word. Read on to find out how the demo plays. Continue Reading »