News | 7/24/2008 at 11:17 AM

Left 4 Dead Interview Showcases New Look, Weapons

Maximum PC recently had an interview with the designer of Left 4 Dead, Michael Booth, about the upcoming zombie killing game.  There's a lot of information in the interview, detailing how the scaling AI works, the new look of the graphics, and much more.  A few details about the "boss" zombies are given as well, and they are all awesome.  Zombies with tongue weapons or who puke on you in particular sound like winners.  A couple tidbits about weapons in the game are dropped, as well, including this interesting quote.

The pipe bomb before was very realistic, so it exploded like a real pipe bomb would. But in terms of gameplay mechanics, especially with this game, it wasn’t actually very functional. There are so many zombies that are coming at you from all directions that having one even fairly big explosion didn’t help in a lot of cases. So what we did is we McGuyvered it a bit. Now, there’s like a labeled battery strap on the bomb with a beeper and the beeper sound just drives the zombies nuts. They have to chase the sound. So you can pull out the pipe bomb and set it off and it starts beeping faster and faster and all the zombies in the area chase down the pipe bomb like a dog chasing a bone. They kick it around and after about six seconds the beeper keeps getting faster until it explodes. But of course it’s completely surrounded by zombies at that point.

The game was notable enough already, but now we add to its list of accomplishments "First Use of McGuyvered As A Verb"!