i tried out the demo, and i can't say that I'm a huge fan. This is not shocking though, since I not a fan of the original either.

I'm planning on getting it for three reasons:

1) My 21 year old son recently moved back in with me while he goes to school at U of M and he loves to play L4d and liked the demo. (If I'm playing L4D with you, I'm probably him).

2) I hate zombies.

3) Giller said so.

Do I get points for playing the demo while listening to Michael Jackson's Thriller?

Because I think I should...

(And I already have it preordered at GameStop. Exclusive weapons ftw!)

Yeah, gay points.

I was listening to Outkast while playing it. Pro shit.

Game is fun. Will probably buy it. It's a sequel. HL2 didn't change much from the original and it still owns. Quit being a bitch.

Hitting a zombie upside the head with a frying pan is one of those things I never thought about doing and, after the first time I did it, now I wonder how I've gone through the majority of my life not doing it every day...

CLANG! *giggle*

I just tried to run the demo, and it barely works on my old soon to be dead computer. Graphics look terrible (from my end) because they're running on the bare minimum (I don't actually meet the minimum requirements).

They must have updated the graphics engine from L4d1, since I can run that game reasonably well.

Is this a good excuse to get a new computer? hmmmm, maybe.

The first game was fun to me because it was the most authentically "scary" zombie game I had ever seen. Playing it almost nightly with my close friends made it that much better. But by the end, it felt to me like every "campaign" was essentially the same experience with a slightly different skin and slightly different level design. Not only didn't this make things feel a bit stale by the end, it really only had a few campaigns in all, repetitive though they may have felt, and my final opinion putting the game down was one of disappointment. The feeling was buffered slightly by my knowledge of Valve's commitment to its other multiplayer-focused games like TF2 and the years of gradual improvements it saw.

That little bit of "good will" was tossed out the window at E3 when they announced L4D2. Even if it was the kind of radical improvement on the original that would warrant a sequel (it's not), it's coming just over half a year after the original's release. That means Valve either had begun work on the sequel long before the original was even out the door, which I doubt, or the steps to get from L4D1 to L4D2 wouldn't be all that great.

From every single thing I've seen or read about it, L4D2 is firmly in the latter category. Every gameplay mechanic, every jumpy thing I loved, and every repetitive, miracle "Director" spawned pointless horde that I grew tired of seems entirely intact from the original, and the only thing this "sequel" adds is more, MORE, MOAR:

• More polygons
  
• More weapons
  
• More uncommon common enemies
  
• More locales
  
• More gore

I'm sorry, but simply dogpiling more of the same onto an already borderline formula just doesn't make me want to spend a full game's price. Hell, I'm not sure if I'd play them if they were just free content updates to the original! It's just four players moving from segment to segment while mindless zombies are "dynamically" thrown at them. Occasionally you'll even get to a quiet place where you very conveniently have to hit a switch, button or other trigger, and then the horde arrives.

Look, I'm not disputing the fun I had with the original. Looking back, it felt like five campaigns with only minor cosmetic differences. I have no interest in replaying them over again, and even tinkering with all the above elements doesn't, in my mind, make for a new experience worth more of my time.

You might be tempted to respond, "Oh well, your loss, you're entitled to your opinion," to which I answer that just as some like Giller began this thread to post his reasons for buying it, I'm posting my reasons for not.