(Click to enlarge. Excuse me for the quality of the picture, as I was running the L4D2 demo from my college laptop.)
The background: Valve recently released the Left 4 Dead 2 demo. Although the only game play mode officially offered is the standard survival bout, it took only about a week for members of the online community to figure out how to modify the files to allow people to play as the infected (zombies). This semi-versus mode is not perfect, however, and as a result every time a player switches between human and infected the system creates an extra survivor clone. This process can be repeated over a dozen times. Since there are only four character models for the survivors, continuous switching ensures that there are multiple copies of the same character. Yes, it’s awesome. The only downside is that the game still caps the total number of human players at four, which means that most of the survivor characters will be AI.
The story behind the picture: Three other players and I decided to spawn the maximum number of survivors using the mod/glitch technique so that we could fight them as infected in expert difficulty. There is a point in the second level of the Parish campaign where all the survivors must enter a trailer, close the door, and open another door that leads to a tower with an alarm that must be switched off. Sometimes the AI was unresponsive and would just stay stuck inside the trailer (they would also not stop repeating the same lines). The only way to kill them was to enter the trailer. I took this picture late in the game when only a few survivors were still alive. It shows multiple dead “Ellis” models one after another, partly covered by one of the remaining “Nick” models. We won the game shortly after.
