The game folks over at Valve (the creators of games such as team fortress 2, portal, halflife series, left 4 dead series) have released for free on their Steam system, Alien swarm. I just downloaded it last night and it's excellent for the price (good game for free, what's not to like?) with multiplayer up to 4-5 players. It's basically a fun game. not sure if there are other threads that mentioned this game, but I didn't see it during my quick search in this subforum.

just letting y'all know. have fun!

yep. still haven't managed to unlock the grenade launcher yet. the flamethrower is fun though. and mandatory on harder difficulties.

gets old after 4-5 runs though. hopefully we'll get another campaign, or some decent community material.

Alien Swarm has always been free

I'm given to understand that a fair amount was lost in the transition to the Valve version. I recommend checking out the original if you have a copy of UT2k4 kicking around.

~J

Hm, I'll have to give this a try during my breaks from New Vegas ...and minecraft...and....omg I'm an addict.

The first step to getting better... is beating all those games!

Okay, so what is Alien Swarm about, and why would I want to play it?

Alien Swarm is a top-down 4-player co-op shooter. You pick a class, pick your loadout, and shoot your way through thousands of bugs across a campaign of five or six linked maps. Friendly fire is enabled by default, so of course the game relies heavily on none of your teammates being trolls, but in my experience that's not really an issue. I had great fun with it.

Disclaimer: I know nothing about the Valve version, this applies to the UT2k4 version.

There are aliens. They're swarming. There's also a woefully underequipped and undersupported band of scrappy space marines dedicated to foiling them.

Guess which side you get to play?

Because you don't want the bugs to win, do you?

Also because it's fun; it's really designed as a coop game, and it ends up being a bit of a tactical top-down free-moving shooter. Not a huge amount of depth, but enough to allow for learning on several axes.

~J