Well, today’s the day.

The Left 4 Dead DLC including the new “Crash Course” campaign has landed today.

This new two map campaign fills in the gap between No Mercy’s helicopter rescue and Death Toll’s… standing in the middle of the road.

In addition to the new update, Valve is offering a discount on Left 4 Dead until the 2nd of October.  Get the game this week with a 50% discount.

Also, 10 more achievements.

http://www.l4d.com/crashcourse/

Okay folks, the Podcast 17 interview is now available on their site.  Here’s the address.

http://podcast17.com/transmissions/c16769

If you only want to here the Cat-Life interview, you can download that MP3.  Otherwise, if you want to here a fairly large run-down of news from the Valve community and several other mods, you can listen to the full program.

I do need to take a moment and apologize to BiGToM.  I’ve posted comments on the Podcast 17 site and our ModDB Profile about this already.  You see, for some reason I kept saying that BiGToM is Dutch.  I don’t know why.  He’s Swedish… and I’ve known that for years.

That’s what I get for doing an interview while tired I guess.

Also, I want to thank all of our team members.  Sorry I couldn’t mention all of you by name, but there wasn’t time and I’m not as familiar with all of you.

Hope you enjoy the interview.

EDIT:

The Mod DB Version is up.

http://www.moddb.com/groups/podcast17/features/transmission-16769

As you know, we announced our plans for a Cat-Life Open Beta two weeks ago.  The beta, which will be available for download in November, will hopefully attract a programmer.  But at the least players will be able to finally play the game about a cat named Newton who finds himself trapped in the Black Mesa incident.

Well, last week our news item was reported by Podcast 17 during their weekly show.  They also contacted me for an interview.

Check out the Live feed at a new time today… 3:00 EST.  Use a time zone converter such as Time and Date.com.  Also, you can skip the Live feed (which has considerably lower quality) and instead check out the Podcast 17 ModDB profile or their website in a day or two for the higher quality download.

Originally imagined in 2003 as a mod for Half-Life, Cat-life has spent a great deal of time on hiatus over the years.  After a long delay due to missing team leadership, the mod reorganized under current Team Cat-Life leader BiGToM.  Yet the greatest missing component, a coder, remains absent.  The biggest single set-back has been the cat’s POV code.

However, as has been stipulated before, this mod about a cat trapped and ownerless during the Black Mesa incident has plenty of lives left.  Earlier this week, BiGToM announced that an older piece of code from prior efforts had been successfully implemented.  The original code had been fraught with bugs such as monsters sinking into the floor.  Nevertheless, after a lengthy wait for a new coder [a wait that included a cash reward], the early code was modified and fixed.

Now, with corrected code in hand, Team Cat-Life is able to wrap up other portions of the mod.  With this news, the team has also announced a target date for the first stage of Open Beta testing.  Expect to be able to download and play the Cat-Life beta in November.

The beta will also include additional bonus content including maps that were cut from the project and some of the original concept.

To help celebrate, I’ve asked BiGToM for some new screen shots for the gallery.  We’ve now added four new images.  Also, be sure to keep an eye on PHL, TWHL’s Forums, HL2Files, and our FPS Banana Account for this press release.  I dispatched two “exclusive” screenshots to each of those sites with our news and those images will not be added to the gallery.

Also, and this is to clarify previous statements, the team does not intend to stop work on Cat-Life and switch over to the Source engine.  There is, however, an ongoing discussion regarding the possibility of either converting a finished Cat-Life to Source or… more likely… making a sequel using Source.

No matter the outcome of that discussion, Cat-Life will begin its open beta in November and we do want it finished before moving to the next project.

And if you are interested in working on a sequel in Source, and happen to know how to code… contact me at the_wildcat@bwldevelopment.com  I personally would like to have someone writing new source code long before the team is actually ready to work on a second mod and possibly accelerate the development process.