As some of you know Eurogamer managed to pull off a "Play With the Developers" event, similar to the one on XBox 360 that preceded it. Both I and Neoflo were lucky enough to participate and get to know some of the dudes and dudettes who have been working on the game - of course not very close but they still seemed cool enough. :-D It was fun! They were surprisingly good! Initially we beat the Death Toll campaign on advanced with a guy called Jeep Barnett - he's a coder at Valve and worked on Portal, L4D and is currently co-coding HL:Ep3, apparently. He definitely knew his way around in the game and we also got some info that a L4D patch is in final testing and might be released as early as next week! He knew about some exploits, too, and we used the health pack one once. ^^ He looks like a likable guy:

(The one on the left.) Then I joined a VS mode game with Chet Faliszek (he played on the other team, he's one of the writers at Valve) and a certain Yasser Malaika, who is an artist and probably didn't play that much L4D because he was all excited when we started to win or at least made a good move (or probably he's just such en enthusiastic guy ^^) - however, he was still pretty good at the game and in the end our team won, although we had to finish the campaign with replacement players after duty called away both Valve guys. Most of the devs left after two hours but Kim Swift, one of the creators of Portal and PR dudette for that game (as well as other stuff at Valve), apparently had nothing better to do, since she kept on playing for like another hour. ^^

Here's Jeep Barnett again, this time with Kim Swift:

All in all it was highly enjoyable and I'm glad that the devs really do know about all the epic glitches and exploits and are working on fixing them, even if patches are released in "Valve time" (not very often ;-). It was also cool that all of the devs used voice-comm to add to the experience. :-D

P.S. Epic "I was there" (and died) screenshot: