It's amazing how much your team affects how well you do. I've breezed through Expert but found normal IMPOSSIBLE depending on who you are with.

Well, that and how much of a dick the director is being - I've had empty streets on expert and boomer/smoker combos on normal.

Well we've been playing the same 2 levels for a few days now, so it's expected that we're going to do fairly well on expert. That mode is going to be very difficult if you're trying to beat a whole chapter in a single run. I'm ASSUMING that each level in a chapter is harder than the previous one. If that's the case, the last level of every chapter is going to be incredibly difficult on expert.

I am so fucking excited for this game it is unbelievable.

I played the 360 version and, well... I didn't like it as much as I'd hoped. the graphics and interface felt dated, it was too fast paced resulting in poor-looking animations (I don't understand why they don't incorporate the same type of dynamic animations that they had in say, GTAIV - zombies look like they're gliding on the floor towards you), but most importantly, though it had atmosphere, it just... feels too much like a game, I guess. I was hoping it would be more fluid and such but really I'm disappointed by the lack of immersion and polish. stuff like clipping, very poor animation, unsynced animations (it really breaks the feel of it when a teammate is waving his arms to heal someone who's actually behind them),  the absolutely terrible first-person hands/guns that look like they're from HL1, etc. - just feels very last-gen. i guess source is just dated, but i almost feel like this game is far less polished than HL2 or TF2 by a wide margin.

then again it could be the 360 version's clunky controls and subpar physics/graphics, i'll have to try it on the PC

Yeah, learn to play with a controller and stop bitching about people who prefers to play on consoles.

I haven't seen any of that glitchy stuff you're talking about on the 360 version. Even valve themselves admitted that the graphics for the 360 weren't on par with the PC, yet. And what kind of guns were you expecting? Laser blasters and saw blade launchers? This isn't Dead Space. Have anything to say about the gameplay, besides how ass the 360 port is?

Why would you buy the console version?

I'm not. It's just possible to unlock the console demo without preordering.

I haven't seen any of that glitchy stuff you're talking about on the 360 version. Even valve themselves admitted that the graphics for the 360 weren't on par with the PC, yet. And what kind of guns were you expecting? Laser blasters and saw blade launchers? This isn't Dead Space. Have anything to say about the gameplay, besides how ass the 360 port is?

I didn't say anything about the guns? What are you talking about? I said that the gun/hand models in first person are pretty awful which I don't think you could find someone to dispute, the arms look like twigs and the guns have incredibly lowres textures. However, I did play mostly on splitscreen, so it's possible that the FOV was slightly distorted.

The game doesn't feel frantic, it just feels twitchy in a bad way and the constant dips to about 15 FPS the 360 version gets doesn't help either. I'm sure the PC version is a lot better, but the 360 version is fairly subpar!

The source engine is showing its age, but it's not that big of an issue IMO.

Can you name any other engine that can throw HUNDREDS of character models in one screen at once with literally no lag? I'm surprised they're able to do this, and I am almost confident that no other engine has the ability to do something like that. The physics in the source engine are still better than most out there. Sure the graphics aren't that good, walls are still flat despite the amount of detail on them. The animations are not on par with TF2, but TF2 only has to deal with a select few character models. There's a lot more flexibility involved with that than when you have dozens of different character models on screen. And HL2 certainly did not have better graphics or animations than this game. Sometimes the animations are not synced, but it's a small issue for me.

I don't know what you're talking about; the animations are NEVER synced. The zombies run at you, using a running animation that doesn't actually seem to touch the ground half the time, and swing repeatedly like a WoW character not actually targeting anything. nothing seems actually attached to the environment. when a human falls to the ground, half the time he falls through a wall and more than once for me they've fallen through the floor and the only way to rescue them is via the teammate outline. everything is rather poorly animated. it looks like half the characters are doing the robot.

but you know, like i said, graphics are only part of why i'm disappointed with it. the levels are incredibly short (minor complaint seeing as they're demo ones, i guess), there's amateurish bugs/level design issues like the giant ape zombie thing spawning outside a subway car and just running back and forth outside it providing you with a completely safe area to fire from it at (I can imagine how irritating this will be when you're spawning as that boss zombie in versus mode), the automatic weapons don't feel powerful to me, and why on earth can you kill 50 zombies in a row using only the melee attack?

it's all possible it's the 360 version, but i'm not satisfied with this so far and i hope it gets really fine-tuned before release. it does a lot of things right, but i feel like this is more SERIOUS SAM WITH ZOMBIES than the tense horror game it was advertised as!

melee being powerful is excellent. its pretty much the best thing ever just using melee medikit all the way through.