Stop! Stop! It’s not ready yet! If Grolsch made DLC for the Xbox, it’d be a lot better than Gearbox and Valve respectively…
I have recently decided to get some of the eagerly anticipated DLC for two of my favourite games and spend a considerable amount of money on Microsoft points in order to download them. The games in question are Left 4 Dead/Left 4 Dead 2 (same DLC, different games), and Borderlands.

For you regular readers you’ll know I aimed a swipe at the DLC for Borderlands the other day and despite having the perseverence to try and battle away at the game to get the last remaining 3 achievements to get me my maxout score, it’s not actually possible. Gearbox came out and admitted that there is a bug in the spawning of the random items and even if you do manage to collect all them, the achievements won’t unlock as they have to be attained in a certain order. Not only is this bullshit but where is the fucking patch which increases the maximum level huh? I’ve had this DLC 12 days and still no sight of it. Maybe they’re waiting to fix the bug so it all comes out together? Or maybe they don’t fucking care. I’m going with the latter. It’s stupid to have so many achievements hinging on collection missions anyways as I can’t think of a single gamer I’ve come across on my travels who actually likes collection missions, so why have 3 extra ones as part of the DLC?

The Left 4 Dead DLC is even worse. I’ve managed to record a few of the major glitches in the video glitch section but the more I play it, the more frustrated I get. I think the general clipping issues are inherent in both versions of the DLC and at first they’re rather comical. After a few more plays, they’re more like termite colonic irrigation. I mean straight from the off, how can you fall through the pier at the beginning. If you had no intention of letting the players stand on it, why implement a visible floor? It’s madness. The whole Francis scooting about is pretty funny but in the No Mercy version on Left 4 Dead 2, the zombies are floating…and that really freaks me out! We also have Tanks in Hunter skins which is difficult because you can’t spot him in a crowd of marauding zombies and the bugger has all the attributes of a tank which means he can kill you in 3 hits. The game also accidentally allows you to clip through solid walls but since it’s dependent on you opening a particular door, the game will crash faster than bulldog on a superbike.

Perhaps the most disturbing of the glitches is that on Left 4 Dead 1, booting up th DLC will wipe all your progress for certain achievements, namely the expert progress, the zombie genocide and the 20 Car Pile Up achievement, all of which are time consuming and all of which will induce a bout of tourettes once you realise that the 20 hours of gameplay you’ve invested have been completely flushed down the toilet. Didn’t anyone from Valve bother testing it before actually releasing it? Surely someone on their payroll woudl have had a dabble with it before release, and seeing that the glitches are so obvious, someone surely flagged this to part of the implementation team? I know Valve do favour their games on the PC platforms but if you’re going to cater towards console owners, don’t they think to actually show some concern towards, what is probably, a substantial amount of their income?

Rock Band releases DLC every tuesday without fail and in my experience has never really cocked any of it up, albeit some of the songs were tabbed by a deaf person but overall gameplay wise I can’t really say I’ve noticed anything that doesn’t work, although (until they released Welcome To The Black Parade the other week) most of the DLC this year has been pretty shit, unless you like Miley Cyrus or Country music. I am pretty adamant that the majority of game designers don’t actually listen to the fans and continue to march to the beat of their own drum because we the gamers are mugs and will continue to purchase content like willing sheep. They’re laughing all th way to the bank while the rest of us sit in a puddle of our own disgust cursing the fact we’ve spend our hard earned cash on content which just doesn’t work.