Left 4 Dead: Live 4 Minutes

Prepare to get your ass kicked ... and love every minute of it.

IGN has a hands-on preview of the new "survival mode" for L4D, coming soon to a zombie clusterf#*%k near you. The mechanics are simple: gear up, alert the horde, and hammer down. Of course, "simple" doesn't mean "easy":

How furious is it? Consider this: In all of the play testing that the Valve designers have done while creating this mode, none of them have ever survived past the 10 minute mark. We're told the company best so far was about nine minutes, with a team of elite players battling like crazy to keep one another alive. Our experience at Valve averaged around three or four minutes a round, but they're like the fastest three or four minutes of your life.

And you're not dealing with just one or two special infected at a time:

What makes it so challenging is that the Survival mode doesn't waste time building up. After the initial wave of zombies you'll start getting hit by waves of special zombies; these are the hunters, smokers, boomers, and tanks. You'll get multiples of them at a time; I often saw two or three hunters or smokers leaping around the battle while the mindless horde minions were everywhere. In one battle, we had the tank, a boomer, a couple of smokers, and a hunter hitting us at the same time. We're told it's even possible to get two tanks at the same time, a prospect that seems both ludicrously unfair and hilarious at the same time.

The mode will be available on 16 maps, one of which is an entirely new level called Lighthouse. In addition, the Dead Air and Death Toll campaigns have been tweaked to accommodate versus mode, to double your griefing pleasure.

Now would be a good time to practice staying in formation.