Month: March 2019

Enlarge / Artist's conception of Left 4 Dead fans searching aimlessly for a new co-op zombie shooter for the last ten years.

Back in the old days of 2008, when Valve actually made and released new games on a semi-regular schedule, the publisher took a chance on independent developer Turtle Rock and a little co-op focused, AI-driven zombie swarm game called Left 4 Dead. The game was a multimillion-selling success, as was its 2009 sequel and associated DLC packs. So of course Valve and Turtle Rock built on that success by... letting the franchise lay fallow for almost a decade now.

Fast-forward to today, when Warner Bros. Interactive announced it has recruited Turtle Rock to bring the Left 4 Dead flavor back with the not-at-all-coincidentally titled Back 4 Blood.

While an accompanying FAQ makes it clear that this is not Left 4 Dead 3 (an IP that's owned by Valve, in any case), the announcement notes that the new game will share the same creators, development team, and zombie-shooting flavor of those well-remembered classics. "We get to return to a genre that was born in our studio with over ten years of additional experience and zombie ideas racked up in our brains," Turtle Rock cofounder and Design Director Chris Ashton said in a statement.

Enlarge / NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine speaks at Wednesday's Senate hearing. His rocket fuel of choice is not LOX/Kerosene, but rather Mountain Dew. (credit: NASA)

In a remarkable turnaround, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine on Wednesday said the space agency would consider launching its first Orion mission to the Moon on commercial rockets instead of NASA's own Space Launch System. This caught virtually the entire aerospace world off guard, and represents a bold change from the status quo of Orion as America's spacecraft, and the SLS as America's powerful rocket that will launch it.

The announcement raised a bunch of questions, and we've got some speculative but well-informed answers.

What happened?

During a hearing of the Senate Commerce committee to assess America's future in space, committee chairman Sen. Roger Wicker opened by asking Bridenstine about Exploration Mission-1's ongoing delays. The EM-1 test flight involves sending an uncrewed Orion spacecraft on a three-week mission into lunar orbit, and is regarded as NASA's first step toward returning humans to the Moon. This mission was originally scheduled for late 2017, but it has slipped multiple times, most recently to June 2020. It has also come to light that this date, too, is no longer tenable.