The official Left 4 Dead blog confirms that Francis, Bill, Zoey and Louis will be hitting the Mac platform this spring, right alongside Portal, Half-Life, Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2. And, like all the other games Valve is giving the Mac treatment, the original L4D will be cross-platform compatible, meaning Mac and PC users will for once have to find common ground in order to survive.

Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 are coming to the Mac! [L4D Blog]

While rumblings of Steam coming to the Mac platform have been stirring for quite some time, the first solid indicators came last month, when Mac-specific graphics were found in the beta test files for the new Steam service. Then Valve took things a step further, teasing Mac users with a series of images featuring popular Valve games integrated with Mac themes.

“As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients,” said Gabe Newell, President of Valve. “The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services.”

The Mac version of Steam will include all of the features of its PC counterpart, as well as a new feature called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the game on one platform to download and play it for the other at no additional charge.

While it remains to be seen how many third-party developers will jump on board the Mac train, Valve is full-steam ahead on supporting the platform, eschewing popular emulation techniques to deliver native Mac games, day and date with the PC versions from here on out.

“We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation,” said John Cook, Director of Steam Development. “The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows.”

Valve’s first simultaneous release for Mac and PC will be Portal 2, announced earlier this month.

And now Mac users will be able to experience the joy of a large Steam release. I can’t wait to share that with you guys.

Alexandra Neonakis has followed up last year’s splendid Left 4 Dead Valentine series with another five featuring the special infected of Left 4 Dead 2. And Capcom-Unity’s got your back with another six starring the cast of Super Street Fighter IV.

The Left 4 Dead Valentines are available as a free .pdf at the Valve Store. Capcom-Unity’s series is accompanied by a new trailer featuring Juri, Chun-Li, and Cammy.

I grabbed it while playing through a chunk of the second map.

Left 4 Dead 2’s March-scheduled three-map add-on, The Passing, picks up after players in Valve’s hit sequel escape Liberty Mall in Jimmy Gibbs Jr.’s car. There is, Valve’s Chet Faliszek tells me, a moment when the cast of the original Left 4 Dead runs into the cast of Left 4 Dead 2 at the opening of the first map.

While the original game’s cast isn’t playable, not in this add-on at least, they also aren’t just scene-setting wallflowers.

“That intro scene, there are thirty-something versions of that,” Faliszek said. “Pretend these guys had an hour-long conversation. We don’t want to make you sit and watch an hour-long movie, so we’re going to dice it up and give it to you in different ways.”

The two crews run into each other again at the conclusion of The Passing’s third map, just before the add-on pack slips neatly back into Left 4 Dead 2’s original gameplay of the Dark Carnival.

“Depending on how it started, you’ll have different conversations there as well,” Faliszek said.

The second map, playable at this week’s Microsoft X10 event in San Francisco, featured a small coastal Georgia town packed with picturesque brick buildings, a quaint downtown.. and zombies.

Faliszek said that, while the area has “Savannah influences,” like the series of walkways found early in the first map, it is an entirely fictional place. The team had initially played with the notion of basing The Passing on Atlanta, but decided it made more sense to create their own town, he added.

Some of The Passing will also make an appearance in the still unnamed add-on pack coming to the original Left 4 Dead as well, though none of the Left 4 Dead 2 cast will be in that pack.

The notion of tying the two casts together in an add-on pack was something Valve has been playing around with since before the second game was announced, he said.

“We talked about the digital comic and lead up before Left 4 Dead 2 was announced, and that was the genesis for all of this interaction between the two games,” Faliszek said.

The price and exact release date for the two add-on packs have not yet been announced, but Faliszek says that the plan is to release the packs within a couple of months of one another.

Since the game was released late last year, players have wiped out 28,981,249,043 (and counting) card-carrying members of the walking dead society. Twenty. Eight. Billion.

To put this in perspective, it’s estimated that the total number of humans that have ever lived is just over 100 billion. So we’re well on our way to wiping out the entire history of the human race! (and might already have come close if you add figures from Left 4 Dead 1).

Applaud the statistic if you want, but we’re saving our applause for the Valve employee/employees who had the foresight to put a zombie-kill-counter in the game in the first place.

Don’t worry, we’ll make more [Valve]

These 10 new screens of the new episode, coming to the PC and Xbox 360 in “late March”, show off the new “Savannah-esque” coastal town setting and the new Fallen Survivor infected. He’s the unlucky undead wearing the bucket hat, bandoleer and Molotov cocktail in some of these shots.

You’ll also get a peek at what appears to be a new machine gun and the new Black Tie common zombie.

In “The Passing”, players will meet up with the original Left 4 Dead’s survivors, Francis, Bill, Zoey and Louis, who will appear as non-playable characters. Valve’s Chet Faliszek told Kotaku that Left 4 Dead 2’s survivors will rendezvous with the original quartet later on in the campaign, and that they will aid Coach, Nick, Ellis and Rochelle in finishing the third map in the campaign.

That new add-on will offer an opportunity to see more of the original cast’s character traits, Faliszek said, storylines that will likely be explored in the Left 4 Dead comic book that will arrive after “The Passing”. That comic will be illustrated by Powers artist Michael Avon Oeming.

Then, about a “month or so” after that, Valve plans to release an add-on for the first Left 4 Dead, an episode that will tell the story of the original survivors’ journey to “The Passing”. That unnamed Left 4 Dead add-on will only be playable on the original game, not in the sequel.

Valve says it plans to release “The Passing” on Xbox 360 and PC in “late March” with more details on the Left 4 Dead downloadable content coming soon.

No that is good news, considering that EA lost $US641 million during the same quarter last year. A remarkable improvement, you might say, especially since revenue was down to $US1.243 billion as compared with $US1.654 billion from the year prior. Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello is understandably pumped.

“EA is growing share in our packaged goods business and our digital businesses continue to grow rapidly,” said John Riccitiello, Chief Executive Officer, clearly pleased.

Eric Brown, Chief Financial Officer, was similarly stoked. “We are expecting an increase in FY11 full year non-GAAP earnings per share on the basis of strong cost controls and growth in our digital businesses,” said Brown. EA expects to make $US3.45 to $US3.70 billion in the next fiscal year, thanks to the release of many video games.

The newly issued patch, now available on Steam and arriving for Xbox 360 owners in “an upcoming title update”, deals away with the dreaded “auto spawn” feature during finales. Plus, it adds Special Infected bots, a change that will help fill out the zombie side when playing with fewer than four players.

The slightly bad news is that Valve has also reduced the effectiveness of melee weapons against the Tank. If you don’t have the Tank Burger achievement, Xbox 360 gamers, better get it quick. There are plenty of additional, less exciting changes – though “Improved SurvivorBot AI” is never a bad thing – if you’d like to read ‘em at the official Steam site.

Left 4 Dead 2 and the Left 4 Dead 2 SDK Update Released [Steam]