Wallpaper of the Week: Left 4 Dead

FROM JASON’S WALLPAPER FOLDER — I picked up Left 4 Dead with some Christmas cash and have been playing it a couple hours a day ever since. It’s incredibly smooth, and the game mechanics are based more around ease of play than depth of play.

That doesn’t mean it’s a cheap game — each of the campaigns offers many ways to slay the zombie hordes, and incorporates enough strategery to make Sun Tzu proud. There are height advantages, bottlenecks, use of flame and environment, and defense towers.

If you hook up online with a squad familiar with tactics, or with any knowledge of SWAT or military procedures (like clearing rooms before moving on, or how to tag-team corners from different angles to make sure a new room’s covered), then it makes slicing through the waves of undead even more fun.

That’s why I like the game so much, I think. Jack-asses who rush ahead like they’re still playing Doom II, leaving the rest of the group behind in the process, always fail. One man might get lucky and win a round on his own once in a while, but mostly the campaigns are designed to absolutely require at least three survivors to cooperate.

It’s a mechanic that makes Left 4 Dead about playing smarter, not stronger.

For example, you could go into a room with four windows and put a man in each, hoping to hold back the zombie legions as they stream in. Or you could put two men in a closet at the top of some stairs and two men in a corner in back of the stairs and bullet-grind the horde as it lurches up single-file.

Which do you think is going to work better?

My favorite ploy is to get in two ranks at the back of a dead end, then explode containers of gasoline in the mouth as the zombies pour through. If you do it right, you’ll barely waste any ammo at all while the bodies burn.

This is the most excited I’ve been about a third-person shooter in a long while, so I went hunting for wallpapers to celebrate.

Most of the Left 4 Dead walls out there so far are pretty corporate, so when I stumbled on this slightly off-cannon rendering of the protagonists, I just had to have it on my desktop.

Click the thumbnail up top or here to get the 1024×768 image.

Customizing a cell phone is easy with the right tools

FROM JASON’S CELL PHONE — Those ringtones on your phone are just little WAV and MP3 files, and the wallpapers are just tiny JPGs. That means you could convert your phone to just about any theme — if only there were a way to get your custom clips and images to it.

Sure, you could pay $2.99 per ringtone to buy through the service provider. Or you could use a couple of simple online tools to upload any ringer and any wallpaper for free.

For some phones, getting free toys straight from the Internet is a snap. Some providers, though — like Verizon — make it quite counter-intuitive to get anything at all to or from a phone (especially the lower-end ones).

It took quite a bit of digging to find upload tools that weren’t scams, overly complicated software downloads, bloatware, or pay sites. These links below, however, work like a charm:

Upload free ringtones	Upload free wallpaper	Get wallpaper dimensions

Space

It takes about 5-12 minutes for the messages to traverse the cell network and beep to your phone. Be patient and don’t spam yourself like I did the first time trying to get it to work.

My phone has been converted to a Star Trek communicator using this ship’s intercom hailing sound along with a text message tone from Worf. This one from Data or this computer dialogue also work pretty well.

Couple it with this United Federation of Planets logo wallpaper I cropped, and you’re set to go.

It’s a little bit nerdy, sure, but you should have heard the reaction from my co-workers the first time I got a call at the office. I couldn’t resist flipping the phone open dramatically and doing my best Shatner.