Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Message Board older than one year ago

CS:GO will appear on Steam for Mac and PC on August 21st. It will cost $15. Valve point out that CS beta 1 was in August 1999.

That means I am very old.

Our e-sports correspondent is ESFI World’s Samuel Lingle

It’s been a month since the last e-sports update, but fear not. They’re returning with weekly regularity. In theory.

Today I’m going to recap most of the bigger events of the past month or so, considering there was a lot of exciting stuff you guys may have missed. It’s StarCraft heavy by necessity, as the majority of e-sport events these days feature Blizzard’s popular RTS.

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Gun Game, which my brain has decided now needs to be sung along to the Duck Tales theme tune, is crouch-walking into the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive beta. On Friday, Valve added the first Arsenal: Demolition map de_lake, a game mode that reverses the ever-increasing returns of the original GG. When you start the match, you’re given a rifle: if you get a kill with it that round, the next round you’ll receive a weaker weapon. After five rounds CTs and Terrorists swap over. It includes the traditional Terrorist/Counter Terrorists defusal dance, and for every additional kill you’ll receive more equipment in the next round. It’s like someone’s accidentally tumble-dried Counter-Strike and it’s come out all dizzy and tried to explain its own mechanics. I can’t wait for Talk Game, where you attempt to negotiate demands: I did just attempt to negotiate a doughnut drop for me and my fellow Ts, but the response was rather anatomical and descriptive. While I call my mother to make sure he didn’t follow through, here’s a video showing it all in action.(more…)

The best of the best of the e-sports types are flexing their brain-muscles and finger-glands to fight it out at the Inter Extreme Masters, right now. You can watch it streamed over here. Counter-Strikes are being struck, League Of Legends are being made legendary, and Starcraft IIs are being uhm stricken? Anyway, $55,000 is at stake.

I miss pro Quake 3, to be honest. Imagine if there was this turnover in physical sports: no more football this year, because everyone is playing polo now. That would be weird.

The initial announcement of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive gave us the hope that we could all get along; that you there with your hand-build Intel i7 rig could be playing with a friend who might be sat on his sofa, starting at his giant television, holding a joypad. I wanted that, you (maybe?) wanted that, Valve initially wanted that. Now Valve do not want that. Speaking to Joystiq, Chet Faliszek told them it was because they need to frequently update the PC and Mac versions more frequently.

The beta has proved we want to update not just the beta, but the game itself post-launch frequently on the PC. To do that we need to separate the platforms so one doesn’t hamstring the other. So for that, we have removed the idea of cross-platform play — essentially make all platforms stronger by not mixing them.

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I was rather close to falling down a deep, dark Counter-Strike hole just after the Counter-Strike:Global Offensive launched in November, but a broken PC released me from a frightening future of constant de_dust2 battles and crying about how unfair it is. I’d actually forgotten I had it until Valve and Hidden Path updated it this week, switching from a stress test to a big-assed closed beta, with over 80 tweaks. The big changes are the addition of three reworked classic maps, de_inferno, de_train, and de_nuke, and new guns, the Nova shotgun, the Bizon and the MP7 SMGs. But there’s more.(more…)

I'm three days behind the times, but at least the key I got from the Eurogamer Expo is worth something now.

Ah, so maybe we do have CS:GO beta keys after all… We’d probably better get on with playing that. (Also Tribes: Ascend, which we haven’t quite caught up with yet either.) Anyway! I am sure a few of you are already saving up for Desert Eagles, while the rest of the internet will have to make do with a few measly minutes of game footage here and there, such as that found below this post. I’ve also dropped in a comparison video which compares the Source version of CS with CS:GO. It certainly looks pretty, and I am sure Hidden Path/Valve are making a decent job of the manshoots, too. OR ARE THEY?(more…)

If you were lucky enough to receive a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive beta invite (and we weren’t) then you’ll be pleased to learn the beta has just begun. We don’t care, because we don’t have an invite, so it’s pretty irrelevant to us. The beta, that arrived via Valve Time a touch late, will scale up (when perhaps we’ll be invited, maybe), aiming for a release “early 2012″. Which could mean any time between now and the eventual entropic destruction of the universe. Apparently it’s only a teeny weeny bit of the game, so doesn’t even require a pre-load for excited people who are able to play it, which we aren’t.