Valve have turned revolutionary announcements into standard business practice. After making the greatest class-based combat game free for everyone, they casually announced “We’re making a sequel to the most popular online shooter of all time” as if they were pointing out there were biscuits beside the tea. EA made more noise about their being a Madden 2012, even though the only thing which could have prevented that was the sun exploding. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (rocking the most perfect acronym of CS:GO) will be shown off at the Penny Arcade Expo within the week even though it won’t be released until next year. That’s classic Valve – a playable game is just the starting point for another year’s work. Which is important, because getting CS:GO right is more important than defusing a nuclear warhead correctly.

It’s very easy to screw up sequels. Crackdown had the plot of “Superpowered cops destroys criminals,” and the sequel played like they went back in time to give themselves brain damage. Even Counter-Strike’s creator doesn’t understand what makes the game, with his Tactical Intervention sequel promising civilians and attack dogs and various other things which control from the player worse than hand-paralysis. Counter-Strike servers are purer tests of sheer skill than Shaolin Temples, while Promod servers are already working to upgrade the experience. Which is why we’re not just dribbling at the prospect of a new Counter-Strike – we’re laying what we’d love to see, while there’s still time.

Clan and League Support

Counter-strike has more established competition than the Olympics, because those amateurs only play once every four years. The competitive community is more essential to CS servers than electricity, but the software makes it easier to reset your advanced shader options than say anything about your team. That’s why most player’s names look like the file got corrupted.

TF2 servers prove how hard Valve listen to their fans. The Catholic church doesn’t pay as much attention to their practitioners, and they have an entire sacrament based on sitting in a dark cupboard with someone to tell them secret naughtiness. Items, maps, entire weapons sets have been integrated from fan support. The next generation of Counter-Strike should have clan identities at the options level, beside your name and spray. A simple request-confirmation system would allow clans to have creat automatic pages, clan servers, organise league matches and much more. Right now you can look into a random TF2 player’s backpack easier than you can find their clan affiliation, and even then you’re depending on people not lying.

Software support for clans would do the same thing for CS leagues as Free 2 Play did for TF2: a lot of initial whining, a whole bunch of beginners, and those who stay to play (everyone no matter what they claim) benefits from a far larger player base. Automated league matching and scorekeeping would eliminate 90% of the whining from shooting other people in the face. And in videogames, the real crime in that sentence was the whining.

Multiple Modes at the Menu

Counter-Strike has been subjected to more custom modifications than the Nissan, and they work far better.

LEGO cars look manlier

Counter-strike servers allow more alternate kinds of fun than a Hollywood sex club and you don’t have to mop them afterwards.GunGame, jump matches, surfing races, knife-ball, sniper duels – they sound like the X-Games stopped playing around with skateboards and really became Extreme. These mods aren’t hard to install (and you can have them included on your own CS server just by asking) but the fact you have to find them at all means many never hear of their incredible joy.

Counter-Strike itself started as a mod. Its entire heritage is how hard players rock when they’re allowed to make more fun things for free just because they want to. TF2 has already integrated a stamp system to support matchmakers – neglecting mod support in CS:GO would be blinder than throwing a flashbang at the Sun and staring at it.

The Ultimate In Anti-Cheat

The greatest joy in running your own server is instantly destroying cheats (here’s how to spot them.) VAC and PunkBuster do their best to defend us from scumbags, but Counter-Strike needs to better at detecting and destroying cheats than a Terminator turned referee.

In the future, people who use aimbots get to meet a real one. Briefly.

We’re looking forward to CS:GO. We can trust Valve to make a sequel because they want to make it better, not just make more money (see: Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal 2.) The name clearly recognizes the massive player base and global competitions. And the best bit?

We’ll always have the old games. CS: Source servers are still running with tens of thousands of players, and GO would have to ship with atomic warheads to end Counter-Strike 1.6. It’s the ultimate shooter, enjoyed by those who value actual skill over shiny graphics, and we’re not waiting for a replacement. We’re looking forward to even more of it.

Counter-Strike’s weapons have been set in stone for almost a decade. You’d meet with less rage and hatred if you tried to alter the Mona Lisa, despite how this armory is less balanced and more lethal than an atomic warhead perched on a slingshot. There’s the AWP, the deagle, and a pile of other rubbish to show you can’t afford either of those yet.

Rock Paper Scissors EXTREME!

That’s why we’re looking at other weapons we’d love to see on a CS server.  The key is that these aren’t the most lethal weapons possible. Those would make the game less fun, Doom’s BFG requires less skill than appearing on a reality show, and if you really wanted to kill everyone ever you’d just need to bolt an AWP to a sentry gun.

Effective, but boring

These are fun guns! And that’s a brilliant sentence! As long as you’re talking about video games!

5. Grappling Hook

Rope beats Attack Helicopter, rather counter-intuitively

Just Cause 2 taught us that every game should have a grappling hook, and that it’s fun to fight your enemy on an island-sized gas station. A grappling hook would revolutionize Counter-Strike strategies as experienced players rediscovered the best paths through their favorite maps (assuming their hard-wired reflexes don’t short-circuit at shock of taking a different route through cs_italy.)

Great responsibility my Spider-Asshole!

Of course there’d be a bit of tuning to remove exploits, but there already are exploits in CS. And being shot in the head by grappling hooker still saves you the indignity of dying to a “bunny hop.”

4. The Fluorescent Decoy

An ancient idea saved for single-player by sensible programmers, but recently resurrected by Halo 3, the decoy hologram has always annoyed multiplayers. It’s always either obviously fake, and therefore useless, or not, in which case it’s incredibly annoying because there’s no way to use skill to tell. But they could do great things on CS servers: add decoy holograms which run and register as real characters but have incredibly obvious signs that they’re fake. Make them wireframes, or glow bright red, or carry huge signs saying “I’m fake and anyone shooting at me is using an aimbot.”

Anyone shooting the obvious fake is instantly booted from the server – think of it as an online anti-cheat Corbomite maneuver. This would only catch the most obvious cheats (where the computer does all the firing, as opposed to other scumbags who use systems where the computer aims but the person shoots), but anything which boots even a single scumbag cheat is worth it.

3. Eyelander

THIS, like the man said, IS A KNIFE!

In a game with guns that can kill you from clear across the map, the knife isn’t just badass – it’s heroic. Being brave enough to bring a knife to a gun-fight, Italian style, already gives you a speed boost on CS servers. But kills should give you even more! The Eyelander’s speed and health boost are a perfect model. Getting knife kills should make you a better person, or at least give you a cash bonus, because you are a better person than the guy whose spine you just stabbed.

Or at least, you are now. What with him being humiliatedly dead and all.

2. Holy Bolter

The deagle is the most lethal thing you can hold in one hand without being Galactus. It’s the king of all pistols.  If you’re going to have an instant-killing gun anyway (assuming you can headshot) it may as well look the part. Which is why we want this incredible Holy Bolter model from Crysis imported across.

The best bit? That gun’s user is gigantic genetically-engineered power-armored warrrior, a warrior from beyond the stars, and true to the spirit of deagle he can still be dropped in one headshot.

Helmets are for wimps.  Or survivors.  Whatever you call those pansies!

1. Split Portal Gun

Of course people want the Portal gun in everything, because it’s the most incredible weapon every made (and it’s already appeared in Half Life 2 for people who want to shoot their enemies through tears in reality), but we don’t want the full model.  That would be the worst thing to happen to a CS server outside of AI hostages. Instead, split it into two of the one-sided portal launchers from early in the game, and give them to different team members – just as the bomb is assigned to one player each round. This forces team-work, and a well co-ordinated team can pull off incredible approaches and surprise attacks, while beginners would die even quicker than before. The special forces call doorways “coffins” for a reason, and if your strategy is creating a glowing target circle then running straight through it then you’ve just reversed the meaning of “strategy.”

With the new routes through de_dust (a priceless joy and the automatic VIP aspect of how the portal-wielders become higher-value targets than TF2 medics who are also the heads of a foreign governments, it would be a whole new game.

The best bit? It’s bound to happen. It’s incredibly obvious that Half Life Episode 3 will feature the portal gun and more, and then it’ll be mere moments before someone unlocks it all for a Counter-Strike Source server.

Counter-Strike started off as a mod made by a bunch of players in their spare time and it’s become the most popular shooter in history. It’s an “underdog did good” story of Hollywood, except the disadvantaged kid who believes in himself never grows up to kill ten thousand terrorists a minute, even if he’s Rambo. Advanced Counter-Strikers know their maps more intimately than their own genitals (and have more fun with them). This dedication to the pinnacle of first-person-shooting is so intense, some people play Counter-Strike even when they’re playing things that aren’t counter-strike. Behold, five insertions of anti-terrorist gameplay into other games.

1. Black Ops Counter-Strike “Mod”

Call of Duty Black Ops: one of the biggest shooters of the year and some people are already bored with it. Possibly because of Treyarch’s idiotic exclusivity deal where they’re holding “private” servers hostage. This is a brand-new definition of “private” which apparently means “You can only rent them off the company we tell you to.” They’re so mercenary in this monopoly that you have to pay extra for teamspeak, and an attitude like that is worse for gaming than a power cut. That’s why advanced players are coming up with their own voluntary, player-side mods – like Counter-Strike for Black Ops.

With voluntary “No knife, no prone, no sights except sniper” rules, players recreate classic CS gameplay with far superior graphics. And until you’ve seen people crouch-strafing with an assault rifle with the very latest in video-card lighting, you haven’t seen anything.

2. GTA: CS

In a fever dream of great gaming confusion, behold: Grand Theft Auto’s CJ running around our favorite maps with a machine gun.

It’s an amazing mod, and we especially love how they’ve cushioned the shock of seeing de_dust2 in heretical third-person with that chillaxed shirt and shorts combination. Though no amount of holiday clothing could convince us to play Counter-Strike with the drunken paralysis-simulator GTA calls an aiming system.

3. DOOM!

The greatest grandaddy of all shooters is always welcome, especially when it’s remixed with the most successful offspring any shooting game could hope for.

Some demented pixel artist updated GZDoom (already an outpost of retro-love) with all the weapons the modern counter-terrorist could need – although he does betray a lack of understanding by starting off with the shotgun. Which no CSer would even consider. The dropped weapons show the love lavished on the imported hardware, because blocky as they are the level of details forces the guns to be bigger than the corpses they came from. Particularly enjoyable additions are the programming of grenades, and the way the pixelated AWP is an insta-kill one-hit-murder machine. Just like in the real thing!

4. The Quake III Killer

This video clip isn’t so much gaming as “CSI: Counter-Strike”

We’ve got nothing but a few seconds of grainy video, four corpses (but they were Quake server corpses so they disappeared shortly after), and the knowledge that whoever this mysterious killer is we wouldn’t want to be on his bad side.

5. Left 4 Dust

The mysterious “Masterofsomthn” lives up to his name, as long as you extend it to “something BRILLIANT!”

He demonstrates the glory of the source engine, especially how NAV files make it possible for infected to sprint around de_train in pursuit of survivors. And if you thought dust couldn’t get any better, it’s because you didn’t dare to dream you’d be able to use Left 4 Dead 2‘s chainsaw mutation there. UNTIL NOW!

There’s a battle in progress for the very soul of gaming, and it’s the most classic premise possible: an elite team versus an endless horde of brain-dead enemies, and just like Left 4 Dead, the good guys aren’t guaranteed to win. It’s also the only conflict in the modern world where terrorists are the good guys, and that sentence just got us on a Pentagon list so make sure you enjoy this article.

Because it’s about Counter-Strke vs Farmville. There hasn’t been a clearer battle of good vs evil since Star Wars, or a more pointlessly terrible bad guy since Star Wars with Hayden Christensen.

If he could just fire now we'd be sorted

Counter-strike is the embodiment of everything the players want. Literally. It was built by players, expert Half-Lifers who had an idea that seemed so much fun they decided to make it. They were so right everyone else played it as well, and so many people played it companies elevated it all the way to 1.6 and Source. Every point in its development was driven by gamers who’d playing it harder than diamonds on Viagra.

It’s the ultimate in expert gaming, with crack-shots sniping across the map for over a decade and new players discovering this “de_dust” place every day. Expert Counter-Strikers make heart surgeons look like amateurs, with finger-twitches more precise than jeweler’s lenses balanced on atomic clocks. The only reason the climaxes aren’t nailbiting is because you couldn’t pry the players fingers off the keys with Gordon Freeman’s crowbar.

On the opposite and unfortunately popular end of the spectrum you have Farmville. Designed by committee with the express intention of converting bored office drones into money, with a subtext of more money. The core mechanic of the game is “It doesn’t at any point look like you’re playing a game. It looks like you’re clicking on some pointless menus.” There’s a very, very good reason it looks like that. True entertainment hasn’t been further from an organisation’s priorities outside since a court last prononunced the death penalty.

Farmville isn’t just a waste of time, it’s a electronic nightmare. It’s Political Correctness and the death of personal responsibility given flesh, an electronic poison crawling across the internet and infecting everyone with nothing better to do. Because anyone who plays Farmville has nothing better to do. If you’re not convinced, here’s the proof that Farmville’s not a game: IT’S NOT POSSIBLE TO BE BETTER AT FARMVILLE THAN ANYONE ELSE. There’s no skill, or challenge, or tactics – the only way to be “better” is to spend longer on the game and check more often, which is the exact opposite of improving.

Spending longer playing will help you in any game, but that’s not meant to be the only measure: you can spend all day in the gym, but you won’t put on any muscle if you spend it all sitting in the toilet. Farmville is that toilet: as long as you clock in the hours you’ll get the “rewards,” as long as you have sufficient brain-damage enough to think differently-colored seeds count.

Some players are pissed off with Counter-Strike because they hear about it, load the game up, arrive on de_dust and are immediately shot in the heat forty times in a row. We’ll admit, that can be a bit of a drag. But instead of being a negative publicity, it’s a fantastic filter. If someone can’t enjoy a game unless they’re winning, screw them. You don’t want those people on your server. Worse, imagine the type of game they want: a game they can win, instantly, against long-term players despite never having played before! What kind of idiotic, entertainmentless, skill-free wreck of a program would allow any idiot to compete on even ground with someone who’s been playing since the first version?

Farmville.

The wonderful world of Counter-Strike:  “advanced military hardware”  and “basic illiteracy” haven’t been so effectively combined since the last  National Rifle Association convention.  We only wish we were competently insulted while defending de_dust (we’re pretty easily pleased as long as we’re playing CS), which is why we’ve written this handy guide!

With a typical Valve overkill of awesome, Left4Dead 2 introduced the idea of Mutations: officially supported optional weekly variant gamestyles to keep things fresh and exciting.  The only problem is that it’s a game about murdering clowns using electric guitars and combat shotguns: it needs to be kept fresh in the same way the Marianas Trench needs to be kept wet, and it’s an even greater example of the sheer awesome majesty available on Earth.

What we want is some Special Ops Mutations for Counter-Strike.  It’s still the most popular shooter despite an absolute lack of anything that even rhymes with “innovation” for over a decade.  Valve have already shown that they’re still thinking of the supreme tactical shooter, as a company that makes shooters really should, with the Beta update bringing a bunch of recent improvements across to the ultimate in terrorist-shooting-in-the-face-ing.  We can only hope that this is the thin end of the wedge, getting the mandatory “players whining about change” out of the way before brining out some real upgrades.

We’ve got some Special Ops ideas, and want to hear yours as well!

There can only be one (AWP)

On Counter-Strike servers the Arctic Warfare Police sniper rifle is all-powerful, all-known and can smite you from any distance – it’s like a very local and angry god but with far more proof of its existence.  This mutation means only one player on either team has the option to buy the AWP, the last survivor (or the highest-scoring in the event of multiple survivors.)

You might think this means things are unbalanced, with that one best player having the best gun, but you’re not thinking it through.  This will bring some seriously Splinter Cell twists to both teams.  Sure, your team-mate might be defusing the bomb and about to win the game – but his back’s to you and that AWP is oh so very sweet.

We’ll Bomb You Back

This week the Counter-Terrorists take a lesson from Commando, deciding that not being the people blowing things up is for pansies.  Instead they decide to deny the bomb sites to the enemy – by blowing them up first!  It’s a race against time as teams try to show each other who’s the real threat, with maps like de_dust gaining extra CT bombsites (otherwise the way they start between A and B could be a little unfair.)

To win the map you must successfully bomb your site first – simply killing everyone on the opposing team doesn’t count as a win.

Now You C Me

Random bombsites!  C marks the spot, and that point is selected – but not announced – every time you spawn so you have to search and destroy.  To compensate for the increased difficulty, teams switch every round and there’s a match-break scoring system – one team must win twice in a row, once on each side, to claim victory.

Keep It Together

An alternate scoring system, Left 4 Dead survivor style, with the surviving members of each team adding up their health for a final score (of course, with a bombing success/prevention bonus).  Scores are added up over five rounds, so that one guy in the corner with an AWP doesn’t necessarily even score the highest, as well as not actually helping his team.

Arms Race

This one’s simple: GunGame mapped over multiple rounds.  If you haven’t played GunGame, you really should, as it’s Counter-Strike rewired via the arcades and an experience-based leveling system.  In the original mod killing enemies raises you through the weapons – on a mutated CS server, the new level would be evaluated at the end of each round, leaping you to a new weapon, with every member of the team succeeding in bombing/preventing jumping one level.

And before you think this sounds less balanced than a drunken giraffe, it’s not an uphill trend towards the AWP – the highest level is the knife, preceded by the HE grenade, with the idea “Let’s see how well you do with these if you’re so great!”

We’re not the only people here who love CS – what are your ideas for Special Ops Mutations?

Valve have returned to the most popular “Shooting people in the head” simulator since CIA Assassination Camp ’63, adding achievements and all sorts of player stats.  Particularly important are the new “lifetime achievements” screen, almost sarcastically accurate for people still complaining about camping.

But what would Counter-Strike be like if they’d been supporting it like Team Fortress 2?

FROM THE DESK OF GABE NEWELL:

When we decided to add our most important inventions of the past decade to Counter-Strike, we ran into a serious problem – the counter terrorists already have hats!  This shattered morale.  Many staff quit, or cried, or committed the final Valve option of “Hati-kiri“, pulling their hat down over their eyes so that they could no longer see and retiring from human existence.  What could possibly replicate the insane dedication displayed by hat-hunters have without accidentally including actual function?

(the remaining notes on the desk appear to be a termination notice, a government announcement that any company not currently producing food or post-dystopian leather gear was to be liquidated, and a crude attempts at fashioning small paper hats from food stamps.)

The world of counter-terrorism was rocked yesterday, even more than a world punctuated exclusively by explosions and/or slaughters every three minutes normally is, when Arctic Avenger terrorist “**DIX**2mch4u” killed an SAS operative engaged in an entirely different police action on a separate server. Counter-Strike players around the world cried “FAG!”, though whether they’d actually noticed the shot or this was simply their standard once-per-second intimation of homosexuality is unknown*.

*The irony of such players claiming to know anything about any kind of sexuality is, conversely, very well known, and hilarious.

“2“, as he will heretofore be referred because simply writing a name like that is an offence against intelligence and letters, was covering the entrances to bomb site B with an AWP. After headshotting the entire CT team, he fired a ninth and final shot which killed an extraordinarily surprised “[XD]Killah!” on an entirely distinct cs_italy server. Killah responded in the rational manner of any counter-strike player, blaming his unexpected death of hax, fags, and AWP whores, all in a single incredibly expletive-dense second.

Fellow players assured Killah that he was a nub and that he should learn to [VERB DELETED] play – though exactly how you’re meant to learn to avoid an one-hit instant-kill zero-warning long-distance weapon with a ten shot clip was not made clear. Leading counterstrikologists have theorized that the Arctic Warfare Police sniper rifle’s insane lethality has finally exceeded the restraints of local physics (instead of the mere idea of game balance it normally violates), and after killing all local targets reached across the matrix of servers to find something else to instantly annihilate.

This result has provoked spirited debate among the pretending-to-kill-each-other-every-day community, unless you define “debate” as something other than “trading insults and misspelled capitalized intimations of maternal sleeping partners.” No clear resolution could be reached, with a clear fifty-fifty split among players. The first party believes that the AWP is for nubs, while the second believes that those killed by said weapon – and in fact everyone other than the wielder – is a nub. At this point talks stalled and everyone was kicked.

Counter-Strikers are among the most competitive creatures ever to exist – Darkseid once crossbred piranhas with Vikings, teleported them into a CS server, and they were crying into their fishy beards with AWP-holes through their gills within a day. But while twitch-reflexes and noscopers dominate de_dust, how do they stack up against unconventional foes?

vs Skiers

Many countries are confused about how to deal with computer gaming – Australia only recently stopped trying to ban them altogether, while the lack of imagination in setting obviously bothers Germany more than most – but Norway’s sending an Olympic skier to a LAN party. It’s not clear what they’re expecting to happen apart from a horrific demonstration of just how few advertising opportunities there are for world champion skiers.

SteelSeries gaming is deploying double Olympic gold medalist Petter Northug in a two-man team with Counter-Strike champion Patrik Lindberg, in what could be the most insane buddy-cop movie of all time. Though at least we’ll get some original one-liners: “That n00b looks piste off!”

vs Strippers

Probably the most famous photos of a LAN party on the internet, enabling delighted (if unoriginal) gaming sites to sneak tits into an article without resorting to cosplay.

The pics were copied more than Elvis, with every half-snarky internet commentator

1. Making the same sad jokes about nerds ignoring women
2. Demonstrating that those players are far smarter than everyone talking about thome.

Those gusy are top Russian teams (Virtus.pro and forZe), they play Counter-Strike servers constantly, and that means they have the internet. They don’t need to embarrass themselves slobbering over cheap Russian slappers in public – unlike every single person trying to mock them. They can see that, and much more than that, any time of the day or night, when they’re not busy playing a national-level match in the coolest lan ever – look at that place, it’s like a Borg Cube of Counter-Striking.

Craning your neck to see past a stripper isn’t just dedication, it was the only dignified response. Because the only photos more embarrassing than being harassed by half-naked women would be ones of you ogling them like a twelve-year-old.

Note: Even when professionally paid to be there they look bored to tears.

vs Porn

See, Counter-Strikers know about online porn. Though some of them don’t know about “display monitors.”

vs Cheats

Counter-Strike servers are plagued by cheat, dual-wastes of both virtual and physical space who believe steering a computer around as it plays the game for you counts as “fun” (as opposed to a vicious parody of the concept of life.) One such scummy super-powered-player was playing in a Chinese internet cafe, using a wallhack to make obstacles in the game transparent.

Some other people saw him, and, well

He survived, proving that karma isn’t an active force in the universe. Of course we can’t recommend brain-stabbing as a method of conflict resolution (we prefer private servers and competent admins), but on the list of people we actually feel sorry for this guy’s somewhere below the “Smashing our hands in drawers for fun” society.