Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

has some of the most famous, popular, and beautifully handcrafted maps of any multiplayer game. But there’s still only a finite number available, so it’s cool that someone has built a procedurally generated level with “tens of millions” of possible layouts.

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Get your speedrunning shoes on and prepare your glitches: Awesome Games Done Quick has arrived for its yearly speedrunning extravaganza. As with previous years, the charity event is raising money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. It’s been live since yesterday evening and runs until this Sunday, and there are already some fab runs in the likes of Mirror’s Edge and Dragon Age: Origins to catch up on.

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Toxicity in games is no fun, and in this year of our lord 2020, there seems to be a growing trend of using artificial intelligence to find and deal with toxic players. I don’t just mean in text chat either; the companies Modulate and FaceIt have both created AI that can supposedly detect toxicity in voice chat from the way that someone says something.

Part of me that feels like this is a good idea. Having a way of quickly and easily getting rid of them is great. However, I’ve heard one too many stories about AI learning to be racist, so I do wonder if it’s the best sort of tech to put in video games.

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Many of you are by now bathing in twinkling neon ravelights and swooning into the metal arms of Cyberpunk 2077‘s humourless unhunks, who stalk the streets of Night City like animatronic pizza restaurant mascots gone feral. That is fine. There are worse places to find oneself in the labyrinthine hell of video games. Places such as these. Here are 9 neighbourhoods you wouldn’t want to bring up your children in.

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Gaben Claus has gifted the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive community with an early Christmas present. Operation Broken Fang is now live, and brings with it new maps, features, and cosmetics.

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After over a decade of work (and nine months after actually releasing the game), the Black Mesa gang are finally just about finished remaking Half-Life. Today they launch a big update they’re calling the ‘Definitive Edition’, with changes including a visual refresh of many areas, performance improvements, extra polishing, and a redo of one level from the bit with all the trains. They… still have a few wee fixes to follow, but it seems they’re really, truly, mad, deeply almost done with it.

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Plenty of us have been in online matches for any number of games where we just don’t see eye-to-eye with a teammate. If they’re particularly thorny, you might report them and hope the system serves them their just desserts. The scales of justice aren’t quite so balanced though when the other person has their finger on the ban button, which is what this Dota 2 player found out the hard way.

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It is done. Gnome Chompski has shot off to where gnome man has gone before. The little red-hatted fella started life as a bit of a joke in Half-Life 2: Episode Two. Players who carried the garden gnome all the way to the end of the game would be awarded with the achievement “Little Rocket Man” – a title old Chompski truly lived up to last night.

Gabe Newell partnered up with Weta Workshop and Rocket Lab to send a real-life Chompski into space, raising money for charity and even inspiring a couple of new Steam achievements in the process.

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Ultrawide gaming monitors are the kind of hardware that might seem too excessive, maybe even a bit too gamer> to bother with for playing games on PC, especially when their demanding resolutions often require powerful graphics cards to make the most of them. Once you try one, though, there’s no going back. I’ve been a big fan of ultrawide gaming monitors for years now, mostly because supported PC games just look fantastic on them. And that’s why I’ve put together this list of the best ultrawide games on PC – to show you exactly what they look like in the flesh, complete with GIFs and photos of them running on an ultrawide monitor so you can see them in motion with your own peepers.

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Look, competitive Counter-Strike is nice and all, but on the 20th anniversary of v1.0 I do find myself consumed with dreams of a wholly different CS skill: surfing. It’s the freestyle skating to proper CS’s baseball, using a movement glitch to skid, glide, and soar through maps filled with abstract shapes. It is stylish as all hell. And people race surfing! Or you could go freestyle and hit cool tricks to wow judges! Maybe you could even do synchronised routines! Or, like with the X-Games, you could think it seems too much effort and just watch YouTube videos and coo approvingly. So let’s do that, for now.

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