Valve is ramping up participation in the Counter-Stike: Global Offensive beta, promising a whole round of keys will be handed out to people who complete a survey on the game.
All you've got to do is head here and answer some questions, and "over the coming months [Valve] will make selections from the survey participants".
In good news for the curious, unlike the company's DOTA 2 beta, new players will be welcomed as part of the intake.
Survey [Valve]
This Spring sees the release of Tactical Intervention on the PC, a game noteworthy because its development has been led by one of the co-creators of Counter-Strike. So the fact the two games look similar is no coincidence.
Former Valve staffer Minh Le, who has been working on the game in Korea for a few years now, will be publishing the game in North America through OGPlanet, with a beta to kick off next month.
While Valve's own Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is an iterative update to the venerable old franchise, Tactical Intervention looks far more ambitious, including some unexpected stuff like driving sequences.
Tactical Intervention launching in spring 2012 [Neowin]
YouTube user Blitzkrieg1981 has, after spending around 55 hours pausing and examining episodes of the hit TV show The Office, gone and replicated the entire thing as a map in first-person shooter Counter-Strike.
Fans of the original British series, sorry. This is the American version.
Counterstrike Source The Office (TV) map [YouTube, via Reddit]
The gang at XDA-Developers are hard at work on a full port of Counter-Strike to Android devices, but they've already released two playable versions Android owners can run go get free right now.
The video above shows Counter-Strike being played on a smartphone (using the game's Matrix mod) and a tablet and it appears to have variable touch controls, although I could be seeing that wrong. My personal preference is that looks a little sludgy to control—notice how many rounds he fires (touching the rifle, to do so, apparently) before bringing someone down with a headshot. However, if you have Sony's Xperia Play, well then you also have a gamepad, and now the experience becomes a little more intuitive.
Still, it's Counter-Strike. The port is being built with the Unity3D platform, will support multiplayer and can be downloaded with either Facebook or Kongregate versions available. There are two versions out there, one for devices running Android 2.0+, another for those running Android 2.3 and up. (See the XDA-Developers thread for links.) That means it won't work on anything with an earlier version of Android.
Counter Strike Now Available On Android Via Unofficial Port [RedmondPie, thanks Tanishq D.]
The people at Valve Software like to tease. They don't, however, like to confirm the existence of new Half-Life games.
Kotaku reader ZombieK says he spotted these images in the beta for Valve's spring-scheduled multiplayer shooter Counter-Strike: GO. Let's classify them as teases. Or taunts. Or.. Easter Eggs?
The shots first appeared on the Steam forums last month.
ZombieK says the images all come from the beta's unreleased office map. "The textures and all the files for the unreleased maps are there except for the maps," he said over e-mail. "I originally ported only the map cs_office from source. And when I opened it in GO the chalkboard spread all over the wall . So obviously it didnt have any coding for how big it should of been but when I saw it, I started digging through every directory."
The first two images are screenshots. The others are art files pulled from the game's directories. The Mesa bits and the crowbar are Half-Life references. The others are jokes about other Valve games, Counter-Strike included. Good teases, Valve fans?
And no, this isn't a confirmation of Half Life 3 either.
An article on Hungary's MSN portal about teen sexuality uses an interesting image to illustrate its point. And by interesting I mean amazing.
For those who can't instantly see the disaster zone, it's a Holy Trinity of PhotoShop disasters. For starters, either the main is playing on a cardboard box, or the screenshot overlay was so poorly implemented that it looks like he's playing on a microwave door.
Next, that's a Nintendo Entertainment System. Of which Counter-Strike, pictured, missed by over a decade. And finally, it's a Counter-Strike screenshot of two dudes humping.
See? Amazing.
Kamaszok szexuális élménybeszámolói a neten [MSN, via Reddit]
This mighty helpful YouTube video shows just how far Valve's shooter Counter-Strike has come over the past eight years, between the release of the landmark version 1.6 and subsequent revisions like Condition Zero, Source and the upcoming Global Offensive.
All shots are from the game's trademark level, de_dust2, and show that the biggest addition to GO isn't the lighting or fancy textures. It's the power lines.
The beta for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive went live yesterday. Know what that means? Yup! People filming themselves playing it then uploading it to the internet so we can all see.
The footage is from the tweaked update to classic map "Dust".
It's...Counter-Strike all right!
As part of a study before people are actually sent to Mars, a team of volunteers spent 520 days locked inside a fake spaceship. To see if they could all stay alive and not, you know, kill each other.
It was mission success, as the six men - three from Russia and one each from China, Italy and France - emerged the other day safe and sound. So how'd they get along and not die of boredom?
Counter-Strike.
According to 32 year-old participant Alexander Smoleyevsky, whenever tensions threatened to boil over between the men, they'd all settle in for a few rounds of Counter-Strike.
Which only shows these were unique men, blessed with the patience required for the epic voyage for Mars. I mean, put me up against a camper and a cheat for 17 months and I won't just get upset, I'll kill them with my bare hands.
UPDATE 1-'Mars crew' played Counter-Strike to cool tempers [Reuters]
As advertised, here's over sixty minutes of Europeans and Americans going at it on the latest version of venerable old Counter-Strike, Global Offensive.
Enjoy An Hour Of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Footage [Game Informer]