I wasn’t around to cover the previous week’s Steam Top 10 as per usual, so you’ll have to wildly imagine the shape of it yourself. I can take an educated guess if you like: I’m pretty sure Soldner was a shock number one, with Limbo of the Lost and Aliens: Colonial Marines hot on its heels. Strange that they’re completely gone from the latest chart, below, but that’s the fickle nature of the millennial digital consumer for you, innit?

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Fans Of Things Not Staying Exactly The Same All The Time will be glad to hear that the latest weekly Steam top ten is quite a changed one from the previous week. A new number one, surprise re-entries and a loosening of Ubisoft’s chokehold on the charts. … [visit site to read more]

Yup, I’m trying to make this a regular thing again. I know you’re very excited about that. Bit late this week as I wasn’t around for the first two days of it, but there is still MUCH TO LEARN from the top-ten best-sellers on Steam last week.

It’s a strong mix of independent and mega-gazillion blockbuster; though the overall shape of the chart isn’t hugely surprising, the number one winnah perhaps is. … [visit site to read more]

A run-down of the previous week’s top-selling Steam titles is something I used to do regularly, but a combination of it tending to be fairly unchanging week-to-week and being a feckless human being who can’t stand to do the same thing for long meant I fell out the habit. These are changed times, though: with indiepocalypses here and flash sales there, the Steam charts are now wildly changeable, so I like to look in from time to time, like an old aunt raising a withered eyebrow at reports of what her nephews are up to at university. This week: a whole lot of Ubisoft, not a lot of XCOM and an unofficial Hunger Games (or an unofficial Running Man, if you prefer the awful classics). … [visit site to read more]

Tis the season for games to get some kind of pumpkin-flavoured update (or to prompt outrage by dealing in precisely zero pumpkins/ghosts/costumes). In Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Hallowe’en means Valve will have done something utterly adorable to their map chickens. And by map chickens I don’t mean those losers who mill about accidentally falling victim to my friendly fire*, I mean the actual chickens.

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And in “Well this is a nice idea but it would involve me not playing Jason Derulo on repeat while headshotting Ben so you can count me out” news: there are now Counter-Strike: Global Offensive music kits.

What that means is when you have a music kit equipped it replaces the in-game music with music from your kit. That covers *deep breath* the main menu, round start, round end, bomb planting, bomb warning, round won, round lost, round end warning and death camera bits of a match. For extra RUB-IT-IN-YOUR-FACE-ness there’s also a special MVP anthem which plays to everyone when you’re MVP.

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One mode in the free-to-play Counter-Strike Online 2 sees players turn into a deadly cartoon pig. Another gives terrorists cloaking devices, and of course the game does zombies too. The original CS Online has an event starring giant bug men. In Japanese arcades, Counter-Strike Neo had sexy cyberbabes. The straight-faced man-shooter lives a fabulous double-life thanks to Valve licensing it to Asian developers, who rebuild in weird ways we don’t usually see. But!

Later these year we’ll all get to coo and prod at one of these oddities when Nexon bring Counter-Strike Nexon: Zombies to western players through Steam, free-to-play.

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At the time of writing, there’s eight days, eighteen hours, two minutes and thirty-five seconds until the ESL One Cologne Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournament kicks off. In the tournament, happening adjacent to this year’s Gamescom, the sixteen best CS:GO teams will fight for a $250,000 prize pot.

As a reader of a PC games website, it’s 50/50 about whether you’re more interested in this or the sticker-betting Pick’Em Challenge Valve just launched for CSGO in support of the event. More details and a wub-heavy trailer below.

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How long is it before everyone copies Valve’s Counter-Strike: Global Offensive update structure? The latest addition to the venerable multiplayer shooter is called Operation Breakout, and it adds six new maps for everyone to play for free. For those willing and able to pay $6, you then get a now-familiar bundle of upgrades including access to mission drops with the chance to unlock “45 exclusive weapon finishes”, a Challenge Coin which tracks your achievement-y ‘mission’ progress, and a new weapon case containing new community designs.

Given how most other games split their multiplayer communities by selling the maps directly, and given how that split is bad even for the developers, surely it’s only a matter of time before we’re covering our Battlefield and Call of Duty weaponry with paid-for and unlockable stickers and baubles. More details on the update and its maps below.

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Valve games have become more and more dependent on the Steam Workshop for introducing new content and fuelling play. That’s never more the case than in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which is as much about unlocking, buying and trading gun skins as it is familiar CT vs. T battles. So it’s interesting to see how Valve deal with copyright infringement within that community. After receiving a DMCA takedown notice about two items, the M4A4 | Howl and a community sticker named Howling Dawn, those items have been swiftly removed from the store and action taken against its creators.

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