The ESL One Cologne 2014 CS:GO championship went down as the most-watched Counter-Strike event in history, with over 400,000 combined viewers watching live in-game or through the ESL stream over the weekend. There were plenty of memorable frags, clutches, and comebacks during the 16-team, four-day event, the best of which I ve collected here.

Every ace (one player notching five kills) from the tournament


The final moments of the last in the three-match series between Cloud9 and NiP


LDLC s apEX notches a 3K on a terrific eco round


Dignitas dupreeh walks through smoke and is rewarded for a moment


A disgusting jump-USP headshot at the end of this clip


Semphis with an amazing stealth retake on de_dust2 s bombsite B


One of our favorite matches of the tournament, an incredible double-OT comeback


The moment of victory for Swedish team Ninjas In Pajamas

Source is certainly showing some wrinkles in comparison to, say, UE4, but CS:GO remains the premier competitive shooter on PC today. Even after a decade half of history with the franchise, we still love the look and feel of its classic maps and their modern iterations: Mirage's A bombsite, Inferno's "banana" path, or Dust 2's dim tunnel.

Firing up CS:GO on LPC, I decided not to go with a triple-wide monitor setup, so I arranged our three 27" monitors in portrait configuration. This gave us a combined resolution of 4320x2560 or 25 percent/3 million more pixels than we'd get at 4K.

.@wesleyfenlon has fired up Next Car Game on our ludicrous 3x27" portrait setup. https://t.co/JYOJGYvSdr— Evan Lahti (@ELahti) May 9, 2014




Click each preview image to view the uncropped, uncompressed PNG.

Garry Newman trolled me. I asked the Garry's Mod and Rust creator to show us his computer setup and he told me, flat out, that he doesn't use a standard PC. Then I asked him to send pictures of the setup and he included male genitalia on one of his monitors. Dude is messing with me.

But when you're Garry Newman, looking in on the ridiculousness of the industry, you can do that. You can see the notion that a game developer should have some hand-crafted PC with a giant case and laugh. You can get an email from someone about showing off your rig and decide to have a little bit of fun. And his rationale for his non-traditional working setup is fascinating.

What's in your PC?
My work PC is a Mac Pro running Windows 8.1.

3.7GHz quad-core with 10MB of L3 cache
12GB (3 x 4GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC
1TB PCIe-based flash storage
Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM each

What's the most interesting part of your setup?
Probably the fact that it's a Mac Pro. It looks like a bin.



What's on your desk?
Mac Pro, 2 Apple Displays (connected via thunderbolt), a phone that I never use and a printer.

Do you have a gaming PC?
No I don't have a gaming 'PC'. The Mac is probably more powerful and sexy looking than any gaming PC I could build. I've never had any problems with performance. PC manufacturers have kind of got it wrong for 10 years when designing gaming PCs. I don't want a computer that looks like a motorbike, I'm not 12 years old. I want a PC that doesn't look out of place in my living room. I don't want to have to lock it away in its own room.

At one time I did build a smaller PC with a smaller case, but it was always a struggle to fit everything in, and even then everything was quite loud.

Even though I use a Mac I don't use OSX. This kind of makes me a sinner in both camps. PC users hate it because I'm using a Mac (even though it's just a PC) and Mac users hate it because I'm using Windows.

Blur added to obscure giant Rust penis.

At home I have an iMac with Windows installed. OSX has a tool built in to let you easily install Windows. It's not running emulated, it creates a partition and you boot into it. I have one wire coming from my computer, and that's plugged in the wall to power it.

The only disadvantages to using a Mac are the price and the fact that you can't really upgrade them (except for memory). To me this isn't a big deal because I'm rich as fuck so I'm more likely to just buy the latest model instead of trying to get 10fps extra in BF4 by upgrading the graphics card.

My days of taking my PC to bits to make it faster are over. In the same way that I don't take my TV or fridge to bits and change components. This stuff doesn't interest me. I just want to use it.

What are you playing right now?
Banished.

What's your favorite game and why?
Ever? My favourite game ever is probably Black and White 2. I don't know exactly why but it's a game that I return to and play through at least once a year.

Mr. Newman also sent a picture of his "PS4/XBone/Steambox desk" for inclusion:

You may have noticed some strange behavior in Garry s Mod if you played it a couple of days ago. An exploit that took advantage of the Source Engine s file sending mechanism made it possible to send files with any extension to the client or server. Strangely, this was used to change users Steam name to VINH'LL FIX IT, and using them to spam friends and players with the word cough over chat. The exploit is mostly fixed now, but Garry s Mod s own Garry Newman tells us it could have been a lot worse.
The worm as I understand it was transferred to the client as a dll, then when it loaded it crashed the client, in the hope that they'd join another server, Newman told PC Gamer in an email. When they did it downloaded the server's config file and looked for a rcon password. RCON, or remote console, allows you to control a server remotely. If it got one, it infected the server by uploading the dll and running it (it didn't need rcon to upload the dll, only to run it). And then the cycle continued.
Newman said he patched Garry s Mod within an hour of finding out about it, and that Valve did the same, but that it s still possible for the bug to spread via different Source Engine mods, so be careful what you download.
The effects of the worm were mostly non-destructive as far as we know, Newman said. Luckily the creator kept it pretty tame. It could have been a hell of a lot worse. I hope by being proactive and patching it quickly we avoided anyone using it maliciously.

Have you played every single game in your Steam library? No? Neither have I and that accomplishment is apparently just a small sand grain in the over 288 million games in Steam collections that have never felt a press of the Play button. That's a surprising figure from a new report by Ars Technica researching the most active and popular games on Steam straight from the recorded statistics of some of the platform's 75-million-strong community.

Ars' method for its number flood involves sampling registered games and their played hours via profiles and their unique Steam IDs. With the help of a server for computational muscle, Ars randomly polled more than 100,000 profiles daily for two months to pull together an idea of which games see the most time on everyone's monitors. In other words, your Backlog of Shame (don't deny it, everyone has one) probably took part in some SCIENCE at some point. Exciting.

Some caveats exist, though. The data Ars looked at for its research only extends back to 2009, when Steam brought in its "hours played" tracking system. Owned and played/unplayed games are thus slightly skewed to not account for older releases from the early noughties, and any length of time spent in offline mode wouldn't get picked up by Steam either. Still, Ars claims its results deliver a good picture of Steam gaming trends for the past five years albeit with some imperfections.

Predictably, Valve's personal products stack high on the list in terms of ownership and most played hours. Dota 2 takes the crown with an estimated 26 million players who ganked faces at some point in the MOBA, but free-to-play FPS Team Fortress 2 follows closely behind with a little over 20 million users. Counter-Strike: Source rounds out the top three with nearly 9 million players, but it's also collecting dust in over 3 million libraries.

As for non-Valve games, Skyrim wins in activity, barely edging out Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with 5.7 million estimated active owners. Civilization V kept 5.4 million players hooked for Just One More Turn, and Garry's Mod boasts 4.6 million budding physics artists.

Want to know what the most unplayed Steam game is? It's Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, the Source tech demo given free to pretty much everyone on Steam who bought or fired up Half-Life 2. It hasn't been touched by an approximate 10.7 million players. I guess that old fisherman is feeling pretty lonely right now.

My favorite stat is the total of played hours divided by game mode, more specifically the separate multiplayer clients of the Steam versions of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops. The single-player campaigns for each respective title sits modestly within the mid-20-hour range, but the multiplayer side balloons well into the hundreds of hours. It's a pretty obvious indicator of where the biggest chunk of popularity resides in FPS gaming, but it's not like you wouldn't get weird looks for claiming you play Call of Duty for the story anyway.

See more of Ars' results in both number and pretty orange graph form in its report.

So far in Rust, I've encountered rock-wielding bandits, malicious architects building one-room death arenas, and a cult of naked men. Poke around the community for a bit, and you'll find more good times in a game with such a sheer degree of freedom. Those flashes of spontaneity are just a small part of why Rust is really cool. Its success is, by now, not a big surprise after a pretty strong early access alpha and taking the top spot for survival RPG player activity, but today marks another notch in Rust's handcrafted leather belt: it's sold over 1 million copies, as tweeted today by Facepunch founder Garry Newman.

As a comparison, it took Garry's Mod a little over five years to hit the same sales milestone since launching on Steam in 2006. More impressive is the fact that Rust is still in alpha, with Facepunch continually tweaking and updating the game as it nears a full release. Rust first arrived on Steam Early Access on December 11.

Last week, Facepunch pushed out a sizable patch that removed zombies from the game entirely and improved animal behavior beyond derp levels. A million sales in almost exactly two months--not bad for a WIP title with a warning line of contains violence and caveman-themed nudity."

We've got our own thoughts on Rust's alpha right here. If you're jumping in for the first time, check out our guide to surviving your first day.

Humble Jumbo Bundle. That's quite a mouthful, and if you say it ten times fast it will summon both Beetlejuice and Candyman and open a portal to the underworld. So, y'know, it's probably best to avoid that. However, it's also the name of the Humble Bundle's latest pay-what-you-want sale, which this time discounts Sanctum 2, Magicka with two bits of DLC, and Natural Selection 2. Beat the average and you'll also get Orcs Must Die 2, Garry's Mod and Serious Sam 3: BFE throw in too. If your bank account wasn't summarily emptied during the course of the Steam sale, it might be worth a look.

That average, at the time of writing, stands at $4.10, so you won't have to fork out much of your pay packet/poker winnings/pocket money to get your hands on those six games. The charities receiving some or all or none of your money this time are Watsi and Child's Play, and there will of course be more games added to the deal over time.

The Humble Jumbo Bundle ends in a little over 13 days.

Being a captain in FTL: Faster Than Light is a nerve-wracking experience. Hostile aliens could teleport onto your ship at a moments notice, an asteroid could take out life support, and you're constantly put in horrible situations with no clear solution. The responsibility is simply too great, but luckily a pair of fellow space-goers are working on a Garry's Mod gamemode that lets you demote yourself to the role of a single crewmember.

The mod, called Final Frontier, is a 3D representation of the cruel—but rewarding—roguelike we thoroughly enjoyed last year. Where your ships systems were easy to control from your tactical view, everything in Final Frontier must be managed by human players. Firing weapons, teleporting players, and unlocking doors requires a quick mind and quicker hands at the correct console.

The developers hosted a Q&A to elaborate on what their FTL-inspired mod entails:

“This game is (heavily (blatantly)) inspired by FTL, a game we all enjoyed playing but felt would be improved with multiplayer,” one of the developers wrote. “Unlike FTL, you control a single crewmember in first-person perspective, and must manually perform the tasks that FTL characters carried out by standing at their posts mashing keyboards. How well you perform your job is entirely dependent on the skill of the player at that task.”

The two modders say they’re only “prototyping the project in Garry’s Mod,” and that they’re only testing it internally, but plan to set up a public server once the mod’s main features are finished. I suppose I could take this time to look for a top-tier crew that’ll fight and die for me without question. Any takers?

Thanks, Rock, Paper Shotgun

Yesterday, we wrote about a mod-management tool called Gmod. As many PC Gamer readers pointed out, its name creates confusion with GMod, fans' loving nickname for sandbox game Garry's Mod. "Isn't that a trademark infringement?" wondered some fans. The confusion has sparked a bit of an investigation, but now Garry's Mod creator himself, Garry Newman, has come forward with some interesting information on the name mix-up.

In an interview with VG24/7, Newman admitted that Olympus Games actually owns the name—and that the name confusion has been a contentious issue not just among gamers, but also between the two developers.

“It’s actually the other way around," Newman said. "They own the trademark for ‘gmod’ and have threatened to take us to court if we don’t other buy it off them—along with all their domains and Twitter accounts—or post a press release pointing out we’re not affiliated, along with a permanent link on garrysmod.com and our twitter, and force the community not to abbreviate Garry’s Mod to GMod.

"Garry’s Mod pre-dates their trademark, as does the abbreviation of Garry’s Mod to GMod. As a bonus our game is called Garry’s Mod—not GMod. It’s only occasionally abbreviated to GMod out of convenience."

Newman feels that the people behind the mod-management tool should've rebranded long ago to avoid confusion, rather than traverse this rocky legal territory now. However, Skylar Kreisher from the Gmod team says there's another side to the story, which we'll be hearing about soon in their next Kickstarter update. We've also contacted Kreisher directly, and will inform our readers if we hear anything back.