http://youtu.be/HrvFGga5Nik

Are you on it? Have you shot many men? Does it still feel like Counter-Strike? The starting gun has gone off, head-shotting a terrorist twenty metres away and signalling the launch of the Global Offensive closed beta. COUNTER-TERRORISTS WIN.

There's a video of the closed beta above, from Evil Avatar. It looks like Counter-Strike, it sounds like Counter-Strike, but does it taste like Counter-Strike? We won't know until we've jumped in and licked the sand on Dust. Valve have said that they'll gradually send out new beta invites until the closed beta is essentially an open beta, so don't worry if you're not in this round of testing.

http://youtu.be/Zw684xM2cUo

Half-Life: Origins comes from the same team behind the excellent Beyond Black Mesa short film released earlier this year. It's a short but evocative take on those famous first moments of the original Half-Life, the peaceful train journey before all that nastiness with the interdimensional portal, and the aliens, and the crowbar. It captures the workmanlike atmosphere of Black Mesa quite nicely, though the chap playing Gordon keeps reminding me how perfect Hugh Laurie would be for the role. Infectious Designer should ask him to do their next film, I'm sure he's not busy.

Details are slowly emerging on Counter-Strike Global Offensive’s closed beta, which is due to start on 30 November. You'll need a key to join in, and it will initially consist of two maps: the ever-popular Dust, and, er, Dust2. “Can't wait to see people getting to play the changes in Dust,” said csgo_dev’s Twitter feed.

It’s very much a closed beta, though. To be in with a chance of playing you’ll need to have grabbed a key from PAX Prime or the Eurogamer Expo. There are likely to be beta key giveaways on certain popular gaming sites in the near future, too.

Don’t panic if you haven’t got a key. This initial closed beta is merely to nip any problems in the bud, and the testing period “will start small and grow until eventually everyone is in,” according to the Twitter feed. The Counter-Strike Global Offensive team are very open to feedback, too. “Everything. Everything is open to change in the beta,” they said.

This preview originally appeared in PC Gamer UK issue 233.

Since shortly after its first beta release back in 1999, this tactical, team-based Half-Life mod has dominated the competitive firstperson shooter scene, while countless hours of community yelling have made it a tight, balanced experience. A brief foray onto consoles in 2003 failed to expand the audience away from its PC home, so why are Valve attempting to create what they’re calling the ‘definitive’ version of a game that people like just fine as it is?

“We had been looking to create an XBLA version of Counter-Strike: Source as a sort of nostalgia thing,” explains Chet Faliszek, whose role on the game is loosely defined as ‘writer’. “But pretty quickly we began to realise how much we liked the game and it grew to something bigger.”



The team have decided to make some changes to the tried and tested formula. Classic maps such as Dust have been tweaked and, while other stalwarts such as Inferno and Nuke will return, they’re joined by new maps designed specifically for the Arsenal modes. The new modes are based on the popular Counter-Strike: Source mod Gun Game, in which players start with a pistol and earn a new weapon with each consecutive kill. Many of these new environments are said to be inspired by other titles in the Valve canon, though they’re holding back specifics.

The graphics have also undergone an overhaul, though they could hardly be described as beautiful so much as robustly functional. Eight new weapons have been added too. These pack tactical characteristics, as well as additional firepower. For example, the Molotov cocktail is intended as much for blocking off areas of the map as causing damage to enemies. Meanwhile, the Zeus is a oneuse, Taser-style weapon that costs an eyewatering $1,000 of your load-out bank.



Playing it though, it’s very much the Counter-Strike you’ll be familiar with, and Faliszek is keen to emphasise that the experience hasn’t been compromised through its shared appearance on consoles. “This is absolutely a PC experience,” he says. “One of the rules we had is that it’s going to be Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike. There is no auto-aim; it’s absolutely a game of skill. PC players will still be able to mod the game, host dedicated servers and all of the things that have made Counter-Strike such an enduring experience.”

Indeed, Valve looked carefully at what the community were doing in Counter- Strike and borrowed traits, including shorter round times and even entire match modes. Counter-Strike has always grown up in public, shaped by the rallying calls of the people who love it the most. While Valve are claiming CS:GO will be the definitive version, it’s still the community that will decide its future.

Preview by Simon Parkin.

Super Meat Boy completely won us over with its slightly icky take on the good ol’ platform genre. To celebrate its first anniversary, the game has been released as part of a huge bundle on Steam, which includes the original game, Aquaria, Bit.Trip Beat, Bit.Trip Runner, Braid, Gish, Machinarium, VVVVV and World of Goo. You’ll also get the music tracks from Super Meat Boy, Braid, Machinarium, Bit.Trip Beat and Bit.Trip Runner. That’s a whole bunch of indie gaming right there, and it’ll only set you back £17.89 ($28) - or £1.78 per game. Oh yeah, it also includes Half-Life 2, for some reason.

The Global Offensive closed beta was to kick off with 10,000 participants this month, but CVG report that Valve have pushed it back a while after criticism from the pro players they have testing the game.

"They gave us a lot of feedback on things we should get in the game before we release it, otherwise we're going to be getting a lot of bug reports or a lot of feedback and it would just be redundant," said Valve's Chet Faliszeck.

"The closed beta will gradually expand to include more and more players, until "by the end of it, everyone will be playing the game. It will be the released game that you're playing and then at some point we'll say, 'OK we're going to officially release it.'"

"We have no mandate from anybody of when we have to ship this. So we're more than happy to just keep working on this until it's ready to ship."

That means we probably shouldn't expect the full release any time soon, but there are already pro competitions popping up. Check out one hour of professional battling from the Intel Extreme Masters.

Valve co-founder Gabe Newell gave a fascinating insight into the pricing experiments Valve have been running with Steam at the WTIA TechNW panel in Seattle recently, revealing that Team Fortress 2's shift to free to play quintupled its player base.

During the course of the seven minute aside, covered on Geekwire, Newell also revealed that the conversion rate of the number of free players who go on to buy something is "20 to 30 percent" for Team Fortress 2, much higher than the 2-3% conversion rate seen by other free-to-play games.

Newell said that he thinks the announcement of Team Fortress 2 as a "free-to-play" game, and not just outright "free" was part of TF2's successful shift of payment model, perhaps underestimating the power of the raw, uncontrollable human drive to acquire and hoard sweet new hats.

"Why is free and free to play so different? Well then you have to start thinking about how value creation actually occurs, and what it is that people are valuing, and what the statement that something is free to play implies about the future value of the experience that they’re going to have," Newell said, suggesting that the implication that a free-to-play Team Fortress 2 would exist as a continuing service was a key motivation for new players.

It's likely that Valve's reputation for providing free updates and ongoing support was even more of a factor than the "free-to-play" label, but Newell admits that Valve are generally stumped by their observations. As an example, Newell commented on the remarkable but confusing success that Valve saw early on with Steam sales, saying "we do a 75 percent price reduction, our Counter-Strike experience tells us that our gross revenue would remain constant. Instead what we saw was our gross revenue increased by a factor of 40.

"Not 40 percent, but a factor of 40, Which is completely not predicted by our previous experience with silent price variation."

"We don’t understand what’s going on," he added. "All we know is we’re going to keep running these experiments to try and understand better what it is that our customers are telling us."

Team Fortress 2 players are currently gearing up for the incoming Halloween Update, which among other things, is sure to add new hats.

As reported on Gamasutra, a bunch of Valve's writers have been taking part in a roundtable question and answer session at GDC Online.

Read on for some insight from some of the most talented writers in the industry.

Valve might be famous for its use of silent protagonists but according to Mark Laidlaw, one of the writers at Valve, it can be a restrictive on a studio's creativity: "Now that some of Valve's most popular protagonists are silent, there’s no turning back. “At this point we’re fully committed to it and taking it as far as it possibly could go.”

Eric Wolpaw, another writer at Valve, also provided some insight. Referring to Valve's hugely successful free to play game, TF2, he said: “that whole game is us desperately trying to keep our jobs."

“Comedy stuff is tougher because it’s more subjective and it’s really hard to gauge peoples’ reaction," he said. Wolpaw added that sometimes it’s a bit depressing, when people playtest a part in a game that’s supposed to be funny, and there's little reaction. “Pretty much no one that played Portal 2 cracked a smile, but testers still said the game was funny... It’s hard to tell if a joke is failing or not.”

Laidlaw was equally humble when referring to his own work: “We fail all the time, we just don’t advertise it too much...we always want to feel like we’re on the edge and challenging ourselves and growing all the time.”

What's your favourite example of writing in games? Let us know in the comments.

So now we know that Gordon Freeman will return in Renegade Ops. We can't say exactly why, but we can show you what he'll look like. See three new screenshots of Gordon's buggy in action below, along with some new artwork in which Gordon has a bit of a glare, perhaps a bit irate at how long it's taking for Episode 3 to come out.

 
Gordon Freeman will be a playable character in the PC version of Renegade Ops. The top down blaster will let us play as the Half Life hero and drive around in the Half Life 2 buggy, firing off rockets, taking out tanks with mounted machine guns and unleashing swarms of Antlions to quickly wipe out dozens of enemies at a time.

Renegade Ops is the latest from Just Cause and Just Cause 2 developers, Avalanche studios. A far cry from the sprawling, open world action of their previous titles, Renegade Ops will be a more traditional co-op shooter, with a very, very strange Gordon Freeman shaped twist.

“Working with Steam and the Half-Life team makes this game extra special.” said Sega's director of digital, John Clark. “Gordon Freeman is a deeply-established character in the gaming world and we are proud to have him included in Renegade Ops.”

Renegade Ops is out on Steam on October 14, and will cost $15.00 / £9.99 / €12.99 / AUD$ 20.00. Catch the first screenshot of Gordon in his buggy below, with more to follow on the site shortly. The One Free Man is back!