Counter-Strike 2 - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alec Meer)

how come such a dirty office has posh Herman Miller chairs in it?

I’ll be honest with you: I have two middle names. I’ll be honest with you again: I will almost certainly never play Tactical Intervention, the new multiplayer shooter from Counter-Strike co-creator Minh “Gooseman” Le. Why? Because of a gypsy curse, of course. But you are under no such restrictions, which means you can play the game right now. Its open beta has launched, you see.

Update: doesn’t appear to be live in all territories as yet. Grr. Of course, there are ways and means to pretend to be American, but hopefully they’ll make it open to all comers soon. (more…)

Half-Life 2
Dota 2


Valve boss Gabe Newell stepped up to the stage during last week's BAFTA awards to receive the prestigious Academy Fellowship for his contributions to gaming. Presumably momentarily distracted by accepting a trophy modeled after a smirking face, a bewhiskered Newell fielded some interview questions over the normally airtight subject of Valve's business performance that hinted at the monumental scale of the studio's prosperity.

Newell chalked up Valve's successes largely to user-generated content on open platforms such as Steam Workshop before sharing some jaw-dropping numbers. "There's sort of an insatiable demand for gaming right now," Newell said. "I think our business has grown by about 50 percent on the back of opportunities created by having these open platforms.

"And just so people understand how big this sort of scale is getting, we were generating 3.5 terabits per second during the last Dota 2 update," he added. "That's about 2 percent of all the mobile- and land-based Internet activity."

Wait, what? We're not exactly sure what Newell meant when he dropped that bombshell of data info, apart from maybe claiming responsibility for all those times my connection speeds chugged while browsing these past few months. Still, it seems entirely plausible—Dota 2 has a lot of players, and the MOBA recently took the crown for the highest concurrent user amount of any Steam game ever. If any Steam game can feasibly take a bite out of the entire Internet, Dota 2 holds the best chance.
Counter-Strike - alfred
We have released a Beta update for Counter-Strike 1.6.
Changes in this update are:
<ul><li>Fixed mouse clicks not working under Linux
<li>Fixed mouse clicks being in the wrong place if your view was letterboxed
</ul>
Counter-Strike - alfred
We have released a Beta update for Counter-Strike 1.6.
Changes in this update are:
  • Fixed mouse clicks not working under Linux
  • Fixed mouse clicks being in the wrong place if your view was letterboxed
Counter-Strike - alfred
We have released a Beta update for Counter-Strike 1.6.
Changes in this update are:
<ul><li>Added letterboxing of the game based upon your resolution option so the game maintains the correct aspect ratio based upon your resolution choice. If you choose a "Normal" (4:3) and play on a widescreen (16:9 or 16:10) monitor then we will now place black bars at the edge of the screen to keep the right aspect ratio. The same is true for widescreen options on 4:3 monitors. Put "-stretchaspect" in the games launch options in Steam if you wish to disable this behavior
<li>Added better detection for older GPU drivers and the functionality they support. This should fix the green bar or black screen rendering issues people have been seeing
<li>Improved copy/paste functionality under Linux
</ul>
Counter-Strike - alfred
We have released a Beta update for Counter-Strike 1.6.
Changes in this update are:
  • Added letterboxing of the game based upon your resolution option so the game maintains the correct aspect ratio based upon your resolution choice. If you choose a "Normal" (4:3) and play on a widescreen (16:9 or 16:10) monitor then we will now place black bars at the edge of the screen to keep the right aspect ratio. The same is true for widescreen options on 4:3 monitors. Put "-stretchaspect" in the games launch options in Steam if you wish to disable this behavior
  • Added better detection for older GPU drivers and the functionality they support. This should fix the green bar or black screen rendering issues people have been seeing
  • Improved copy/paste functionality under Linux
Counter-Strike
There will be Nevgevs.
There will be Nevgevs.

Beginning tonight, we're hosting daily Counter-Strike: GO events on our server. Because why the hell not?

Our weeks-old, St. Louis-based CS:GO server has hosted lively Steam events about twice a week. We run custom maps exclusively because the community has somehow produced 1,000 of them for CS:GO since adding Steam Workshop support last month. I earmarked my early favorites in February, but new favorites have already emerged, like the cs_sauna remake.

How to join, in four extremely simple steps

Join the PC Gamer Steam Group to be notified of events
Subscribe to our CS:GO Steam Workshop map collection (this will auto-download and auto-update the maps we run on our server through Steam—MAXIMUM CONVENIENCE!)
Join the server ("PC Gamer | The Psychedelic Den of Map Experimentation," IP: 8.6.76.59:27015) around 7 PM PST / 10 PM EST
Have fun; be the kind of person you'd like to play games with

Thanks to GameServers for being a darn good server provider. If there's a config setting you'd like changed or a map you'd like to see in the rotation, just let me know or leave a comment on the Steam Workshop collection. Messages sent to evan@pcgamer.com stir my spinal community antennae implant.

And yes, we know CS:GO isn't the only game in the universe. But we've got a good thing going there, and I'd rather do a slow roll-out of community funtimes than expand things too quickly. Look for more games and events to pop up throughout the year.
Counter-Strike 2 - Valve
Release Notes for 3/11/2013

[ MISC ]

- Fixed the end match map vote sometimes selecting the wrong map as winner
- Fixed a crash in dedicated servers related to the end match map vote
- Players can no longer cast a vote outside the range of maps in the end match map vote list
Counter-Strike 2 - Valve
Release Notes for 3/8/2013

[ MISC ]

- The convar mp_endmatch_votenextmap (defaults to 1) is now accessible to everyone.
- If a server is running a map group with more than 10 maps in it, a random set of 10 maps will be selected from the group and will be shown to clients at the end of the match in the map vote list.
- Added mp_endmatch_votenextmap_keepcurrent (defaults to 1) that forces the current map to stay in the list of end match voting options. If not set, the current map is not guaranteed to be in the list and will randomly enter the list like any other map.
- Resolved a few bugs with the new random map selection.
Counter-Strike - alfred
We have released a Beta update for Counter-Strike 1.6.
Changes in this update are:
<ul><li>Fixed white bar at the bottom of the screen and low FPS when running a 16-bit desktop under windows
<li>Fixed crash if you used the swapdemo command incorrectly
<li>Cleaned up default keybindings
</ul>
...