In the endless war of cheat vs. anti-cheat, Valve are considering serious measures to lock down programs hooking into Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The new measures, currently being put through their paces in an opt-in public beta testing, will not let you join VAC-enabled servers if you launch CS with incompatible files loaded. This is, to be clear, not any sort of kernel driver like Valorant’s controversial Vanguard. The new anti-cheat feature is currently being tested in an opt-in public beta and seems a way away from launching properly, bringing crippling performance problems for some players right now.

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In the grim darkness of the near future, there is only De_dust2. But look further ahead and- oh! There it is! Only war. Now look back to the present and find the two have come together in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, with new Warhammer 40,000 stickers now sold to slap on your virtual guns. CS’s stickers have always been a bit ‘teenager bunkbed’ so frankly I can’t think of a better match. It’s only weird that AK-47’s haven’t had “WAAAGH!” stickers all along.

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You know how it is. You think you’re into videogame soundtracks, then you go and hear someone perform ten of them on a Mongolian string instrument. I recently spent 20 minutes listening to a man do just that, and I think you should too.

Genius Jaavka is the man. The morin khuur is his instrument. Songs from Horizon Zero Dawn (coming to PC this summer), Mortal Kombat, Dota 2 and Fortnite are just some of the ones he treats us to. He’s really very good.

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Five people were charged this Sunday with fixing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive matches, according to Victoria Police. If found guilty, they could face up to a decade in prison.

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I frequent a Counter-Strike level design forum called Mapcore. There, a Dutch teenager who goes by “RD” (“RealDespair”) has long claimed to have been the original author of fy_iceworld. His now defunct portfolio site went on a lengthy rant about it:

“Yes, you read it right. I am the creator of this unholy monster. When i created this map i had absolutely no idea how popular it would become. It is sad that there are many txt files in rotation from kids that claim to have made this map, but you have now stumbled upon the true author…”

Was RD actually responsible for making one of the most influential and popular game maps of all time? I began a forensic investigation to verify its authorship, digging through the ancient detritus of dead Geocities pages, Angelfire websites, and Romanian file servers. I even datamined the fy_iceworld file for clues. I now know what “fy_” actually meant, and it wasn’t “fight yard.” Originally, it wasn’t even called fy_iceworld either! But let’s start from the beginning.

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Looks like there’s a drip somewhere in Valve’s spigot. Source code for both Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has apparently been made public. The files appear to be from years ago, though that may not prevent present troublemakers from doing their thing. Some fan servers are worried enough that they’ve gone offline until they can assure that these leaks won’t compromise the security of players. So far it’s unclear where the leak originated, though of course that hasn’t stopped anyone from guessing or pointing fingers.

Update: Valve have now responded to RPS to say they are still investigating but currently “have not found any reason for players to be alarmed or avoid the current builds” of either game. >

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I remember playing a Counter-Strike map in 2001 called fy_iceworld. It was a small simple grey killbox of a map that virtually anyone could’ve made within the first few hours of downloading the editor tools.

fy_iceworld quickly became one of the most popular and divisive CS maps at my school. I was, of course, one of the haters. I tried to convince my friends to vote against fy_iceworld on our local internet cafe’s CS server, but they argued that I was just salty about being bad at it (which was partly true) and they forced the mapchange anyway. Similar conversations played out across countless clan servers, cyber cafes, PC bangs, and LAN parties around the entire world.

To properly gauge fy_iceworld’s influence and legacy, I asked several working level designers for their takes. Should we love it or bury it?

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Most of us may lack the cybergoggles necessary to jack into Half-Life: Alyx today, but we can carry a bit of Alyx over into Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Over the weekend, Valve added new Half-Life-y stickers to slap on guns, patches to slap on uniforms, and badges to display in your profile. Some of them are cute! Unfortunately, they’re obtained through nasty little loot boxes – and these are not cheap. And surprisingly, the new cosmetics don’t include a new glove skin of HL: Alyx’s gravity gloves, something many had expected.

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The big daddy of PC game stores broke a new online user count yesterday with a whammin’ 20 million folks signed in. Sounds like everyone is at home perusing their game libraries for some reason. On the real, the spread of Covid-19 is certainly keeping folks home more than planned and PC gaming is, of course, a perfect indoor time-sink of a hobby. Good on ya for staying home to game if you’re able, folks.

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It’s been over a year, and I still have yet to find an idea in any game that comes close to matching the brilliance of the interlocking hex-tablet-drone system in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive‘s battle royale mode, Danger Zone. It belongs to the extremely select class of new ideas in games that not only offers several compelling points of departure from the tried-and-tested genre formula, but also solves almost every single one of the problems that have plagued the genre since its inception.

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