While Valve promised to keep the mechanics of the game itself will stay exactly as they were, the addition of over 100 achievements, 'cinematic' death shots, a redesigned scoreboard overflowing with information, not to mention persistent player stats and a domination/revenge system - all of which we've seen before in other titles - Counter-Strike veterans are creating something of a fuss. The nuts and bolts of the world's most famous hostage rescue game have been changed from old Half-Life 2 code to Orange Box, meaning it now runs the latest version of Valve's engine that supports Windows and Mac OS X and now powers Team Fortress 2 and Portal.īesides support for the six per cent of Steam users with Macs, the biggest gains you'll see from this upgrade are multi-core processing, allowing owners of multi-core processors (ie pretty much every desktop CPU sold in the past few years) to reap the benefits of multi-core rendering better HDR support, juicier explosions along with tweaks, bug fixes and enhancements inside Source itself.īut Counter-Strike players are never more than a few moments away from complaining about something, and it's the extras Valve has added to the game, on top of these engineering works, that have polarised a community which prides itself on acting like a two year-old beating the floor in a tantrum. New GutsĪs a result, Counter-Strike has recently had its biggest upheaval since 2004, when its engine was swapped for Half-Life's GoldSrc to Source. A lot of the people who play it today have always played it, and the clubby feel of most servers, together with the fact everyone seems to be in a clan, means newbies don't feel welcome. Over the years it's had numerous revisions big and small, while steadfastly sticking to its principles and listening patiently to the bad tempered, semiliterate know-it-alls who play it.Īlthough its popularity has never dwindled, put both the 1.6 mod and Source versions together and you haveĪ title with almost twice the head count of its closest rival, it isn't attracting new blood. Its success is rooted in the way it's changed and yet remained unchanged.Įvolving from a bolt-on extra to Half-Life with a look and feel barely different from the game on which it was based, Counter-Strike: Source is now a modernfeeling thing. Launched Over a decade ago as a mod for one of the most important games ever, Counter-Strike has become a pastime for tens of thousands of people worldwide.

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