CSGO - No Game For Old Men

No context, I'm just amused by how badly the guy on the left is craving my sausage.

If you're into FPS games, then there's a decent chance you're already looking forward to the impending releases of Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 or Star Wars: Battlefront. There's no doubt both games will feature a hilariously overpriced season pass, which will grant you access to 3 or 4 map packs, most of which (in case of CoD) contain regurgitated maps from previous games of the series. Activision will announce the next CoD less than two weeks after Black Ops 3 is out and you can be sure that Battlefront will see a sequel within a year if the game won't absolutely bomb. That way you get to pay full price for the same, slightly modified game year after year without the possibility to create any content of your own. Remember when that was still a thing? The possibility to create maps, skins, models, modifications and whole total conversion mods for AAA FPS games? Or to host a server containing all your favourite custom mods?

One insanely popular Half-Life mod back in the good old days was Counter-Strike. My classmates would talk about this game where somebody shot someone through the seat of an airplane with a desert eagle and apparently there were terrorists and counter-terrorists and I had no idea what the fuck they were on about. Then I grabbed an early CS beta and I absolutely hated it.

I was used to playing death matches on Half-Life. You know, rush in there, shoot anything that moves and if you die, you're just one click away from getting back into the action. Winning matches by scoring the required amount of kills was relatively easy, especially when your hardware and internet connection were better than anyone else's. Simple, braindead fun. And then there was CS.

Shut up! It was 1999!

If you die in CS, you're out for the rest of the round. And I died all the fucking time. Footsteps from at least three guys coming from around the corner? I'm all by myself? Great! Let's run there, I can totally take them all! Except this is a game where a single bullet to the head will usually kill you and you're not gonna hit anything if you press and hold that trigger until you run out of ammo. Especially when you move around a lot while shooting. Not that a lot of people were super awesome at circle-strafing or anything. Heck, some folks still turned using their keyboards!

I would have quit there and then, but suddenly the game turned into this huge phenomenon. My friends would no longer show up on Quake 3 or UT, everyone was playing CS all day and night and every other weekend they had major LAN-parties where, in between sharing pixellated hentai clips, people would play CS. Hundreds of gamers gathered at Terafusion 2K, which owes his name to the fact that about one whole Terabyte of data (music, movies, games etc.) had been shared by the community, or so the legend goes. The dark ages, I know.

Deorum Concordia were my classmates. The lady in the background was one of only two girls at the event.

If you search the web for pictures of that event, along with my old user handle, you'll see a picture of my buttcrack, that somebody took while I was asleep. The first, but most definitely not the last picture of my ass on the internet!
Long story short, you either played CS back then or nobody would play with you at all. And I got okay at the game over time. I was always too impatient and too aggressive to play this thing on a professional level, but I had my moments. My brother got into it, as well. He's responsible for one of my all-time favourite moments in tv history.

You see, NBC Giga was a tv channel  back then, which would occasionally show CS tournaments, where some of the best clans competed for fame and presumably a ton of money. And before every match they'd introduce some of the players, showed the clans and their kit. And there was that scene where you'd see this ancient, nicotine-stained Windows natural keyboard. The windows keys were brutally ripped out, the whole thing was stained and looked hilariously old, filthy and like somebody took it straight out of a dumpster. Then there was this shoddy 1st gen Microsoft optical mouse next to it.

Basically this...

...and that, but with missing parts and covered in filth.

The player using this old shit to compete in the professional games was my brother. His clan eventually found sponsors and he'd switch to proper gaming hardware, but he was living proof that overpriced, fancy-ass gaming gadgets are pretty overrated and that nothing beats skill.

I ran my own clan for a while, nothing fancy, but we had fun and scored a few (casual) victories here and there, but the years went by, the new Counter-Strike: Source happened and split up the community and suddenly there were things like Ragnarok, then Final Fantasy XI, the first MMO of the series, and finally World of Warcraft, so FPS games kinda lost their appeal.

Even Counter-Strike's photorealistic visuals couldn't keep me.

WoW lasted for quite some time, it still draws millions of paying subscribers every month, but eventually I missed shooting people and I got into Call of Duty, which was insanely addictive, because it requires pretty much zero skill and you still get to feel like a badass.

I'm not trying to make fun of it, either. I have about half a dozen CoD games in my Steam library, because I genuinely enjoyed playing (most of) them. I just don't believe they're super difficult, especially in softcore Team Deathmatch, which is the most popular game mode by far. You spray your gunfire in an enemy's general direction, they usually die if you start spraying a half second before your enemy does and if all else fails you'll win by lag compensation. The truth is a tad more complex than that, of course, but in a nutshell, it's all about spraying shit whilst running around your enemy like a spastic squirrel on mescaline. I have two friends, who are well into their 40s, who regularly play CoD and just fucking destroy everything. I don't think you can ever get too old for this shit.

And sometimes rabid canines make love to you.

And then came Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, a game whose user count is bigger than the population of some small countries. A game where pro-gamers get caught cheating during tournament livestreams, where people literally shit themselves on youtube whilst unlocking random cosmetic weapon skins and where prepubescent Russians will shout random insults at you via voice chat. A game with visuals and gunplay so dated, this thing should be some obscure niche title compared to the CoDs and Battlefields of this world, but it's not. It's so hilariously big and so popular, Asia even gets its own spinoff with scantily-clad anime chicks.

I don't understand this new generation of CS fans. Some people spend hundreds on virtual loot boxes and unpack them on live streams and youtube for the sake of clicks and when you check out their user accounts they never even fucking play CSGO. They're fucking faking it, because there's an audience for this kind of shit. How is it possible that some weapon skins sell for hundreds or even thousands in RL cash, when all they do is add a new texture to your weapon and do absolutely nothing else?

Yeah, I can totally see Seal Team 6 rocking some of those.

In terms of gameplay, however, CS hasn't changed one bit. Heck, people are still playing mostly the exact same maps we've played 16 years ago and there's still no aiming down sights. You tap that trigger and try to go for the headshot or figure out your gun's spray pattern and counter it by moving the crosshairs away from the enemy. All these years on Call of Duty have completely fucked me up when I decided to give CSGO a try. TotalBiscuit uploaded a video of it a while back, it looked good, I wanted to try it and it was just like the old days. I fucking hated it, because I died all the time and I couldn't kill shit. I circle-strafed and sprayed like an idiot, I rushed right towards enemy players no matter how badly outnumbered I was and gave up on the whole thing very quickly, at least until giving it a second chance a few days ago.

It came back after a while. In case of doubt, stand still or even crouch. Shift-walk and make no noise. Don't fucking reload after every single kill. Don't stand out in the open like a retard. But even then, the game has been out for a few years now, people play this thing 24/7, they know their spray patterns and they're younger, faster and more experienced with this shit than I'll ever be again in this life. Eventually, I gave up on trying to get any good with an AK47 or an M4 and just went for an FN P90 which can be sprayed fairly safely. Or one of the scoped rifles when I had the cash, so I could actually see and hit shit from a distance. I'm not shy to admit I cheesed it. And eventually this happened...

It'll only go downhill from here. Time to uninstall.

I remained on top of the scoreboard for the rest of the match and, for a moment, everything felt like the good old days. I didn't freak out, panic and fuck up whenever I ran into enemy players. I snuck around, ambushed them, felt in control. Basically the exact opposite of how I normally play CSGO.

The amount of skill it takes to be good at CS is ridiculous. You need an insane level of awareness, map knowledge, a sense of timing when it comes to peeking and reloading and don't get me started on how difficult it is to kill shit when you're used to gunplay mechanisms of games like CoD. When you finally get the hang of it and completely dominate a round or two, you get a sense of reward far more satisfying than any CoD killstreak.

I'm not claiming to be any good now. I had an epic moment and I'm hoping to repeat that at some point, but that's as good as it gets for me. I have so many games to play and so many articles to write for my job, I doubt I'll ever get dedicated enough to reach an at least average skill level on there. But I can see where the hype and fascination stem from, even 16 years later. And the insane amount of pressure when you're the last surviving member on the team and everyone gets to watch when you save the round - or utterly fail by being a complete noob. I think I'm gonna get my FPS fix on CSGO from now on. Sorry, CoD, we had some great times together, but I've run into an old flame and she's still surprisingly hot.

-Cat

Windows 10 Surprise Penis

Ahh, Christmas! That special time of the year where you drink lots of alcohol, cuddle up on the sofa watching nothing but reruns and take pictures of each other's peepees when nobody is looking. At least that's what I assume must have happened when I tripped upon a folder of last year's Christmas photos. I found pictures of the pets in there, Christmas food, family and (what I hope is really) my junk, as well as whatever the fuck it is that Claire has got down there. I genuinely don't remember taking those, but it's pretty much the only time of the year where I drink.  The bear and I are horrible people, so I'm not really surprised by the depravity of our past selves. Way to go, guys!

We looked at all those pictures the other day, tried to reconstruct whatever the fuck happened that night and moved quickly on to more important things - Windows 10, for one. A free upgrade to a shiny new OS - just install it, keep all your stuff, keep doing things the way you always do, just... cooler? Faster? I dunno. More up to date, I guess. Reviews have been pretty positive, it runs all the games you could play on 7/8 and then there's that massive performance boost on the horizon, which may come with brand new DX12 games as soon as the end of this year. Tempting stuff.

Rawr!

I had this really reasonable stance on the whole thing - wait for the first service pack, which irons out the biggest kinks. Wait for actual DX12 games to be a thing. The free update is available for an entire year and there's no need to rush things. Wait and see what everyone else thinks, first. But then we went ahead and just upgraded Claire's old Windows 7 anyway, because she has no work-related stuff on her PC and whatever games she could have lost in a messed up upgrade could have been restored via Steam in no time. And less than two hours later she was on Windows 10, which looks slightly different with that weird start menu and its tiles, but aside from that it's like nothing ever changed. It kept her rotating snake wallpapers, her animated snake mouse pointer, all the desktop icons were arranged exactly the way she remembered from Win 7 and the only thing that disappeared were the desktop gadgets, which had long been discontinued for being a security risk, anyway.

There are free weather apps and other such handy things in the App Store, so she didn't miss the gadgets much. With that said, it would be cool if it was possible to pin live tiles directly to desktop. I'd like to see sticky notes on there. Or maybe a big, stylish clock, just for looks. You can have all that in the start menu, but that's not really the same.
Minor nitpicking aside, everything just worked. She could connect to the internet straight away without us having to set up any networky stuff, all her favourites and bookmarks were still there, Steam still worked fine and so did all of her games. Heck, GTA V ran better than ever on her machine and showed no more annoying stutters and hitches. She also freaked the fuck out when she launched WoW, so I assume she noticed a slight FPS increase on there, as well.

I think I'll stay in Los Santos.

It all looked very promising. Stuff just worked, some of it better than ever, and the whole thing was relatively quick and easy. And most of my friends confirmed this, saying the upgrade went without any problems and most of them were very satisfied with Windows 10. And I had a backup and nothing to lose, so... yeah. I decided to give it a shot.

Steam, Skyrim, Chrome, my sound card, GeForce Experience. Those are some of the things which didn't work after the upgrade. Steam told me it had to be reinstalled before either crashing or freezing my entire system. Skyrim would produce an error message, which came back an infinite amount of times until killed via task manager. My old Soundblaster X-Fi was no longer recognized - the Windows 10 software pack told me there's no compatible hardware. The Chrome shortcut spat out error messages and would no longer launch Chrome at all. Instead, it could only be launched via the new File Explorer, which just so happened to show a massive version of the Xmas dick pick whenever I started it. I'm not really sure why I kept it in the first place. Thanks and goodbye, recent files section!

The little santa hat was your idea!

It took a few hours to fix all the issues, which shouldn't surprise me, really. I mean, just because everything worked immediately for everyone else is no guarantee that I'm safe from fuck ups, so I get the whole lot. Could have been worse - I didn't lose any data and everything worked a few hours later. Well, except the old Soundblaster. Rest in peace, old friend! Performance is pretty much the same across the board and things don't really feel any different. Well, with one exception - I can now talk to my computer and tell it to show me ostriches. Seriously!

Cortana is a pretty amazing feature, though I'm not feeling super comfortable about all the information Windows 10 wants to gather for me in order to run the whole thing in the first place. I can see why it would want to keep voice recordings to understand me better, but why the fuck do you need my contacts, my internet history, my location, inking and private messages? The word private is right in there. Yes, I get it, she's supposed to be a virtual assistant, so she needs to see my calendar and schedule and shit, but I wouldn't let a real flesh & blood assistant see my private messages or my search history. That shit is called private for a reason!

Windows tells you about all those things upon installation and allows users to deactivate all that, so my Cortana is turned off for now. I don't need Microsoft to know what I do on the internet, what I talk about with my friends or who these friends are. Which is a bit hypocritical, considering I've signed in to Chrome, so I can look at furry watersports porn using any device I want without having to remember my login information.

On a less creepy note, our monitor lizard eats ice cream. I had last weekend off and took him out for a bit. It was a nice, sunny day, so I had a Cornetto and I gave him some. He bit some huge chunks out of it. He dropped most of it on the floor and licked it up. Weird stuff. Yes, we licked the same ice cream cone. Big deal. It's not like he has any balls to lick like that dog of yours, who licks your face every morning.

-Cat

Dear Diablo,

You almost had me this time. The new update brought Kanye's Cube or whatever the fuck it's called and along came the illusion of build diversity. And for the first few hours I was totally hooked. I wasn't even all that bothered by your ugly graphics or the fact that you can get away with using the world's shittest textures, just because you're being made by Blizzard. Because I was having so much fun.

You can count every pixel on that shield, but for some reason it's okay when Blizzard does this.

The cube lets you extract the powerful effects of legendary items, so you can apply them directly to your character. I ran around auto-bombarding monsters with twice the original amount of impacts, turned enemies into minions and had them last three times as long whilst attacking 50 percent faster, had bouncy magic shield builds that cost no resources whilst toasting legions of baddies with three times the regular amount of heaven's fury and everything was good. Until Blizzard's way of "balancing" things forced me into one of exactly two viable cookie-cutter builds just like before the update.

My class has a bunch of items, which double or even triple the damage and effect of certain abilities, which is great. My class also has armor sets, which raise certain abilities' damage by 500 to 750 percent, which isn't so great. If I can use one of those sets and crit for over a literal billion damage (which is now fairly low by Diablo 3's standards), then why the fuck would I bother with any of those legendaries, which only double or triple the damage of my other abilities, which then end up hitting for 50 million or less?

The whole thing is fucked. The only really useful thing the cube lets me do is enhance the two most obvious and hilariously overpowered builds for my class even further. Yes, it's now easier to add bonuses from smaller item sets, so I get to chose whether I'd like 10 percent faster cooldowns or 15 extra damage against elite baddies and WHO THE FUCK CARES!? If my primary ability suddenly hits for eight times its original damage I don't give a shit about hitting some monsters for an additional 30 percent on top!
If "build diversity" means getting control over such minute benefits, which don't really affect my playstyle in any significant way, then it's no real diversity in the first place. Wanna play greater rifts? You're gonna shield bash or you're gonna throw hammers. Enjoy the new diversity!

What about fucking phalanx? Bombardement? Condemn? Or any fucking skill that isn't shield bash or blessed hammer? When I look at the top 100 players and only see two or three builds per class, then there's no damn diversity.
I think the cube is a step in the right direction. Heck, should you actually decide to let people play the way they want again, instead of forcing everyone into one or two incredibly specific and restrictive sets and styles, I'll be happy to stay. Let me use my favourite abilities again! Give me a phalanx that can actually kill an enemy in a rank 40 rift. Or a bombardment that doesn't just tickle the bad guys. Having more freedom over a bunch of secondary stats with the same old cookie-cutter build is a good start, but it's not enough. Not remotely.

-Cat

UPDATE: Looks like this problem is being actively worked on right now. Let's see how that'll go.