Recent reviews by Money Talks

boring as ♥♥♥♥

WewIn 1999, I crawled out of Counter-Strike’s wretched vagina to become the man I am today. And, now, I’m tasked with rating the game. How does one even rate his mother?

In sixth grade, I would wake up for school at 5:30 AM, but then I started getting up at 4:30 just to get a couple rounds in before class. Call it dedication or a sickening obsession, but I was hooked on CS (nevermind my neighbor who broke into my house to play while I slept!) It was more than a game. It was my social hub, my iTunes visualizer, and my brief entryway into game design (which didn’t go very far.) It is and remains a standout multiplayer shooter that paved the way for things to come with Call of Duty and Battlefield.

Being eight years since the excellent Source remake, Valve has decided it’s time to give the game another facelift. What started as a Source port for consoles became a more ambitious project that included PC. While there are no radical departures in Global Offensive, it is without a doubt a reboot. Valve has just hit the reset button on the series, once again. As drastic and premature of a maneuver it may be, there is no denying that Counter-Strike remains an addictive and rewarding competitive shooter like no other.


ounter-Strike was born on PC and it is there that its largest community of players will stay. Nevertheless, Valve wished to branch out and get their hands on some of that Call of Duty money. Even so, the game still plays like classic CS: this is white-knuckled gaming not for the easily impatient and frustrated. It’s true that the game has been rebuilt almost completely, but the majority of changes are superficial and surface level: A chime plays when you kill, you are rewarded with progress points and achievements that do nothing, and the game’s player models have become greatly improved.

If you are new to the series, here’s what you can expect. CS is a slow-paced game -- funny thing is that it was pretty fast in the days of Rainbow Six -- where two teams try to eliminate each other while attempting a secondary objective (rescue hostages or plant a bomb). The two defining features of the game are the permanent death that forces players to spectate until the next round begins, and the ability to purchase weapons and equipment at the start of each round with money earned from kills and victories. You can find these features in Call of Duty’s Search and Destroy mode as well as Shadowrun (2007), but outside a couple mods for Quake and Unreal Tournament no one has attempted to replicate the full package.