This is my first and probably only review. And this isn't about counter strike 2, this is about cs:go.

I'd like to start with saying I played a lot of counter strike source with my friends, and before that half life counterstrike or 1.5 or whatever you referred to it as on WON servers predating this steam account. CS:GO came out when I was in college. I was there for the global chat between rounds and you could clown on the other team. It was the most toxic experience I've ever had gaming and I grew up with with halo 2 on xbox live but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ I absolutely loved it. I was there when the R8 first dropped and it was essentially a pocket awp that magnet headshotted if you left clicked anywhere on the enemies body, even if they were entirely across the map. Seriously there were comp matches where everyone just bought R8s all rounds all game long. I had a late 2010 11" macbook air with 1.6 ghz proc with an nvidia 520m graphics card. i don't even know how this ♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing ran csgo but it did I averaged 20 fps, sometimes as low as 11. I put like 1200 of my almost 1800 hrs on that thing and idk how but i made it master guardian 2, almost entirely on dust II with a scout. There is honestly a good chance that if you have a 10 year coin like me and live in the western half of the world we probably played at least once together. It was terrible and it got me through the worst times of my life and I absolutely loved it. I failed out of college - at the time, the only thing i had going for me in life- lost my job in the 2013 us gov sequestration. CSGO was there for me. Became homeless and suicidal before a friend took me in. CSGO with mcdonalds wifi and my car in the parking lot was there for me. While trying to find purpose and meaning in my life while barely avoiding debilitating drug addictions and pathways to certain death, CSGO was there for me. Met, moved in with, and almost lost forever the love of my life before reuniting with her and marrying her and having our first kid and buying our first house and experiencing a global pandemic and having our first and second miscarriage and then selling our first house and finally having our second son then buying our second house and having our third son CSGO was ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ there for me. I'd conservatively estimate that 75% of my friends on my steam account from this past decade are just fantastic people that I met and probably bonded with over something entirely stupid like memes or jazz or solipsism or conspiracy theories or musicals or islamic extremist roleplay or feeling sad and alone or whatever while playing CSGO. I had downloaded matches from YEARS past with friends irl who are dead now. Years and years later, when I upgrade from that macbook air to this pc I'm typing on right now, I watched those games. I cried. I smiled.

But now its gone. I came home from work yesterday to see a reddit post saying the servers went offline. just like that. Idk why it struck me so hard its just a game, but it was my game and I'm embarrassed to say that when I came home and saw that it kinda felt like coming home to hear that a friend was gone. Profoundly sad but that's life I guess.

CS2 is the next counter strike. I got to play the beta, and in a lot of ways it plays like CSGO. I'll probably play it more now that it's out and should my friends, still able to come online, invite me to play it.

But this review isn't about CS2, its about CSGO. I should've recommended it when I had the chance.

give me my downloaded matches back please valve I'm begging you its 2024 now we're pregnant with our 4th child and I still miss being able to watch my old downloaded csgo matches with my friend when he was still alive you have no idea how much this stillhurts