Apparently Counterstrike: Global Offensive hit 100,000 concurrent users last night. We didn’t make up any of that number, but we were playing other games which were based on mods. Two of the most popular games in the world, in fact. Odd that major developers don’t feel the need to provide mod support given the chance of greatness. I had a lot of fun last night, and I drank a few beers, and as a result I can’t quite remember much in the way of themes and specific jokes. Expect match reports and maybe rambling about other things.
Boobs: distracting
Prof instigated the night after rumours of Counterstrike, and we began the evening’s gaming with a few rounds of good old normal Counterstrike: Source. I’m not good at CS:S, and that means I more often than not spend most of the game spectating. As a result it is not my favourite game, while Prof rarely joins us to play anything else. Rumour has it that if you say Counterstrike three times he appears. As it happens though, I did rather enjoy the half a dozen or so rounds we played before the server crashed and we moved on to Hide and Seek.
Hide and Seek was as entertaining as ever. Not quite as rupturingly funny as last week, but hiding tables under vans or following hunters around as a purple bottle of bleach never gets old. For some reason boobs seemed to feature strongly in the game. Tezz, for reasons he can’t remember, had boobs on his spraytag, and one of the custom maps had some blokey posters on the walls. I think lack of familiarity with the maps saw the end of Hide & Seek for the night, it was proving too difficult for the hunters to find everyone when they didn’t know what the custom maps were supposed to look like in the first place. We had a good run at it though.
Does anyone smell bleach?
With a few of us dropping out for bed or other things, we fell back on a few games of our weekly staple, Dota 2, to finish the night. We still had a good turnout of eight for our first game, a mixed bot random pick practice match. It wasn’t a particularly long match, and it was dominated by Bits playing as Templar Assassin. It’s hard being on the other team when you’re being whitewashed and one player is untouchable, but we’ve all been there on both sides and with Dota more than most games you just have to get on with the game, look for the small victories, and try not to spoil the enjoyment of the winning team by complaining about it.
Game two was another practice match, between six of us this time. This was more even, although it was still a fairly quick match. The highlight for me, playing as Tiny, was lobbing Pnut at Fabyak. This resulted in a kill each for me and Bits (as Abaddon), not to mention having me in hysterics. I didn’t play great but it was pretty enjoyable regardless.
The final game left us with four, so we played a real match and made up our numbers with a random. It was pretty even throughout a lot of it. The other side had someone disconnect for quite a while, return, then give up. We had a random who didn’t play well and then left. Their strength was a moderately well played Pudge, who was grabbing and killing stragglers in the first half of the game and being a real problem. Later on we started to team up and gank him at every opportunity and he lost his edge, the rest of his team not sticking with him and backing him up. We had the edge in pushing, as we cleared their bottom lane all the way to their ancient by the half an hour mark, which put them on the back foot.
Could also have been Pnut running out of beer
It looked as though we were edging ahead for a win, when Teamspeak fell over. A look at the replay, which is a brilliant feature in proper matches (but not available for practice games) shows our performance plummet when that happens and we could easily have collapsed. We adapted and overcame though, suckered them back to our base and wiped them. Pnut called a charge on bottom and the game was over in a minute. A good defence from a fairly disorganised team, but we all played well and worked together. It would have been just as enjoyable if we lost, but a victory against real people is all the sweeter.