As some of you (if not all) might know, steam beta 2.0 was released today, along with beta 1.6 of counter strike, was released this afternoon. It has been quite a anxious day for counter strike players around the world waiting for this beta, but it seems some may have to wait a little longer, the beta was leaked just hours before its official release and the content servers were flooded with huge amounts of people attempting to play.
With this, valve has suspended the beta test until they can get more content servers up and running, which led to the mirrors for steam being taken down, and with the servers still flooded people who were able to download steam before it was suspended still cant play because of the problem.
I was able to get steam working, so I ran a LAN server just to test it out, well let’s just say it wasn’t all bad. The wait to download the game was long, 120 minutes and 15 seconds to be exact, but I was happy to wait, so I left my computer and came back later to find counter strike ready to play.
First of all the new launcher was a little slow, but that was fixed when I changed the colours to 32bit, the new GUI looks great (it is also very easy to get used to ) it’s certainly a step forward from the current and outdated launcher.
All I wanted to do was test the beta, so I clicked on create server and boy did it take its time, about 20 minutes, not only that it kept freezing up on me, I had to continually press ctrl+alt+delete (every time it froze) then press switch to, which would ‘unfreeze’ it for awhile, then it would freeze again then the cycle started again until the game loaded.
Once in the game I didn’t have any trouble at all, some differences I noticed straight away were that the in-game VGUI has change a little (ever so slightly) all that’s different is the text looks a little different nothing else.
The smoke grenade has changed the way it disperses the smoke, you throw it.... it lands, smoke begins to billow out but then the grenade flips over and lands somewhere else and spits little amounts of smoke out at a time, it looks really cool .
The new weapons are, well lets say there are ok, firstly the Galil, the skin isn’t all that good and the sounds are terrible, the Famas looks better than the Galil but the sounds are terrible as well.
The Ballistics Shield is great though, you can have either a knife or a pistol out with it, the only thing I didn’t like is that if I put the silencer on the USP then take out the shield the USP didn’t have the silencer on it anymore, other than that I really like the shield.
The new map de_airstrip is a welcome change to the other maps in counter strike, I think it will play well and the textures are great, I noticed a few errors but I am sure that they will be fixed for the final release.
The new Aztec looks great, there are a few minor changes but the layout is the same and it has a updated texture set which replaces some textures to make it look quite better,
Inferno hasn’t changed much at all either, it has a brand new texture set and has undergone a few minor changes, and what looked like to me, new lighting.
I am still yet to play the game seriously, but when I do I will take plenty of screenshots, for now here a few I made while testing.