The Things I Hate About Steam and CS 1.6!

This article is quite lengthy and I hope you read the whole thing. If not, ur a noob :-p!

Straight off the bat, I'll tell you that I don't like Steam. In principle it has its good and bad points. In principle it may open all kinds of doors for the gamer, but it closes all kinds of doors too. If Valve gave the option of Steam-delivered content or the delivery of content via legacy means, then that would go some way to resolving some of the issues I have with Steam. I want more control over how Mods make their way onto my system. I want to download them the way I've come to know and love. I want to install them the way I always have. Steam, when it is finalized, will deny me that freedom. Steam denies me that now with CS 1.6. I don't want to "live" in a Nanny State.

Secondly, I don't want to log into Steam whenever I wish to tweak my CS or HL, or DoD or NS settings. I want to bypass as much of Steam as possible when I don't intend to play online; when I'm taking the LAN route. I know Valve will resolve this issue 'shortly', but time is relative, and Valve's definition of 'shortly' is akin to the knowledge that mankind has only inhabited Earth for a 'short' period of time compared to the age of the planet.

Thirdly (and related to my first issue), upon installing Steam it tells me that I have 'n' many weeks or months of free subscription. Once this period of time runs out then I'll be on my own, unless I decide to exercise Mr. Visa or Mrs. Mastercard. Now I wouldn't have a problem with that if I cared in the slightest for acquiring full commercial offerings from Valve by way of Steam, but I couldn't care less about buying Half-Life 2 or Counter-Strike: Condition Will-Never-Be-Released directly from Valve. If I want either of those packages then I'll buy them from the local game store, the way I've done so many times in the past. (At least that way, I'll feel as though I'm getting something physical for my money.) What I do care about, though, is getting hold of Mod updates once my subscription has run out. To me, it seems as though Valve intends to deny me this. Unless, of course, an out-of-date subscription won't restrict me in this way. But then, like I said at the outset, I'd like to download Mod updates the old fashioned way. Valve should respect this.

Now on to CS 1.6

I like it. I don't like it. I like it.

That's the way it has been with every previous release of CS. For the most part, it *has* been worth the wait. But there are issues with it that do need to be addressed ASAP.

First off, the walking walls of death - the Tactical Shield. What happens when the unstoppable force meets the immovable object? The immovable object wins every damn time. The shield is just too damn powerful. Sure, it counters the old ‘AWPwhoringshitgibbon’ issue, but it does it too well. (Come on lads, in the real-world a Tactical Shield would have a hard time stopping a few pops of a Desert Eagle, let alone an AWP). Valve should have resolved this in the beta stage. Every game I've played of CS 1.6 to date has been hampered by the TS. Every game. How many times will I have to sit back and watch one CT, or T, with a Desert Eagle and a TS take on and beat 3 tangos' wielding AKs or Colts? The TS should stop the weaker 9mm parabellum-round weapons and shotties in there tracks, but a deagle or above will likely just punch straight through, and the AKs, Colts, Augs, Scouts, AWPs, blah-blah of this world? Ask your local S.W.A.T. member if he'd go up against a Colt M4 spitting out 5.56x45mm death with only Kevlar and a TS. He wouldn't. In short, the TS should be downgraded ASAP and treated like nothing more than wide-angle Kevlar.

Clock cycles. Even when idle, CS 1.6 uses more clock cycles than 1.5. Why?

Silly gun names. Sure, this can be fixed just as long as you're not using the VGUI, but it should be circumvent able even when using the VGUI.

The CS 1.6 bots should be available now. Not tomorrow, or the day after, or the week after Hell freezes over. It can take a fare while to get used to the changes in CS 1.6. Folks' should be allowed to practice offline, with bots

r_drawviewmodel 0. What a bummer! Oh, I can understand why it was disabled. After all, if you're running around with a TS your field of view is restricted. If we could turn hand-helds off then that valid restriction would be circumvent able. But Valve could has solved this issue with a simple Boolean test. Want the psuedo-code Valve? It'd go something like...! If r_drawviewmodel is 0 and active_weapon is tactical_shield then set r_drawviewmodel to 1. If r_drawviewmodel was 0 and active_weapon is not tactical_shield then set r_drawviewmodel to 0. It'll admit that it's a little bit more complicated than commenting out the code that supports the r_drawviewmodel console command, but it would have taken a couple of minutes at the most to make the desired changes

And how we get to headshots. Is CS 1.6 meant to be the Headshot Edition or something?! Has Valve screwed up with the hitboxes? It seems as though every other kill on the 1.6 servers is a headshot kill - and it doesn't matter whether your an expert aim or a flinching noob. There's something seriously wrong here and if it isn't fixed then it won't go down well with the die-hards.

6 issues in CS 1.6 that should have been resolved while it was still at the beta stage. But still only real issues, which isn't bad going. The only problem is how long will it take before those 6 issues are resolved? And will we have to subscribe to Steam before we can download the update? I dread to think...