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Counter-Strike - Condition Zero Finally Released
daitengu writes "After almost a year and a half of 'It'll be out soon', Valve Software has finally released Counter-Strike: Condition Zero. It is available on Steam for the low-low price of $29.95 or, rumor has it, you'll be able to buy it in stores today or tomorrow. Counter-Strike is the world's most popular online First Person shooter, and Condition Zero brings updated maps, skins, and graphics to the game, as well as a single-player mode. It also brings what some reviews have claimed as one of the best AI they've seen." The submitter continues: "If this game was released 9 months to a year ago like Valve was promising, I may have invested the $30 or $40 to buy it. Now, however, It's just not worth it to me." Does CS:CZ pique your interest at all?
I think I will probably wait until Half-Life 2 comes out. I just recently picked up Battlefield Vietnam, and I think it's going to tie me over for awhile as far as online fragging goes. Half-Life 2 on the other hand, will hopefully still be inovative when it comes out. But then again, at the rate their going, all the inovations in it might already be out in other games by the time it comes out. Hopefully it doesn't go the way of Daikatana and be too late or never come out like Duke Nukem Forever.
... and I'm still looking at axis-aligned rectangles and big unaligned textures.
CS, UT2003, UT2004, BF1942 and BF:Vietnam are all full of abusive, team killing, selfish morons who don't know how the play the game and appear to have a collective IQ lower than a squirrel's. The 'communities' in MMOGs are generally full of great people, but the number of repeadly abusive and purile kids is a number one thing that turns me off and had lead to me cancelling my subscription for MMOGs.
Just last night I was playing Battlefield Vietnam, which, apart from the retarded menu system, and a bug which causes you to die randomly and inexplicably when falling from short heights, is a very good game to actually play on line. At least in theory. I've been playing it for a few days, as an example of how thing go, I played two sessions each on different servers last night, this is how it went:
Server 1:
Had Team Killers runing up behind players and stabbing them firing rockets at them and generally runing the game. 3 of the players had negative kills scores, this later went up to 4 as a large number of people resorted to hunting and killing the TKers rather than playing the game (which is understandable, given how distruptive they were being). They would constantly log on and off and change names and teams so you wouldn't know if you could trust the person next to you not to turn round and kill you, or if the 'friendly' tank or helicopter instead of escorting you was going to suddenly open fire on you.
I eventually got fed up of this and found another server...
Server 2:
The player teams were constantly hugely uneaven, making victory impossible for the other team (given the nature of the game). At one point, it was 2 vrs 10 (after being like this for over a minute, that was the point I quit). I changed sides 8 times trying to keep it even, but moronic players would constantly join the server and pick the winning side, which ever side that was, it didn't matter to them, they would just pick that side making the game pointless for the already overwhelmed team. They would all refuse to change teams themselves, while asking each other to change.
So, I'd much rather play with bots and avoid the purile and abusive 'smack talk' from kids (who accuse you of 'cheating' and 'being a n00b' because you used a particular weapon to kill them with, and saying some weapons are, for whatever mystical reason 'out of bounds' and 'unfair').
Sadly, as has been already observed by other players, bots are pathetic and useless in all the EA Battlefield series. They don't understand the point of the game, don't capture points or hold them (instead drive right past them), can't drive vehicles or helicopers (they just crash them in to obstacles and run aircraft into the ground, for reasons not obvious). They also don't follow orders (dispite claims to the contrary by the blurb from EA) and are eager to take any and every vehicle going first, even though they will more than likely just drive it into a wall - or even an open space - and sit there in it (I've seen this on all difficulty levels). When playing with bots its always wise to shoot them first, then take the vehicle for yourself.
To make it even more frustrating, they don't seem to suffer from not being able to see you because your hidden in cover (I would guess they 'see' you reguardless due the the feeble 'AI'), which further ruins the atmosphere, given that a large part of this game relies on finding good cover.
Given this and the pathetically few number of levels in Battlefield Vietnam (made all the more repetative as many of them are just slightly different versions of other maps) I feel it's a rip off for what you are charged, and is worth no more than 20 USD/ 15 UKP for the content you get. It may have lots of new shiney shader effects (and it does look good and the gameplay is fun) but the shameful level of the bots and the few number of levels are appaling. This is epecially true given that in singe player games you'd have twice as many unique levels, with hand placed and well balanced enemies