Red’s Corner is a bi-weekly column by Paul "ReDeYe" Chaloner released every other Thursday exclusively at Cadred.

Paul's last three columns can be read by clicking the following links:

It's Not Boring	21st May
France...	7th May
Silly Season	30th April

As you will know by now, I am a fairly balanced guy but every now and again something really irritates me and I just cant let it go. This week is no different and before I head off in to a another Redeye rant, let me just preface this with: I love Valve normally, they have produced fantastic games that I have derived a terrific amount of enjoyment from and despite paying what appear to be ridiculous prices for one or two of them, over time there is no doubt they have provided better value for money than a can of Tesco value beans.

Good, I got that bit out of the way, now I can move on to giving them a hard time. I have moaned about this before, but this time around I have an idea so bear with me.

This isn’t something that just happened last night or even over the last 14 days, its just a manifestation of annoyance that has been building since the last Counter Strike Source update in 1834. Alright I exaggerate, but it’s been far too long, especially when other games, some even older than Source, have been given updates.

It’s not just a lack of updates (important ones too) that has my goat. The recent announcement of Left4Dead 2 has also annoyed me. EXCUSE ME VALVE but Christ on a bike, how about going back to sort out the bloody mess in the other games first? And in any case, from the early reports, it seems they basically want to rip up all the successful stuff from L4D and make a new game with zombies. Awesome. Not.

Left 4 Dead 2... Should This really be ready for release before other games are fixed and updated?

I get that a game has to be a commercial success first, but lets be honest, most great games are, not by coincidence, also hugely successful flying out of the high street stores or the virtual delivery systems we now use. Thus it usually leads to a follow up to “cash in” and I don’t mind Valve making money, I really don’t, but this soon? Less than a year after the first one? How about fixing the many things wrong with the game in the first place? And while we are at it, why mess with the really good things that L4D gave us? Ah yes, because that worked so well when Counter Strike Source was released…

There is a valid argument in that CS:S wasn’t Counter Strike 2, but the point still stands. Things were changed, weapon spray altered, recoil played with and don’t even get me started on the flaming hit boxes. Yet, annoyingly it takes some random dude no one has ever heard of to fix a bug which has been in 1.6 for errr about 6 years. On top of that, he managed to solve the issue in the time it takes to smoke a cigarette. Actually, he figured it out whilst smoking one…

So if it is that easy, why not let a few of the new bods at Valve have some homework and let them loose on fixing the issues with CS:S? I mean, its arguable I guess on some of the issues, but for example if bunny hopping is a “mistake” of the physics Valve used in the game, then sort it out. How about removing the ability to crouch bug? But more than anything else, what really annoys me is that my friend runs CS:S faster than I do on an old Athlon fx57 and why? Because my quad core is actually slightly slower on the clock scale and CS:S still doesn’t use all 4 cores. I’m not a programmer or a software engineer but surely if you already made your latest games (L4D) and some of the older ones (TF2) multi core compatible, you can do the same for CS:S? It’s not much to ask to keep a ton of fans happy and might even stop the inevitable CS2 questions which are starting to happen more often.

Actually don’t even get me started on CS2. If history teaches us anything about Valve (and if I am totally honest, other producers like id software and Epic) its that sequels generally don’t work, split the communities in to even smaller bases and divide further not bring together. I was fortunate to be there on the day id showed Quake 4 to the world at Quakecon in 2005 and even managed to sneak a few videos of it in action on to the net without being arrested. At the time, dual players really wanted to play each other in the same game and compete for top honours at ESWC and WCG and Quakecon too. To do this however, a game had to appeal to an extraordinarily wide audience. Quake 4 excited them and me tremendously.

Some of the names Quake 4 unified

Initially and with some help along the way, Quake 4 did exactly this, despite being far from a good game when it was released. It attracted the very best from previous Quake iterations such as Cooller and Toxic and Fox from Q3, Fatal1ty, Vo0, Stermy and Ztrider from Painkiller, Purri from Q2, Lauke and Gitzz from Unreal Tournament and Rocketboy (who was still playing doom3 of all things). It also attracted a huge amount of players from those scenes, some of whom were new stars on the block like Cypher and Av3k. Sadly, the game didn’t live up to the expected standard and whilst Raven were mainly to blame for the poor release and id fixed almost everything by the time 1.4 was released 18 months later, it wasn’t enough to save the scene and everyone went back to obscurity or Q3. Only now, almost 2 years on are players starting to return for QuakeLive.

The lessons are clear. If you are going to release a follow up to what is a massive e-sports game already, listen to the community and give them what they want first and the sales will follow anyway. Good games sell anyway. Why is it so hard to get that right? id software are now doing exactly that with QuakeLive and it will be a trail blazer of sorts for my theory on whether a game can be a commercial success and a great e-sports game, all be it under a very different profit gaining guise from shop sales.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Valve kicking. I don’t mind that TF2 gets regular and let’s face it, brilliant updates, complete with humorous postings. I don’t really mind that L4D gets a sequel (if only they wouldn’t mess with what already works) and I don’t even mind if we don’t get CS2 (for the reasons mentioned above about follow ups and lets face it, its already hard with the CS community split in two already, three if you count CZ). All I really want is the updates to CS:S.

Of course, if you are a Call of Duty fan, you can laugh at this heartily. You don’t have to put up with this kind of thing as you get a new game pretty much every year anyway. I don’t know what is worse actually. The odd thing about the COD community is that generally, as long as the new game supports competitive gameplay and is available on the PC, they will adopt it en mass. They seem less worried about moving on from a game they enjoy to a new one that offers new challenges, bugs and potential to not play as well as they did before. Why cant CS players be like that? Fragile egos? Perhaps, but mostly its because they love the game they play and nothing else offers anything close to it, despite sharing a name.

My beloved Lada Riva

I challenge you to find a player from 1.6 who wouldn’t love to have better graphics as long as nothing else changed. No, seriously, be honest, it looks like crap. It’s the PC equivalent of a Lada Riva when everyone else is driving around in Ferrari’s (all be it with only one engine not 4 – damn you valve). Although the outside looks like crap, under the hood (continuing the car theme, stay with me) it does have a fantastic engine which works just the way it should. But even so, would you prefer to be seen in the Lada or the Ferrari? God help us if Valve ever make cars.

So there it is, a(nother) moan at Valve. They do make some fantastic games and Steam is now at the point where it doesn’t fail like it used to and actually seems to be something I don’t mind using any more. In fact, for the impulsive buyer in me, it’s a real drain on the bank account, but an excellent delivery of content when I want it. Certainly beats driving down to the shop in my Lada.

But they seriously need to listen to their customers a bit more and whilst I accept they won’t make much money from updating CS:S it would make a lot of us very happy indeed and you cant buy that kind of feeling from customers. No amount of follow up games is going to make me happier than the update we need for CS:S. Then again, patch up CS:S, at least for multi core support and everyone on Cadred will go and buy “The Graveyard” just so that a few pennies head off to Valve, deal?

Begging hasn’t worked, let’s see if bribery does.