Go ahead, update your Steam client. You’ll see that they’ve finally launched their Xbox Live-style (and 1920s style) community system. In addition to friends they have a whole bunch of public and private groups available. I’ve taken the liberty of creating an SDMB one.
Join up! You can see details here:
In related news, I pre-ordered the Orange Box through Steam. Apparently, pre-orderers will get to play the Team Fortress 2 beta starting Sept 17th!
PC Gamers Rejoice/Unite!
Steam service is jammed at the moment, probably from everyone just hearing about this update.
Any Dopers check it out?
Haven’t yet, but I’m going to. Thanks for making the group! Hopefully more people will join.
I love Valve’s games, but I’m not all that good against other people in (most) FPS games and the assholes you often run across in online gaming tend to put me off sticking around long enough to get good. I could use a group of people to play with who aren’t jerks all the time.
Right on! We had some Doper-centric Counter Strike games running at one point in the past – Senor Beef was hosting a server for some time. It was tough to get everyone coordinated, though. The new Steam Community should help.
I’m in - I used to hang out at the Doper CS server a while before I registered on the site, it was a lot of fun.
(YAY TEAMFORTRESS 2, tec)
Member #3!
Howdy. 
I’d be up for some CS:S at some point, so I hope you enjoy kicking my ass.
I’ll be the one whose ass is being kicked by Revenant. I’ll update tonight / over the weekend.
I usually play Red Orchestra on Steam, or sometimes The Ship, if I don’t want to work too hard. I never played Half-Life 2 or CS. For some reason those games are really dark on my monitor, no matter how much I turn up the ‘gamma’ in game, some parts are just a black screen.
I’ve not got Red Orchestra, but i’ve heard good things about it; any comments?
I’ve got Hidden:Source, which is excellent (and the one game i’m actually good at, assuming i’m not the Hidden). SourceForts i’m still trying to learn and keep out of the way of the actual good players. There’s a lot of nice mods up on Steam, really, so I guess i’m wary of actually parting with my money for more stuff.
OK I just joined. I’ve owned Counter Strike for over a year when I bought HL2 Game of the Year edition and I’ve never even activated it. I wouldn’t mind giving it a try sometime.
Betcha you’ll still kick my arse. If it weren’t for dumb-luck kills (oh look, he only has 2 health left, he’s reloading, and his back is to me), I’d never have any kills.
We all just suck. But the point is that when we play together, it’s actually quite fun. I was pretty decent during the early years of the original CS in college. But now a days I can’t keep up with your generic internet server with gaming kids who’ve been playing it non-stop ever since.
Day of Defeat: Source is fun too.
I joined though when I check my profile it says I don’t belong to any groups but when I click on SDMB group it says I belong. Oh well I guess I’ll sort it out.
edit: ps I suck as well. I don’t play online because I’m only good at games when I can exploit the A.I. Though I’d give a doper shootout a try.
For those interested in improving their CS:S skills, try one of the servers running the Deathmatch mod. As the name implies, it’s instant and random respawn, and generally absolute chaos. I normally prefer the slow, measured realism of the normal CS rounds, but with the Deathmatch you get killed a lot and lots of chances for kills. It can really improve your reaction time and quick aiming skills. After a while you start to lose the “Oh my god there’s an enemy…oh shit…panic…now I’m spraying bullets all over his head, but none seem to be hitting.” Short accurate bursts, that’s what’s needed.
The Deathmatch server I’ve been playing on is at 74.52.229.164:27015, but there are others. This particular server rotates between standard and custom maps.
I’m late to the game, I just fixed the OS that steam was installed on, so I can start playing again.
I host small game servers occasionally - not a big, fast, dedicated server like I used to have, but more than adequate for 4-8 people - I fixed the problem I was having that used to cause my server to lag up occasionally when I ran an SDMB server for “the ship” free weekends.
But if you see me online on a locked server, I’ll start setting the password to “SDMB” so you can join us. When I run a server, it’s usually HL2DM. I’m usually not a fan of deathmatch games at all, but I love HL2DM - probably because it’s slower paced, you don’t have to run around hopping on jumping pads or bunny hop ike an idiot - and because the physics system makes it more fun.
In fact, with the “events” system in the community, perhaps we could start scheduling some SDMB games. I can do CS, HL2DM, and Defcon… other HL2 mods if there was interest.
I have problems with this too - old monitor starting to fade. What you can generally do is go into your graphics card options - for NVIDIA cards you right click on your desktop, go to properties, settings, advanced, then the tab that has the name of your graphics card, additional properties, color correction. From there you can select your gamma or brightness and turn it up more than you can in game. I would imagine the procedure is similar for non-nvidia cards but I don’t know.
The web address to our community, by the way, is Steam Community :: Group :: Straight Dope Message Board
Yeah I was wondering when you were going to join up, Senor. I know you’ve expressed disdain at it in other threads, but Team Fortress 2 is an insane amount of fun. I’d love to get a Doper TF2 game going. Or at least Doper-seeded as we did with CS:S a while back.
I have joined the SDMB group. I’m likewise eh about FPS games, but with intelligent people I’m willing to give it a shot. I very creatively used my email address :rolleyes: , watership.
I joined. Thanks for setting it up Jayrot.
I occasionally play CS:Source, but I’m still a fan of good ol’ 1.6.
I’m going to be start a HL2DM server soon with a friend of mine who played the old SDMB games with us. If anyone wants to join, go to the straightdope community page, click “View current status of all members”, then click join next to my name.