So Ritual & Valve are showing off Counter-Strike: Condition Zero at the CPL Winter event in Dallas. But what about all of you who aren't attending? Don't you get to see the game? Oh yes you do. Because FileShack is now hosting a new video showing about a minute of ingame footage. That's not all, we also have two new screenshots to go along with these shots that were previously released. Expect to see Counter-Strike: Condition Zero in Spring 2003.

You can also check out this new preview on GameSpot.

The CPL today announced their workshop schedule for the upcoming CPL Winter event, which shows some interesting information about Condition Zero. This single-player Counter-Strike will be shown at a workshop, but who is hosting this workshop? Ritual Entertainment, and not Gearbox Software. Through various sources we learned that Ritual (also working on Elite Force 2) took over development of the game back in August. It's not known if they started from scratch or are working with the content build by Gearbox. Randy Pitchford & Co will still be at the CPL, showing the PC port of Halo. Ritual is actually the third company to work on Condition Zero, as Rogue Entertainment briefly worked on it as well before Gearbox took over.

Update: Valve sends along confirmation that Ritual Entertainment is indeed the new developer for Condition Zero.

Counter-Strike: Condition Zero Development Moves to Ritual
The primary development of Counter-Strike: Condition Zero (CS:CZ) has moved to Ritual Entertainment. Counter-Strike: Condition Zero introduces single player gaming to the world's #1 online action game. Representatives from Ritual and Valve will be presenting the latest on CS:CZ during a seminar at the The CPL's upcoming Counter-Strike Championships in Dallas, Texas.

In addition to the quote from Valve Software, we have gotten this from Gearbox's Randy Pitchford:

Gearbox Software suspended development of Counter-Strike: Condition Zero in July of 2002. Counter-Strike: Condition Zero introduces single player gaming to the world's #1 online action game. Valve Software has overseen development since July. Gearbox is aware of and endorses Ritual Entertainment's involvement. After developing several Half-Life games, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 and James Bond 007: Nightfire, Gearbox Software is refocusing its efforts on future technology and more interesting and innovative game play. Gearbox Software will be discussing Halo: Combat Evolved for the PC and our vision for the future of interactive entertainment at The CPL's December 2002 event in Dallas, Texas.

The Adrenaline Vault has a Q&A with Intel about the Pentium 4 3.06Ghz CPU, which will power machines at the CPL Winter event. In between questions about CPL sponsorship (AVault and the CPL belong to the same parent company) Intel's Gabe Achanzar tells us what 3.06Ghz adds for gaming, Hyper-Threading tech, the need for a new power supply, and other new features.

Unreality posted news about this thread on the official Unreal Tournament 2003 forums, where Epic's Dr Sin mentions Epic is looking at making a Pro version of Unreal Tournament 2003. This Pro version would be for money tournaments such as the CPL events, where only certain settings can be changed. Epic is asking people what options should be in the GUI that aren't already in there.

Officially making it the worst place in the world to be a gamer (worse than censorship-laden Germany, apparently), Greece recently passed a law making it illegal to have an "electronic game" in either public or private places. This includes PC games, arcade games, console games, handheld games and even cell phone games, and the penalties are a fine of 5,000 to 75,000 euros and imprisonment of one to 12 months if caught. Why was this passed? Apparently to discourage gambling. The ZDNet UK article points out that this puts a halt to the planned CPL qualifying event, and Blue's News posted a link to this petition where people can express their outrage over the law.

A fourth Unreal Tournament 2003 IRC chat log is up, offering more Q&As with Epic's Mark Rein who was anwering questions out of England (where he is to demonstrate UT2003 at ECTS). They ask him about the performance we can expect using a system similar to the specs they released yesterday, of course the demo is also mentioned, the fact that the CPL will need this game done early October for use during their Winter championships and a whole lot more.

Well here is something that will certainly boggle a few people. The CPL which plays host to the largest Counter-Strike LAN tournaments in North America as well as the CAL which every competitive Counter-Strike player is aware of is making a pretty major change. A new requirement for all teams who wish to compete in CPL LAN tournaments is that they either be incorporated or have a corporate sponsor according to AVault and the new policy page. The purpose of this being to expedite payments to the winning teams

"We believe this policy will initiate a significant change within the entire eSports industry that will give teams with defined corporate structures a better chance to receive sponsorships and enter into partnerships with other organizations," said Munoz. He added that the CPL also thinks the policy change might curtail the current trend of transitory teams.

Setting up a corporate account is surprisingly trivial, there are even online places you can do this at. I imagine most teams who dont have corporate sponsors will just go with an LP since there arent really many liability concerns I imagine. Of course, if you dont play Counter-Strike then you probably dont care.. then leave this thread alone. :)

Brief Unreal Tournament 2003 impressions is up at the Adrenaline Vault, based on what they saw at the CPL Pentium 4 event where the game is being shown. Thanks HomeLAN Fed.

Got an email from Valve announcing the fourth Half-Life Mod Expo. Unlike previous years, it won't be held in San Francisco but rather in Dallas, TX during the CPL Summer Event. The Mod Expo will take place Monday, July 22 from 8 PM to 10 PM. Teams who want to show off their modification need to email modexpo@valvesoftware.com.

Here's something you dont see every day. According to an article in Wired which has been confirmed by The CPL. The CPL has just finished up rounding up $45million in investments to fund their gaming league for tournaments and prizes.

Video games have reached a tipping point in the culture, with over 145 million people playing, said G4 Media CEO Charles Hirschhorn. "This is a lifestyle channel. The game community deserves a channel. There have been decades of great work ... and our goal is to complement the community."

Yeah, this ran on ShackES a couple days ago, but we generally dont cover CPL stuff here much anymore and I thought this was particularly worth a mention.

A little while back I pointed to a story on ShackES looking at the popularity of a few games and mods and the communities that surrounded them. The gist of it being two games of the same popularity levels online can yield some pretty different results for a lan tournament. Well it just got proven. CPL was offering up $25,000 in cash for teams who wished to participate in a Day of Defeat v2.0 tourney. The turnout was hardly anything and the DoD event just got canned. Of course the $100,000 Counter-Strike tourney is still on though.

So when you see and hear those things about different communities actually having different attitudes (when generalized) it looks like there is some truth to it. What's this mean? I dunno its 6.15am on a Sunday.

update: Man I was tired. That story I linked from earlier explained it better, didnt mean to imply that CS and DoD were equally as popular, since that obviously isnt the case.

An interesting phenomenon has been happening over at the CPL while organizing their upcoming summer event. They are giving away $100,000 cash for a Counter-Strike tournament which has a huge registration list that they actually even expanded, but they are having troubles filling up the secondary tournament as detailed at ShackES. The plan is for a Day of Defeat v2.0 tourney with $25,000 cash in prizes, but only 5 teams have signed up. Then there is the TFC tournament with only a single team signed up. Fruity. So I did some quick poking around gathering up stats the other day in terms of popularity

TIER 1 - Counter-Strike is huge, duh.
TIER 2 - UT, TFC , RTCW, Quake3, MoH, DoD
TIER 3 - TRIBES2, Quake2

If there was ever a doubt that different games attract different types of players within the same genre, here you go. TFC is neck and neck with RTCW and MoH in the tier2 group, yet only one clan is even signed up in a competitive lan tourney. Yet when other games at about the same size as TFC is now have fielded numerous large scale lan tourneys dedicated to those games. Then there is Day of Defeat, with a hefty $25,000 prize being dangled in front of everyone and only 5 teams sign up?

What does this mean? Different games attract different types of players, and it looks like the # of people playing a game isnt the only indication of how popular a tournament for that game would be.

I suppose an article like this is just bait for the nitwits to come out and insult people for having different tastes in games, so I'll break it to the folks who are tempted to extol the virtues of their game of choice while lambasting anyone who disagrees. You're a moron.

Something to read for the weekend, here's a Wired article on competitive gaming. Just to piss people off they chose to throw the word athlete in there.

People who want to attend the CPL Summer event can now sign up. The event, which will be held from July 20 until July 24 in Dallas, TX, costs $50 per person. The main tournament this year will be a Counter-Strike: Condition Zero one.

Matt has posted his own impressions of the recent CPL World Championship over on ShackES. He talks about all the things that the CPL does right, things they should improve and also offers his thoughts on Counter-Strike as the game of choice.

A four page CPL World Championship article is now available on CS Nation. The wrapup article comes with more pictures from the event along with quotes from those ran the event as well as the players.

Well look at this, according to ShackES a recent WCG tournament (Similar to the CPL) which featured about $300,000 in cash being given out last weekend made the front pages of several Taiwan newspapers. Not for giving money to computer geeks though, but because one of the winners waved what the Chinese government feels was the wrong flag. Here is some of the story lifted from Matt:

IamKmkm_tw, the Taiwanese winner of the Age of Empires 2 tournament at the World Cyber Games, has been harshly criticized by WCG for shouting "Taiwan number one!" and waving his country's flag at the award ceremony where he was awarded a gold medal for his sterling performance.  A Chinese reporter for the state-owned CCTV saw the action and complained to event organizers, who have since denounced the actions of the player, 17-year-old Tseng Jeng-cheng. China doesn't ever like to see the Taiwanese flag displayed and has exerted its world political influence to have it removed from the Olympic Games. Taiwan has been an independent country for 52 years but China believes Taiwan (aka the Republic of China, aka Chinese Taipei as it was called at WCG) is still a Chinese terroritory.

You can check out this story in the LATimes - "China's communist leaders believe that by displaying the flag, Taiwanese are asserting their independence" which I guess is a bad thing.

There are two very big game tournaments going on right now, the CPL World Championship Counter-Strike event, with $150,000 in cash prizes going out, as well as the WCG event with both Quake3 and Counter-Strike events (and a couple other games) sporting $300,000 in prizes. Matt over at ShackES is doing an excellent job with the coverage and there are demos available from both events available via the Shack/Speakeasy FTP of Death. Also, CPL sent word that in addition to upcoming ESPN coverage, they were just featured on CNN and a couple newspapers:

- CNN video (courtesy of Mindverge.tv)
- Dallas Morning News story
- Ft Worth Star Telegram story

Yeah, ShackES is hurting for the new layout :) As the layout here is just about finalized we'll be porting the design over there around the time we plug in the new servers.

The CPL site has an announcement from Speakeasy and Valve announcing that they have a PC Game Broadcast Network up and running to support 80,000 simultaneous viewers of a Half-Life game. Using the Half-Life TV server software, and Speakeasy's bandwidth everyone should be able to spectate during the games at the CPL World Championship event.

The Adrenaline Vault has posted an interview with Jess Cliffe of the Counter-Strike team. They talk about the CPL World Championship event, which has Counter-Strike as main game. Along with the Q&As come three new screenshots from Condition Zero, the single player Counter-Strike game in development at Gearbox.