By Joshua Wolens

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The best FPS games on PC

At long last and ‘with gracious permission from Valve,’ Garry’s Mod now contains ‘most of Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life 2 Episodic content’ even if you don’t own those games

Gaming Industry
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Half-Life 2 just got a patch that fixes a progress-blocking teleporter bug and makes a train easier to race

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Here’s a mod that puts Halo’s multiplayer into Half-Life, which to me feels like putting tea in your coffee

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Bigger guns are louder and therefore riskier as of Rust’s latest update, with other players able to hear you from ‘much further away’

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Counter-Strike 2

Rejoice, Counter-Strike’s grenades now sound crisp and clear as a chorus of angels—plus subtick shooting is either better or the fanbase is experiencing a shared delusion

Joshua Wolens

17 September 2025

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(Image credit: Valve)

If there’s one thing, one single thing, that’s stopped me from going pro in Counter-Strike 2 all these years, it’s the audio on those grenades—fuzzy and low-fi, like it was recorded by the Elephant Six Collective. Atrocious mids, swampy highs, lows with the callous insouciance of a neglectful husband*. I refuse to subject my ears to that.

Well, now I won’t have to, and my CS2 career can finally bloom. In an update earlier today, Valve announced that the game’s ‘nades are almost irresponsibly hi-fi. They “now have unique higher-fidelity sounds for draw, inspect, pin-pull, and throw.” Our long national nightmare is over.
Also, other things, but I fail to see how they compare in significance to our new crystalline ‘nades. Most promising, I think, is the addition of cs_script, “a JavaScript based scripting system for Counter-Strike maps” that can now be used by community mapmakers.

Related Articles

The best FPS games on PC

At long last and ‘with gracious permission from Valve,’ Garry’s Mod now contains ‘most of Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life 2 Episodic content’ even if you don’t own those games

This month 25 years ago in PC gaming, our biggest concerns were pro gaming, moral panics about violent games… and we still thought Halo was a PC exclusive

This opens the door to a whole bunch of buckwild possibilities, like community-made custom CS2 game modes (you can see an example of the scripting language in action in this X post from Gabe Follower).

That aside, you can now peer at other players’ loadouts while spectating, there’s a new Genesis Collection of 17 skins—a fresh injection of stuff for the game’s eternally absurd skin market.

(Image credit: Valve)
Oh, and there are “various improvements to subtick shooting consistency,” which has either been a huge improvement or caused an outbreak of collective psychosis among the CS2 fanbase.
By which I mean, it’s easy to find players reporting back these improvements have entailed better hit registration for their guns in games, but very few of them are giving hard numbers. Without someone actually taking the time and tools to measure these perceived improvements, it could all be a case of the placebo effect. Still, hopefully it really has made the game feel better and we’re not all delirious.

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*Just for clarity, I don’t know what any of this means.

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Joshua Wolens

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News Writer

One of Josh’s first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he’s been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He’ll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin’s Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you’re all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

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The best FPS games on PC

At long last and ‘with gracious permission from Valve,’ Garry’s Mod now contains ‘most of Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life 2 Episodic content’ even if you don’t own those games

This month 25 years ago in PC gaming, our biggest concerns were pro gaming, moral panics about violent games… and we still thought Halo was a PC exclusive

After 15 years of busted marksdwarves, Dwarf Fortress creator Tarn Adams says archers will finally refill their ammo ‘instead of leaping over walls and clubbing people with their crossbows’

Our favorite 1v1 FPS just became our favorite 2v2 FPS, and you can still play it for the low price of free

Half-Life 2 just got a patch that fixes a progress-blocking teleporter bug and makes a train easier to race

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