Counter-Strike: Source gets bots, de_tides remake

Valve has updated Counter-Strike: Source with AI-controlled bots and a version of de_tides reworked by Turtlerock Studios, giving us yet another reason not to right-click and whack 'Exit' when the inescapable Steam app pops up in the morning.

The bots, first of all, aren't just better at playing Counter-Strike and understanding various situations (firing at breakable windows before they reach them to keep up pace, lobbing grenades into choke points at the right time, etc) but have also been designed to better reflect the behaviour of the average CS player. If you happen into their line of sight they will probably see you, but if you're stationary and some distance away, they might not, and that varies. In other words, their performance, though it rests at a certain level of overall skill, is just as unpredictable as yours or mine.

That's the theory, anyway. Your mileage may vary. You can read Valve's summary of their various adopted idiosyncrasies on this CS: Source bots page on the Steam website.

In addition to that and the reworked de_tides (pictured), the latest CS: Source update also fixes a couple of minor issues in de_cbble and cs_office, and adds a version of de_dust2 with support for up to 40 players.

It also throws in a few bug-fixes, so you can't now throw two flashbangs at once or start with double the money at the start of a round (how come these sorts of things never happen to us? We only ever seem to lose money, and if that grenade thing ever happened to us we'd just wind up blinding ourselves twice).

Finally, the game will auto-kick players for killing hostages gratuitously or standing idle for a long time and upsetting things, which we're guessing it didn't manage particularly well in the past.