Game:

Counter-Strike: Source (2004)

Duration: 6:48

21,106 views

82

One of the biggest updates to the game since Pokémon Puzzle League came out was the addition of a four-player versus mode. You can play versus garbage battle, versus score attack, and even versus stage clear...but with four players at once!

First of all, I really had to play a bunch of matches to get a decently short garbage battle mode...things last for a frightfully long time and this makes the focus not to "beat" your opponents so much as it is to outlast them. Interestingly enough, you can still send garbage after you've lost and it will still fall on other people's stacks, but you yourself will no longer receive it. I just wish the match that ended up being short enough to include in this video wasn't the one where I lost first. Usually I at least make third place.

Score attack is the same as the single-player variant, you get two minutes (as I explained in the other video, it's actually ten seconds longer per "minute" of game time, though) to make as much score as you possibly can and then the player with the highest score is the winner. Needless to say, I'm rusty enough as it is without the computer needing to make me look bad...the AI's swap speed is good enough that there's no way a human could match it...and I'm not good enough at "out-thinking" the computer as to how best to utilize chain bonuses to even think about beating it. I'd also like to point out that there's no real benefit in doing this here with computers...if it's just me, I'd get the same result from the regular Score Attack, but it's a real mode that you can play if you've got people to play with.

The final mode is Stage Clear, wherein you just need to whittle down your stack beyond a predetermined line and then you win. The computer absolutely sucks at it, though...but not because it suddenly starts getting any worse at the game. You'll see why it doesn't pay to have the blinders on like the computer does when it just goes nuts on the stack and gets all those chains lined up like they're nothing. So yeah, I actually get to win a match type! Stage Clear is definitely the quickest match type.

So besides the modes I've already recorded videos of, there are Stage Clear mode and Puzzle mode. I don't think I can really cover much about Stage Clear, though...it's pretty much the same as the last battle you just saw there, but it's thirty stages of that on progressively higher speeds and two points where Sanatos will interrupt you and force you to "fight" him by moving you to a high-speed stage where your goal is to use combos and chains to reduce his life meter to zero. Puzzle isn't really a great mode for show-and-tell, because it's like any other puzzle that you want to solve, not watch somebody else solve...so I don't really know if there's anything that can be done about that.

I'll be moving on to either Dr. Mario or Yoshi's Cookie soon, but I must warn you that I'm worse at either of those than I am at Panel de Pon, if you can believe a crazy notion like that. I might play Yoshi's Cookie for the simple reason that I've not played it in longer than I have Dr. Mario.

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