[NewsPoster]

Valve has released Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, a long-awaited update to its multiplayer first-person shooter. The game is available through Steam, and marks just the second time that Valve itself has done a simultaneous Mac/Windows launch through the service. In the past couple of years Valve has turned more attention to Mac support for both first- and third-party releases, compensating for the fact that most Steam content is otherwise Windows-centric.

Rather than serving as a full sequel, Global Offensive presents a graphical overhaul, along with an assortment of new maps, characters, and weapons. It also introduces some new gameplay modes, as well as leaderboards and matchmaking functions. The game costs $15; on a Mac players must have at least a 2GHz Intel processor, 2GB of RAM, and ATI Radeon HD 2400 or NVIDIA GeForce 8600M graphics.

[Grendelmon]

I'm really starting to like Valve. Not only are they creating native ports of some good games on the Mac (Left 4 Dead 2, etc), they've committed to the Linux platform now, which should be available in the next year or so.