Counter-Strike v1.0 released

The continued labelling of each new version of the insanely popular Half-Life mod "Counter-Strike" as a beta (it eventually reached beta 7.1) has been something of a running joke over the last year, but in what must surely be a sign of an impending apocalypse of truly Biblical proportions, the team behind the mod has finally released the long-awaited Counter-Strike v1.0. This latest version adds three more weapons (including the lovely looking "H&K UMP .45"), along with new improved player models taking advantage of the model blending technology introduced by Half-Life developers Valve.

Meanwhile the stand-alone "Half-Life : Counter-Strike", as well as Sierra's latest cash-in "Half-Life : Platinum Edition", are now complete and should be showing up in stores before long. If you already own "Half-Life" though, there is little point in buying Counter-Strike - the retail version doesn't include anything that isn't in the free downloadable version, and according to reports on the newly relaunched OGA website the names of all of the guns have been replaced with imaginary names in the retail version to avoid any possible copyright infringement issues. You can grab the free uncut version of the mod (weighing in at just shy of 90Mb) from the Counter-Strike website.