By: Andy ‘Fro’ Popkin
(This is an editorial piece. The opinions in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of compLexity Gaming or its parent company.)
It’s been a while folks. Not much too really talk about gaming wise, plus life has been busy. I am 
now the proud owner of nemo and dory, along with two other fish. Anyway, figured I’d write a little sumthin for y’all.
With the ESL Masters thing over there in Germany going on, and the USA teams getting their shit pushed in, is North America ready to get back into the international gaming scene just yet? Honestly I expected the teams to get shelled, but not THAT bad. Sure our players are sort of rusty and just got finished with the whole CGS/Source thing, but still… gotta have some sort of skills left over from the 1.6 days. The main thing I have heard our team talk about is just relearning the angles and basic map play, because 2.5 years of circle jerking on Source made them forget it all.
Like I mentioned in an earlier article about the US LAN scene vs. the Euro scene, ours pulled into the train station for a while as the Euro’s took a trip on the autobahn. Sure, our online matches are sorta competitive, but that’s freakin online. It counts for nothing unless you can do the same thing on LAN. EG played x3o and it was 16-14, after that I don’t think any other wins came for a US team in group play. Pretty sad when you think about it. CGS basically set US gaming back a good bit. Not to say that we won’t ever come back, but it won’t be for a while.
With the Kode5 U.S. thing coming up this week, I know one person who is really excited. Rather 5. My boy jdeaG couldn’t stop talking today about Kode5 and how many pugs he wanted to play just 
so he could play CS. I’m sure most of the USA teams are like this right now considering this is the first real showdown of the newly formed squads. They are all so focused on this event, that it almost seems like a CPL. I am not going to make any predictions, because lately the online matches have been going either way. But I got a feeling that the new coL.cs lineup might go pretty far on LAN. Ping is a killer, and we will see if that holds true. EG will be tough to beat, along with a few others, but there is some(“1”)one on our team that’s looking for revenge. Only time will tell.
So to get back to my article topic, are we really ready to face the guys from across the pond just yet. Or are we looking to get beat like a red headed stepchild (lol S0ck). Yeah it’s good practice, but fuck spending all that money to go over there just to get the shit kicked out of you. I think when it comes to the end of the year, if there is any money left in our global economy to run a LAN, the North American teams will be ready for some decent 1.6 action. Weee readdyyy, weee readyyy, weee ready for yalllll – petey pablo.
