In honour of the recent announcement that a new Counter-Strike game is in development, I thought I'd take the time to do a short look-back on the franchise, starting with the first entry in the series, simply titled Counter-Strike.
Counter-Strike began life as a community made mod for Half-Life in 1999. It quickly became quite popular, to the point that Valve took notice of the mod themselves. They ended up ultimately buying it and improving upon what was already there, releasing the game under the name “Counter-Strike 1.6”. This is the version that many people still play to this day, which is a testament to just how well the game was designed, and ultimately this is what boosted Counter-Strike right up there, what gave the series a name and style all its own.
I have never played the original mod, and I'm not even sure if it's still available anymore. I would imagine not, seeing as how it's really a retail game now that one can buy on Steam, a service run by Valve itself. So, I'm going to spend some time talking about Counter-Strike 1.6 in this look-back.
Counter-Strike 1.6 balances what some might call realism with that whole arcadey, fast-paced, shoot-em-up kind of action. You still run fairly quickly, and the game is very similar to games such as Quake in this regard. Running around and jumping frequently will definitely keep enemy bullets from hitting you, unlike in the newer Call of Duty or Battlefield franchises. However, when a bullet hits you, you'll slow down and you won't be able to jump as high for a sort period of time. It only takes a few bullets to end your life entirely, even if you're wearing body armour, and once you're down, you won't even be able to respawn until the next round. It added a lot of tension to the experience, and it ensured that players would act as a team. Anyone who tried to go it alone without some sort of backup was a goner for sure.
For every kill that you scored, you would be awarded a short amount of money. The same goes for every round you win, in which case around $1500 is given to everyone in your team. This money can be used to purchase various kinds of weaponry, ranging from simple pistols to explosives and booming machine guns such as the AK-47. The weaponry is quite varied, and each weapon has pros and cons attached to it, but if you just stuck with buying the most expensive stuff, you usually got the best weapons available to you. One thing that I never really understood, however, was why you had to buy ammunition for your primary and secondary weapons separately. Granted, it's not a huge issue, but sometimes I would find myself purchasing a massive, one-shot-kill, super-accurate sniper rifle for myself, only to realize I didn't have enough money for ammunition. So, I was stuck running around with 5 bullets for my sniper rifle and a pistol with 25. Luckily, this problem was solved with later iterations into the series.
There are two teams in Counter-Strike; the Counter-Terrorists and the Terrorists. It's the Terrorists' job to, depending on the map you're playing on, either stop the Counter-Terrorists from rescuing the hostages or from defusing a bomb. In some cases, you also had to plant a bomb yourself. However, since you don't respawn until the next round upon dying, the rounds also have a sort of elimination aspect to them. If the CTs wipe out the Terrorists before time runs out, they win, and vice versa. It was tense and satisfying, and is still fun to this day.
Counter-Strike is an awesome game that spawned an epic series, so far with three great instalments. If you haven't already, I recommend you pick it up, and if you do, add me on Steam. My account name is the same as my Blogger name.
This has been a look-back on Counter-Strike 1.6, provided to you by Daniel “Fiftybottles” Brackenbury.
The video version has been cancelled. Counter-Strike hates me...
