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Counter-Strike
reviewed by Ben Parrish

You know when you go on Yahoo and they have that little box of top news stories on the right hand side so you can scan it and feel informed even though you really have no idea what the hell is going on? Well, I call that little box "The Box of Stuff That I Do Not Care About." And if you click on any of the links that box, it will bring you to an entire Page of Stuff That I Do Not Care About. Important, earth-shattering news stories with which any reasonable member of society should familiarize him or herself with, and stories which I have no interest in whatsoever. I've talked about this before, but I think it's important, before embarking on this review, to make it clear just how little I know about anything that's actually going on in life, either mine or yours.

So what do I care about? Well, as often and as strongly as I attempt to protest to the contrary, I'm a computer geek. And that means that what I care about, what I really care about, more than real life happenings, more than love, more than the well-being of my friends and family, is... beer. But besides that, what I care about is computer games. A sad state of affairs, you say? Perhaps, but then who is sadder, the computer geek, or the person reading in rapt fascination about him? Why, the former, of course, which pretty much proves your point, so forget I brought this up.

But anyway, computer games have been with me since I was five years old, whooping up on my father in a rousing game of Gunfight in the local arcade. And as there are moments in your own life which you will always remember, moments which serve as a continual source of inspiration, and which define who you are (such as your wedding day, your first lay, and that time you ate ten Big Macs in one sitting), there are such moments that define my life. Moments that involved computer games. One moment in particular, I remember more vividly and more emotionally than any other...

The year was 1991. I think. I vaguely remember being in my awesome apartment overlooking what was then called National Airport, which would make it 1991 or thereabouts. I could spend 30 seconds on the net to make sure that's the right year, but this is not really what this review is about so-- hey, just let me write it, will you? Anyway, I was scanning the BBS's (christ, I almost said "net", but we must remember that this is back when the net was the domain of only a select group of uber-geeks) for any new shareware games that I could play and never pay for.

I found a file called WOLF3D.ZIP. I looked for info about it and was told that this was the first release of Wolfenstein 3-D. This piqued my interest, as back when I was a wee little tyke, I spent a great deal of time with Muse's Castle Wolfenstein, pirated for my Apple II. This was before pirating software was generally regarded as a bad thing, you see. So, a 3-D version of this? Excellent! A blast from the past, oughta be good for a few laughs. So I downloaded it.

These were also the times when the term "virtual reality" was all the rage. Various products were distributed in order to take advantage of the hype, the most "advanced" of which was called "Virtual Reality Studio". This program allowed you to design entire 3-dimensional worlds of opaque, solid-colored, featureless walls and objects, and walk through them at the speed of what seemed like at LEAST 2 or 3 frames per second. This was "way cool" to those who were gullible enough to actually spend money on it. Guilty.

None of this was in my mind as I downloaded WOLF3D.ZIP, as I spent the time far more productively by guessing what it was gonna be like. I assumed, as any right-minded nerd would, that this shareware offering would probably attempt to replicate the claustrophobic feeling of the original (2-D) game, but present the environment in a vaguely 3-dimensional way, allowing the player to step through the rooms with the arrow keys, and face in one of the four major compass directions to view the action from different angles. A reasonable expectation, and the screenshots seemed to bear out the accuracy of my predictions. Yup, there were some walls, there were some bad guys from a couple different angles, and I began really looking forward to playing.

After ages (this is before there was DSL, you see), the file was safe and sound on my hard drive. I unzipped it (with PKUNZIP.EXE, the way God intended) and ran it. Cool main menu, slicker than I would have expected from a shareware product. I started up a game, and as I had envisioned, I was placed in a square room, facing straight ahead at a door.

I hadn't read the directions, of course, so I wasn't sure what to do. I reached towards my keyboard to search for a "help" key or something. As I reached, my hand lightly brushed the mouse.

This was it. The greatest moment in my entire gaming life. I looked up at the screen after the mouse moved, and the whole room had just shifted. I sat for a moment in disbelief. Hesitantly, I grabbed the mouse and gave it another little shove in another direction.

Holy fucking shit.

In that instant, "virtual reality" ceased to be a marketing gimmick. It was right there on my screen, staring me in my slack-jawed face. I could walk around. I could look anywhere. I was there.

I opened the door, still flush with the excitement of this glorious achievement, and walked out, heart pumping like a virgin on prom night. Believe me.

A shot rang out. My hand flinched and manically swung the screen around to face the Nazi I'd killed plenty of times on my Apple II, but now he's standing right in front of me, pointing his gun at me. He shot again, and the screen blanked out to a bloody red.

Wolfenstein 3-D was the greatest game I'd ever played.

I stayed up all night, of course, playing the shareware episode all the way through, and immediately bought the full package. So this went on for a while, because this was the future of games. And was it ever. Within a couple of years, we had Doom, Duke Nukem, Hexen, Doom II, Quake, Quake II, Unreal and countless other pretenders and ripoffs featuring you blasting your way through alien worlds of grotesque, increasingly-well-animated monsters. And many of these games were good. A couple were fabulous, and old WOLF3D.ZIP just sort of drifted away, the granddaddy of the genre, shuffled away to the old folks' home and left to die.

Thing is, though, for me... none of them matched Wolfie. How can that be? Technology progressed so far and so quickly since then that Wolfie really looked and felt rather laughably primitive after only a couple of years. How can trolling through one-level brick rooms beat crawling through the darkened corridors of a spaceship infested with slimy aliens? Hard question to answer. All I knew was that I never got the intense emotional charge out of any of the latter games that I did from the first. Part of it, I'm sure, was the sheer newness. You always remember your first, as it were. But I think there's more.

In all of these other games, you are battling aliens. Mean, scary-looking aliens, no doubt, but they're still aliens. Your innate fight-or-flight instincts are wired into real-world objects and events, and as such are not keyed as readily by the unrecognizeable. There's no mistaking that "the slimy three-headed thing is bad, you should kill it", but even that slight glancing blow of conscious thought is not necessary for, say, a Nazi pointing a gun at you. In the latter case, it is your instinct that reacts more readily (and with much more force) than your intellect.

So for me, the real-world (save for the Satanic Supernatural Hitler stuff towards the end) aspect of Wolf3D was more effective in evoking the most intense emotional responses, and those responses are what make these games work. In this way, walking through those well-lit corridors hiding from the Third Reich became even scarier than walking through Hell hiding from That Pink Demon Guy. And no other game since had succeeded so well at it.

[Ed. Note: This sure seems like a very long-winded and self-gratifying review of a game which has already been out for over a year and a half, and which everyone but you and perhaps three or four homeless people have already played into the ground. I mean, this is already longer than most of your columns and you haven't even gotten to the subject matter yet. You are really losing it, man.]

So I stayed away from the First-Person Shooter (FPS) games for awhile, because each time I played one, it got less and less interesting. Then a game called Half-Life came out, which I naturally ignored so long that it had already garnered all the "Game of the Year" awards and had been re-released with the subtitle "Game of the Year Edition" before I got bored and desperate enough to pick it up and give the whole FPS genre another try.

And this led to the second Great Gaming Moment of my life.

It's silly to go on about how fantastic Half-Life was/is. It is, even nearly three years after its release, spectactularly executed, and probably the best single-player FPS experience there is. For those three homeless people, you start as Gordon Freeman, nerdy scientist, going into your lab. Then something Bad (TM) happens, and you become Gordon Freeman, nerdy scientist trying to escape from the lab without getting eaten by the icky monsters who have zapped there from Another Dimension (R). It is eerie, it is scary (both the "uhhhrrrrhhggghh" kind, and the "AUUGH!!!" kind), and it is way, way too much fun. And then...

I was relaxing in a hallway, reloading my weapons after a frantic fight with some of the Green Guys Who Shoot Electricity At You, and fearing what other hideous boogieman was hiding around the next corner. I tenuously creeped around the corner, when I heard from somewhere up above, "Move out!!" -- and then the rat-tat-tat of machine gun fire, as tracer bullets whipped past me and I scrambled back around the corner to hide and hope that the nightmare would end. Holy fucking shit.

Then a grenade landed next to me. That's bad.

See, not only do the aliens want you dead, but the military does too. And they've come loaded for bear. So the game goes on through its levels, which consist mainly of battling aliens, but with an occasional section where you have to shoot your way through trained Army grunts, and it is these moments where the adrenaline levels of the game, already straining the boundaries of good sense, go dangerously high and blow you (me) away. Returning to fight the Spider-Headed Dudes is almost a respite from the dangers of the carbine semiautomatic rifles and the thinking, calculating human.

This works, I think, for the same reason Wolfenstein 3D worked.

[Ed. Note: This is really getting too long now, and you still haven't even mentioned the game you're reviewing. You've gotta learn to be more concise, to keep the readers interested. I mean, most of the people reading this don't even care about these stupid games, and they've no doubt given up on this review by now. You're destroying this website. It was doing so well, too. Ah, crap.]

Somewhere in this timeline, of course, the Internet was invented. Or at least, made accessible to the majority of the people on the planet. And with this, multiplayer gaming lept into the spotlight. If it's cold, calculating humans you want to play against, there's millions of them out there now who would be more than happy to blow you away.

Multiplayer FPS games generally follow the same path: You start, you find a "powerup" (a magical place which provides you with a certain weapon, a certain armor/shield, or some other ability), then you run all over the place trying to blow up everyone else. This is called "Deathmatch". Sometimes you separate into teams, in which case, everyone on your team runs all over the place trying to blow up everyone on the other team. This is called "Team Deathmatch". Later came other gimmicks, like Capture the Flag, in which the object is to run all over the place trying to blow up everyone else, while grabbing the flag and running back to your own base. But in any case, madness is the method, and these games generally reward the quick trigger, the finely-honed reflex, and the fastest internet connection. I tried a few, and was never taken enough by it to be hooked. Add to this the fact that any vague notion of disbelief had to be not only suspended, but locked away in a dungeon and fed to the Minotaurs -- you would think that a couple direct hits with a rocket would be enough to kill someone, but not in these worlds, which seemed to resemble ultra-violent manic cartoon worlds more than anything else. Oh well.

But then a wonderful thing happened! I got DSL! And with the newfound power of 100k per second transfer rates, I thought I'd try my hand at the whole multiplayer thing again.

Gradually over the past year and a half, one game grew to dominate any discussion of multiplayer FPS gaming. I'd heard the name many times before. And now it was my turn to try it out. [Ed. Note: Thank God. Here it comes.] And the name of that game was...

Counter-Strike.

[Ed. Note: Yaaaay! Now I can go home. Bye.] Counter-Strike is a "mod" to Half-Life, meaning anyone that owns Half-Life can download CS for free, as it's actually a product developed independently and released to the world gratis, which is another amazing thing about it. For those that don't own Half-Life, CS was released a few months ago as a stand-alone product which you can buy from software stores. Either way is fine.

Counter-Strike is intended to portray, in a semi-realistic fashion, Counter-terrorism actions using real-life weaponry and armament. At the beginning of a game, up to 10 people agree to be the Terrorists, and up to 10 agree to be the Counter-Terrorists. Depending on the map the game is played on, the objective of the game is one of these four:

• Counter-terrorists rescue hostages from terrorist stronghold.
• Terrorists place (and explode) C4 bombs at key areas.
• Terrorists attempt to assasinate VIP (a special member of the counter-terrorist team.)
• Counter-terrorists prevent terrorists from escaping to a "safe zone".

After the sides have been chosen, weapons and sundry other items are purchased with money earned during the previous round, and then the two teams square off. A team can win by 1) accomplishing the above objective, 2) preventing the opposing team from accomplishing theirs, 3) killing everyone on the opposing team. Games last a maximum of five minutes. And then you try it all over again.

I started playing a couple weeks ago, and I have probably put in more hours at CS than all the other games I've played in the past six months combined. Granted, I'm not the game-playing machine I once was, but this does indicate at least a passing obsession with the game. Not to mention that I put up a banner for it on the main page of my website.

Weapons are nicely varied, with an assortment of pistols, rifles, sub-machineguns and shotguns to choose from. Certain weapons are only available to one side or the other, lending a definite "taste" to the teams. Terrorist weapons tend to be cheaper but less accurate. Also available are explosive grenades, smoke grenades (to provide cover while assaulting or retreating), and flashbang grenades (to temporarily blind the opposition as you attempt an assault). Sniper rifles are available, complete with multiple-zoom scopes, for those who prefer the "silent but deadly" approach to armed conflict. Basically, whatever your tastes in dangerous equipment, it's been provided here. Each weapon also has distinct advantages and disadvantages. Some are accurate, but the bullets lack punch. Some are slow to reload, but are powerful enough to fire through weaker walls/obstructions. Varying recoil factors can make certain weapons nearly impossible to hit from medium-long range if you hold the trigger down. "Pulse" firing (a few quick blasts, then regain control, then another couple shots) is a must for these.

The tactics available for use are too widely varied to even begin to describe here. But definite thought must be given to what weapons to use, given the route you plan to take. For wide-open areas, longer-ranged weapons are better, but if you're going to crawl through the sewer, close-in fighting is the focus. If you know an enemy is behind a box, grab a powerful rifle and shoot through it. Listen. Listen to where the bad guys are, and listen to determine what kind of weapon they have, to determine the best way to approach them. How to approach is a whole other chapter.

What makes this game so much better than all the others I've seen? Well, here's a few things:

• Deathmatch doesn't work. If you want to go running around trying to blow everyone else up, be my guest, but you will not last long, and your team will be mad at you. Coordination is a must, and there is strength in numbers, so when your team leader shouts over the radio, "Stick together, team," you would do well to listen. And proceed carefully, as a coordinated ambush is a distinct possibility. In this way, Counter-Strike becomes a slower, but inexpressibly more deep experience.
• No magic. There are no "powerups", and weapons do not mysteriously appear all over the map. You grab what you think you'll need at the beginning, and then go with it. The only other way to get stuff is to rip it off from the dead.
• Life is fragile. Even with Kevlar jackets and helmets, it won't take more than a couple shots to your midsection to finish you off, and any weapon will kill you with one shot if it's in the head. Again, slow, thoughtful progress wins out over running in with guns blazing.
• Death hurts. In most games, death is an unpleasant disruption to the action, but you are brought back to life seconds later, and may go on about your business of blowing everything up as fast as you can. In Counter-Strike, if that one shot gets you in the head, you are out, and can do nothing but watch and chat with your fellow corpses until the game ends. Many of the discussions tend towards "Okay, what do we do next time to not get killed?" So next time, the strategies change, and the tactics develop, and the balance of power swings slowly back and forth between the counter-terrorists and the terrorists, forever battling it out, millions of times a day, all over the world.

All of these things basically have one characteristic in common -- they serve to bring the game ever closer to being realistic. And like the Nazi outside the first room of WOLF3D.ZIP, nothing gets my juices flowing better than knowing that there are other real people out there with real guns who are out to get you. And in Counter-Strike, there really are. (Except on a computer.)

Last night I was playing the 747 map, where counter-terrorists must eliminate the terrorist threat from a hijacked jetliner parked on the tarmac. It was down to me, the last "CT", and one other player, the last "T". I crawled silently through the coach class aisles, looking and listening for any sign of my foe. I snuck through the curtain separating coach from business class... and saw his elbow peeking out from around the corner. He turned quickly to face me, as I shot a few rounds through the corner wall, injuring him. I quickly ducked back behind the curtain. Sensing the anger of an injured animal, I backed off of the curtain and hid behind the in-flight movie screen. The terrorist, as I predicted, began shooting blindly through the curtain, hoping I was still standing there. I wasn't. Unfortunately, a poor hostage was, and his bullet-riddled body slumped to the ground. Then, guessing that he had stopped to reload, I crept out from behind the movie project, and turning the tables, I shot blindly through the same curtain. I heard his final moan of agony, as the screen showed, "Counter-terrorists win."

Counter-Strike is the greatest game I have ever played.