Counter Strike is a video game designed for the Xbox gaming
console and personal computers. It is played first-person mode that
involves shooting your enemies, with weapons you will find in the world
today. Counter Strike is a Series game with Counter-Strike:
Condition Zero, Counter-Strike: Source and Counter-Strike on Xbox. To
beat the game you must beat your enemies and complete the task before
they do.
Pros
The first Pro I guess would be that it is has a specific rating for
children 13 and up, however it is up to the parents to decide if their
children are really mature enough to play it. The amount of resources
needed to play the game are another Pro with only Windows needed along
with a 500 MHZ Processor, 96 MB of Ram, a Keyboard and mouse. To play
it on the computer you have a couple of choices making this another
Pro, with either a CD or Streaming Video, so you don’t have to run out
and buy it to try it.
Counter-Strike was released on June 18th, 1999 as
a modification (mod) for the popular game Half-Life. It pits a
Counter-Terrorist team (CT) and a Terrorist team (T) against each other
in a variety of exotic and urban environments. It features three game
modes: Defusion where T players plant a bomb and CT players defuse it,
Hostage Rescue where CT players attempt to rescue hostages, and
Assassination where T players attempt to kill a VIP that the CT players
must protect. Counter-Strike is currently the most popular online
action game available, even though it technically isn't even a game on its own.
Half-Life, released in November '98, was hailed as "Game of the Year"
for its outstanding single player, but the multiplayer side of the game
was never that popular until Team Fortress Classic and the Software
Developers' Kit (SDK) were released. The SDK allowed programmers and
artists to create modifications for Half-Life. Modifications, or mods,
are common in First Person Shooter gaming titles. Counter-Strike is a
mod for Half-Life, and originally required a copy of Half-Life (HL) to
play.
Jess Cliffe, a student, created the website for Minh Le's newest mod,
Counter-Strike. Minh Le, known as Gooseman online, had previously
worked on Action Quake 2 and Navy SEALs for Quake. Cliffe, who uses his
last name as his online handle, was a webmaster of a Action Quake 2 map
site and had developed an online friendship with Minh when he was
working on that game's models.
Cliffe eventually helped more and more with the design of
Counter-Strike before release; Minh was the main member of the CS Team.
Minh did all the modeling, skinning, and animating for Counter-Strike,
along with coding with knowledge he gained from Simon Fraser
University. The maps were handled by those interested in the mod, not
by a dedicated mapping team. Indeed, the core CS Team consisted of only
two people. And while Cliffe did much to help design Counter-Strike,
his main duty was with the website and PR stuff.
Counter-Strike's website, hosted on Planet Half-Life, built up much
anticipation for the mod, which looked like the most complete mod in
the HL community. This relatively new community had few mods in
development at the time. Of course, partly due to Counter-Strike's
success, Half-Life is a very popular target game for many mods.
Counter-Strike's first version was BETA 1; "BETA" software is software
that is not final or software that is incomplete (for more on the early
history of CS, check out cs - year 1).
This trial phase, basically an excuse to allow the CS Team to change
anything it wanted to, continued until November of 2000 when version
1.0 was released. At that stage, Valve Software, the developers of
Half-Life, took over development of Counter-Strike. At this stage,
Valve released Half-Life: Counter-Strike which is also called CS Retail.
Minh and Jess still contribute to Counter-Strike's development, but
only in designing the game and not actually programming or modeling.
Still, many of the changes we see in our modern versions of
Counter-Strike can be attributed to their choices. It's anyone's guess
as to who is actually "in charge," but it is certain that many of the
more daring changes (such as the slow-down after jumping in CS 1.4)
were designed by the core CS team.
Counter-Strike is currently the official game of the Cyberathlete
Professional League (CPL), a company that houses two or more US-based
LAN competitions a year that give out tens of thousands in winnings to
competitive CS teams, or clans. Because of this, Counter-Strike has a
large e-sports following full of clans that are very skillful and
players that are dedicated to their craft. The online counter-part to
the CPL, the CAL,
is responsible for most online CS competition. Most players, however,
aren't in clans and just play on public servers (sometimes called pubs)
for fun.
Two CS spin-offs are currently in production. First is the oft-delayed Counter-Strike: Condition Zero that amounts to the single player counter-part of Counter-Strike. Second is the mysterious Counter-Strike for Xbox (CSX), which has been out of the headlines recently but was shown at E3 by Microsoft.
Minh is currently developing the unannounced Counter-Strike 2, which will likely use the new Half-Life 2
engine—dubbed "Source"—developed by Valve. He lives in Vancouver,
British Columbia, Canada. Jess graduated from Virginia Tech in 2003 and
currently works for Valve in their Bellevue offices.
Cons
As always there are cons to something or another. One
such con is that it is very life like, which is fine for adults and
more mature teenagers. There are cheaters in the game as well but the creators and administrators for each game have a tendency to keep an eye out for this and limit what dead players
and other player can do. Many people complain that it reflects on
society causing another con, but I have found in my experience it is
better not to throw stones than have someone throw some at you.
Summary
The summary is going to be slightly larger than the rest of the article
since this gives me a chance to make any final comments. My first
comment is that it is a game and has to be treated that way. I always
have a problem with people who make waves about something that no else
noticed until they pointed it out, and the ones who generally make the
biggest waves are the one who you would think wouldn’t have been there
in the first place. Now back to the game, when you start out you is
given $800, which can be the administrator, two magazines of
ammunition, a knife, and a pistol. You will be given a few seconds in
which to buy equipment at the start up, during this time you cannot
attack or be attacked, as well no walking or moving.
I will have to give into the fold and rate this game 9 out of 10.
