Counter-Strike, commonly abbreviated to CS, is a team-based, tactical first-person shooter video game which originated from a Half-Life mod of the same developers, Minh "Gooseman" Le and "Cliffe", featuring real-world weapons and shootouts. The game has been expanded into a series since its original release, which currently includes Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and Counter-Strike: Source.
Counter-Strike puts a team of counter-terrorists against a team of terrorists in rounds of competition won by completing an objective or eliminating the opposing force. The latest incarnation of the game, Counter-Strike: Source, is based on the Source engine developed for Half-Life 2. Signs of Counter-Strike's wide influence can be found in mods for games such as Quake III Arena, Unreal Tournament, and other standalone shooters such as Global Operations, America's Army, Call of Duty and many more.
As of May 2006, Counter-Strike is still the most widely played online first-person shooter in the world. In 2002 there were over 30,000 populated Counter-Strike servers on the Internet (second place was Unreal Tournament with about 9,800). In 2004, GameSpy statistics showed over 85,000 players simultaneously playing Counter-Strike at any point in time, and in 2006, Steam regularly shows over 200,000 players for Counter-Strike[1] (this includes Counter-Strike: Source, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and Counter-Strike). According to statistics gathered by Valve's content-delivery platform, Steam, these players collectively contribute to over 6.177 billion minutes of playing time each month, as in February 5, 2007[1] solidifying its position as the most popular online first-person shooter in history. Counter-Strike was originally played online through the WON gaming service, which was shut down in 2004,[2] forcing players to switch to Steam (to which a section of players responded by creating their own WON network, dubbed WON2).
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[edit] Gameplay
Counter-Strike is a team-based, first-person shooter in which players join either the terrorist or counter-terrorist team, and combat the opposing team while fulfilling predetermined objectives. Server settings may automatically balance teams when one team has more players than the other. Each round starts with the two teams spawning simultaneously, as one of eight different default character models (four to choose from for each the counter-terrorist and terrorist teams. Counter-Strike: Condition Zero added two extra models, bringing the total to ten). Each player generally starts with $800 (altough, the starting ammount can be edited by a server administrator.), two magazines of ammunition, a knife, and a pistol: a Heckler & Koch USP .45 Tactical for counter-terrorists, and a GLOCK 18c for terrorists. Players are generally given a few seconds before the round begins (known as "freeze time") to buy equipment, during which they cannot attack or move in any direction. Players may buy equipment whenever they are in a "buy zone" for their team (some zones can be for both teams, depending on the map) provided the round has not been in session for longer than a specified time (90 seconds is default). Once the round has ended, surviving players retain their equipment for use in the next round; those who have died begin the next round with the default pistol and knife.
Standard monetary bonuses in the game are given when winning a round, losing a round, killing an enemy, instructing a hostage to follow, rescuing a hostage or planting a bomb.
The scoreboard shows team scores in addition to data for each player: name, score, deaths, and ping (in milliseconds) on the map. The scoreboard also shows whether each player is dead, carrying the bomb (in bomb defusal maps), or the VIP (in assassination maps), although to obtain this information about players on the opposing team a player must be dead during the round. Killed players become "ghosts" for the duration of the round; they cannot change their names, text chat cannot be sent to or received from live players; and, while voice chat can still be received from live players, it cannot be sent to them (except when cvar sv_alltalk is set to 1, in which case voice chat can be freely exchanged between all players on the server at any time). Ghosts are generally able to watch the rest of the round from multiple selectable views, although some servers disable some of these views to prevent dead players from relaying information about living players to their teammates through alternative media (most notably voice in the case of Internet cafes and Voice over IP programs such as TeamSpeak or Ventrilo). This technique, known as "ghosting," is considered cheating in many tactical shooters.
[edit] Realism
Counter-Strike is meant to be more realistic than futuristic first-person shooters such as Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament, but is also built to keep the action flowing faster than more realistic tactical shooters such as the Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon series. For example, relatively few shots will kill a player, and shots to different parts of the body inflict varying amounts of damage, but damage has no permanent bearing on ability to run or jump, allowing a player with just a few hit points remaining to keep fighting just as well as any other player. Movement and running speed, however, are restricted while taking damage from gunfire.
[edit] Maps
The map in Counter-Strike determines the gameplay and type of a match. Each map is of a single game type. There are three official types of maps in Counter-Strike: Hostage rescue maps, identified by "cs" before the name (eg. cs_militia), where the counter-terrorist team's objective is to free several non-player characters that are present near the terrorist base; Bomb defusal maps, identified by "de," (eg. de_dust), where the terrorist team must try to plant explosives at specific sites in the map and protect it for a set amount of time while the counter-terrorists attempt to defuse it; and Assassination maps, with an "as," (eg. as_oilrig), in which one member of the counter-terrorist team becomes a VIP, and must be protected from assassination until he reaches an escape zone (this type is absent from Counter-Strike: Source). In earlier beta versions of the game another official type, called Terrorist Escape, also existed.
Players also have the ability to create their own maps using the Valve Hammer Editor.
[edit] Weapons
One of the features of the original incarnations of Counter-Strike was that it did not feature fictional weapons like most games, instead using only existing firearms used the world over by real terrorist groups, counter-terrorist squads, armed forces, and law enforcement officials. The weapons are, however, only semi-realistic: many of them are incorrect in small details such as the caliber of ammunition or in their naming. Others do not fire quite as their real-life counterparts do, and many of them are inaccurately 'mirrored', wherein the spent cases are ejected from the wrong side of the weapon. This is attributed to the fact that one of the designers was left-handed, and modeled the weapons being held in the left hand. They were then mirrored to the right side, resulting in these inaccuracies.
When retail versions of the game were first released, most of the weapons were given fictional names, often with fictional manufacturers, most likely due to copyright issues. These names are visible at the start of the round when buying the weapons. The console, however, refers to each weapon in a different way to the buy menu, often using the weapon's real name or designation (eg. The console refers to the "Bullpup" as "aug," the weapon on which the "Bullpup" is based).
[edit] Culture
Counter-Strike is famous for the culture surrounding it, which includes everything from professional gamers and leagues, to excessive cheating and disruptive behavior. Certain professional teams (such as SK Gaming, Team 3D, and Team NoA) have come to earn a living out of it. Cheating groups, such as myg0t, JAPS, Rage-Xtreme, and 187ci, have been known to create a disturbance in the game by spamming the microphone, radio commands, or even killing the whole team in one round. This is also known as raging or griefing.
[edit] Legacy
Counter-Strike remains extremely popular to this day. There are currently professional online leagues supporting Counter-Strike, such as the Cyberathlete Amateur League (CAL), and CyberEvolution, a pay-to-play league. Various LAN tournaments are held throughout the United States and Europe, with the largest being the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL), the Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC), the World e-Sports Games (WEG), and the World Cyber Games (WCG). Championship matches in these events are televised with commentary and analysis.
Half-Life and other contemporary games took full advantage of the advent of hardware graphics acceleration in the late 1990s, replacing earlier software-rendered games such as Quake. Likewise, gamers were expected to abandon the DirectX 5.0 Half-Life and its mods in favor of games utilizing the hardware T&L capabilities of DirectX 7.0 graphics cards such as the NVIDIA GeForce and ATI Radeon. However, the universal shift to the DirectX 7.0 level and beyond has not happened, and the continued popularity of Counter-Strike has given older video cards such as the 3dfx Voodoo3, ATI Rage 128, and NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 continued usefulness.
However, as the criticisms of Condition Zero showed, many players feel that the GoldSrc engine has reached its limits in its capacity to evolve and to stay updated.[citation needed] Even Counter-Strike: Source has been criticized for not progressing the gameplay enough and failing to take full advantage of the Source engine.[citation needed]
There have been a multitude of games claimed by their developers, reviewers and fans to be "Counter-Strike killers," but none have seriously been able to dent its overall popularity. Server statistics in 2002 showed that Counter-Strike servers outnumbered their Battlefield, Unreal Tournament 2003 or Quake III first-person shooter counterparts at least 3 to 1.[citation needed]
[edit] Mods and scripts
Though Counter-Strike is itself a mod, it has developed its own community of script writers and modders. Some mods add bots, while others remove features of the games which some players found annoying, while yet others create different modes of play. Some of the most popular mods give server administrators more flexible and efficient control over his or her server. "Admin plugins", as they are mostly referred as, have become very popular. See Metamod, AMX Mod and AMX Mod X for more information. There are some mods which affect gameplay heavily, such as Gun Game, where players start with a basic pistol and must score kills to receive better weapons, and Zombie Mod, where one team consists of Zombies and must "spread the infection" by killing the other team (using only the knife).
[edit] Hacking and cheating
The game Counter-Strike has been a prime target for exploitation since it came out. Hacking or Cheating in the game has been widely criticized by many people. To keep people safe, Valve issued anti-cheat software called Valve Anti-Cheat, often abbreviated as VAC. Since then it has come to Version 2, or VAC2. Players cheating on a VAC2 enabled server risk having their account permanently banned from all VAC2 secured servers. A few common options included in hacks/cheats are wallhacks, which allow the player to see through walls; speedhacks, which give the player increased speed; aimbots, which help the player aim at a certain part of the body; ESP, which shows textual information about the enemy, such as, health, name, and distance; barrel hack, which shows a line that depicts where the enemy is looking; anti-flash and anti-smoke, which removes the flashbang and smoke grenade effect. The latest zBlock currently blocks VMT edited textures for Source based games to prevent wallhacking by modified texture files. With the older VAC system in place bans happened almost instantly after being detected, and the cheater had to wait 2 years to have the account unbanned. Since VAC2, cheaters are not banned automatically, rather they are banned according to a delayed banning system, and bans are never lifted. Even with the release of VAC2, however, many hacks are still able to slip past VAC2, allowing cheaters to terrorize the game on servers without online admins.
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