Counter-Strike

About a year ago I got a little too invested in the "top [X number] video games of the decade" lists circulating the Internet and decided I needed to play (and more so, own) a number of them. I ended up spending hundreds of dollars in April and May on like two dozen games and my backlog has been exceptionally bloated ever since. Whatever. Today, I crossed this one off my list. Counter-Strike started out as a home-brewed Half-Life mod in 1999 but quickly became so popular that Valve decided to officially incorporate it into the Half-Life franchise and hired its two creators as full-time developers. But the game quickly took on a culture of its own, completely separate from that of Half-Life, and eventually Valve decided to split it off into its own family of games and expansion packs. So when the game was ported to the original Xbox in 2004, it was not done so as Half-Life: Counter-Strike, but simply as Counter-Strike, seen above. I purchased my own copy new for something like eight bucks on Amazon a year back, and now that I've played "through" it, I can see why Amazon had slashed the price so low. Note my use of quotation marks around the word "through." Note them again. The thing is, Counter-Strike was always meant to be a multi-player game in which counter-terrorist teams (CTU, if you use 24 acronyms) oppose terrorist squads up to no good. The terrorists are either trying to plant a bomb somewhere or holding hostages - seriously, those are the only two game types, at least on this port - and the CT forces must stop them from doing so. What makes the game unique, or at least original, in the FPS genre is that matches are quick and there is no regeneration or "re-spawning" once you die. If the terrorists kill you, you're dead until the next round begins - which thankfully is usually within a minute or two. I like that. It adds an element of realism to coming up with actual tactics and strategies. More important than killing is staying alive. I suspect that's a lot like real war, whereas in a ten-minute Halo session you can die twenty times and still call it a good match as long as you had twenty-five kills. In Counter-Strike, you're much more likely to attack from adequate cover and to communicate with teammates to set up cover fire and lay traps for enemies. It seems like it'd be a lot of fun to play with a group of friends. But I'll never know, because the servers for the Xbox version of the game have been taken down for good and the only company I was able to play with this afternoon were AI bots. So I did both tutorial modes and then played through around ten rounds of planting and disarming the bomb, and that about wraps it up. There is no single-player campaign and no story mode to speak of. I'm melancholy about missing the boat on this game when you could actually play it with other people, but I mean, at least my video game backlog got smaller in practically no time at all.