The bomb has been planted!
Counter-Strike has been regarded the worlds #1 online through it’s various incarnations. The game revolves around two teams. The Terrorists, and the Counter-Terrorists. In the game’s most popular, and competitive mode, The terrorists must battle the counter-terrorists to either eliminate them, or successfully detonate the bomb at one of two bomb sites. The Counter-Terrorists however must stop the terrorists at all costs.
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Counter-Strike 1.6
Formerly known as half-life counterstrike, Counter-strike started development, and had its first beta in 1999. Soon after the release of the beta valve started working with the developers, and eventually ended up buying rights for the mod, and then continued on to bundle the mod with several retail products in the half-life series. However the mod remained free until the much Criticized version 1.6 which required users to use Valve’s new content delivery system steam. Players either had to purchase the retail box with a cd key, or buy it from valve directly. This ensured people who had illegally downloaded half-life to play the mod, could not play anymore. Other changes from version 1.5 also angered long time players. Even with all of the changes, Counter-Strike 1.6 is still considered by many to be the most pure, and competitive Counter-Strike Experience.
Characters
Terrorists
Arctic Avengers
Swedish terrorist faction founded in 1977. Famous for their bombing of the Canadian embassy in 1990
Elite Crew
Middle-Eastern fundamentalists based on world domination and other evil deeds.
Phoenix Connection
Having established a reputation for killing anyone that gets in their way, the Phoenix Connexion is one of the most feared terrorist groups in Eastern Europe. Formed shortly after the breakup of the USSR.
Guerrilla Warfare
A terrorist faction founded in the Middle East, this group has a reputation for ruthlessness. Their disgust for the American lifestyle was demonstrated in their 1982 bombing of a school bus full of Rock and Roll musicians.
Counter-Terrorists
SEAL Team 6
Founded in 1980 under the command of Lieutenant-Commander Richard Marcincko, ST-6 served to protect America and her intentions from terrorism. Within just seven years, the project was disbanded. However, it has since been reestablished and is now known under a new name, DEVGRU.
GSG-9
GSG-9 was born out of the tragic events that led to the death of several Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympic games in Munich, Germany.
SAS
The world-renowned British SAS was founded in the Second World War by a man named David Stirling. Their role during WW2 involved gathering intelligence behind enemy lines and executing sabotage strikes and assassinations against key targets.
GIGN
France’s elite Counter-Terrorist unit, the GIGN, was designed to be a fast response force that could decisively react to any large-scale terrorist incident. Consisting of no more than 100 men, the GIGN has earned its reputation through a history of successful ops.
Our Personal thoughts
We got into counter-strike a year before 1.6 came out, and continued to play 1.5 even after 1.6 came out, because we didn’t know any better. We didn’t spend as much time with this version as we did with Counter-Strike: Source, but we did enjoy playing it quite a bit. While all the counter-strike games play very similarly, they all have a unique feel to them. This game in particular just feels great to play, perhaps because the half-life engine that it runs on, is just a heavily modified ID Tech 1
Global Offensive
Counter-Strike has been a LAN center standard since its release in 1999, and every iteration of the game has been majorly successful at LAN centers with the exception of Counter-Strike Condition Zero, with new features like matchmaking, and competitive ranked matches, time is going to be spent on this game.
Pop Culture Status
Counter-Strike has been a top game around the world since the turn of the millennium. Pretty much everyone who finds themselves in any gaming scene, knows and understands what the game is about, how it works, and that the Awp is a one shot kill.
Design
Valve has taken many liberties with this incarnation of counter-strike’s design, moving away from the style of the old games, and instead making the game look like other AAA first person shooter titles.
Factions
While there are no true characters on either the terrorist side, or the counter-terrorist side each Faction is rooted in the real world somewhat and has a bit of a back story. In global offensive the number of factions nearly Doubles from previous titles. However some of the series staple factions have been forgotten.
Terrorists
Anarchist
Balkan
Elite Crew
Phoenix Connection
Pirate
Professional
Separatist
Counter-Terrorists
GIGN
GSG-9
IDF
FBI
SAS
SEAL Team 6
SWAT
About
Counter-Strike Global offensive is valves latest iteration of the worlds #1 online action game, and sensation. Counter-strike global offensive takes a new approach on the counter-strike game play, by changing the way almost every weapon works, and adding a whole slew of new ones, that add interesting dynamics to the gameplay. The graphics have evolved yet again, even better lighting and shadow effects gives the game picture like realism. Global Offensive has gotten much criticism from fans of the series because of the changes to the game play, and the new graphical style that resembles more modern first person shooter games like call of duty, and battlefield. However the game still manages to be the #4 most played game on steam, and currently is the game with the most signups for competitive formats, on competitive gaming websites like, ESEA, and Cevo. The game looks like it is going to have a strong future as long as it gets continually updated, and it might be the game that finally unites the very divided counter-strike community with one single game.
Our Personal Thoughts
We were one of the ones lucky enough to get a beta key for this game, and when we got the beta, the game wasn’t all that impressive. The graphics weren’t very tweakable, matchmaking only had servers on the east coast for weeks on end. it was a pretty bad experience, and made us stay away from buying it when it finally did come out. However, pressure from our friends got to us, and we finally caved and bought a copy of the game. Wow, did they do some work on it. The game ran a great deal more smoothly, had much more configurable graphics settings, and matchmaking was actually kind of awesome. To us, its not the classic counter-strike that we’re used to, which is fine in fact, we think its honestly better that way. Global offensive is the game that we play when we want to play counter-strike, but we want it to be fresh, and we don’t want to play De_dust 2 all day.
Counter-Strike:Source
Counter-Strike:Source Is actually the Second sequel to the award winning Counter-Strike with the first being Counter-Strike Condition Zero. Counter-Strike: Source Brings the same great counter-strike game play into half-life 2’s engine, the source engine.This of course means that the graphics have taken a huge leap, no more simple textures, no more colored lighting. Counter-strike Source brings features like Anti-Aliasing for getting rid of those jaggies, HDR for a more realistic lighting environment, and of course Anti-scroptic filtering for making the textures look sharp. Beyond raw technical features, the game also has significantly updated the geometry of the maps, to make them look more like real world spaces, and with greater detail then ever before.
Characters
Terrorists
Arctic Avengers
Swedish terrorist faction founded in 1977. Famous for their bombing of the Canadian embassy in 1990
Elite Crew
Middle-Eastern fundamentalists based on world domination and other evil deeds.
Phoenix Connection
Having established a reputation for killing anyone that gets in their way, the Phoenix Connexion is one of the most feared terrorist groups in Eastern Europe. Formed shortly after the breakup of the USSR.
Guerrilla Warfare
A terrorist faction founded in the Middle East, this group has a reputation for ruthlessness. Their disgust for the American lifestyle was demonstrated in their 1982 bombing of a school bus full of Rock and Roll musicians.
Counter-Terrorists
SEAL Team 6
Founded in 1980 under the command of Lieutenant-Commander Richard Marcincko, ST-6 served to protect America and her intentions from terrorism. Within just seven years, the project was disbanded. However, it has since been reestablished and is now known under a new name, DEVGRU.
GSG-9
GSG-9 was born out of the tragic events that led to the death of several Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympic games in Munich, Germany.
SAS
The world-renowned British SAS was founded in the Second World War by a man named David Stirling. Their role during WW2 involved gathering intelligence behind enemy lines and executing sabotage strikes and assassinations against key targets.
GIGN
France’s elite Counter-Terrorist unit, the GIGN, was designed to be a fast response force that could decisively react to any large-scale terrorist incident. Consisting of no more than 100 men, the GIGN has earned its reputation through a history of successful ops.
Our Personal Thoughts
Counter-strike source is probably the game we have put the most time into, It was our go-to game for after school fun. While the classic bomb defuse was great, this game has so much to offer in the way of custom maps, and mods it’s even funny. We knew countless people who literally played zombie mod all day and night, like they were preparing for a real zombie apocalypse. Personally we weren’t the biggest fan of zombie mod. Our favorites had to be surfing, and glass maps. Surfing was amazing, especially the combat surfing. There is nothing like gaining incredible amounts of speed sliding on the side of a ramp, and then in a split second knifing someone in the back who couldn’t match your epic speed. Oh, and its pretty hilarious hearing them complain about your heroic achievement too. Now glass maps are interesting concept. the basic idea behind most of these maps, is that there is glass either under or around you, and you could shoot out panels of it to change the playing field, it added a very unique, and challenging element of strategy to the maps. Personally we feel like these glass maps could have been a competitive game mode. But most of them were not designed very well, poorly optimized, or created unfair conditions and general silliness. But there were always those few that were just great. We spent hours upon hours learning the maps, and making strategies for shooting the glass at key times, and watching our opponents fall to their doom.
