Counter-Strike (commonly abbreviated to CS) is a tactical first-person shooter video game which originated from a Half-Life modification by Minh "Gooseman" Le and Jess "Cliffe" Cliffe, and features real-world weapons. The game has been expanded into a series since its original release, which currently includes Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, Counter-Strike: Source, Counter-Strike: Anthology and Counter-Strike on Xbox.
Counter-Strike pits a team of counter-terrorists against a team of terrorists in a series of rounds. Each round is won by either completing the mission 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, True Combat Elite and many more.
Popularity
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 of February 5, 2007[1], solidifying its position as the most popular online first-person shooter.
Steam and the WON Gaming Service
Counter-Strike was originally played online through the WON gaming service, which was shut down in 2004, forcing players to switch to Steam (to which a section of players responded by creating their own WON network, dubbed WON2).
In March 2007, Valve implemented mandatory advertisements through Steam in official maps and in the game's GUI overhead. This unprecedented move took place without reparations for Counter-Strike or Half-Life customers and Valve did not offer refunds for the original price of the game. Customers have expressed frustration with the ads, saying that they violate original terms of service and distract from the game.
Gameplay
Counter-Strike is a first-person shooter in which players join either the terrorist or counter-terrorist team. Each team attempts to complete their mission objective and/or eliminate the opposing team. Each round starts with the two teams spawning simultaneously, usually at opposite ends of the map from each other. A player can choose to play as one of eight different default character models (four for each side, although Counter-Strike: Condition Zero added two extra models, bringing the total to ten). Each player generally starts with $800 (although this amount can be modified), two magazines of ammunition, a knife, and a pistol: a Heckler & Koch USP .45 Tactical for counter-terrorists, and a GLOCK 18 for terrorists. Players are generally given a few seconds before the round begins (known as "freeze time") to prepare and buy equipment, during which they cannot attack, be attacked, or walk/move. They can return to the buy area within a set amount of time (90 seconds is the default) to buy more equipment (some neutral "buy zones" can be used by both teams). Once the round has ended, surviving players retain their equipment for use in the next round; players who were killed begin the next round with the basic default starting equipment.
The scoreboard displays team scores in addition to statistics for each player: name, score (kills), deaths, and ping (in milliseconds). The scoreboard also indicates whether a player is dead, carrying the bomb (on bomb maps), or is the VIP (on assassination maps), although information on players on the opposing team is hidden from a player until his/her death, as this information can be important. Killed players become "ghosts" for the duration of the round; they cannot change their names until they spawn (come alive) again, text chat cannot be sent to or received from live players; and voice chat can only be received from live players and not sent to them (unless the cvar sv_alltalk is set to 1). Many of the new FY (fun yard; basically team deathmatch) maps allow dead players to communicate with living players. 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.
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. Relatively few hits are required to kill a player, and shots to different parts of the body inflict varying amounts of damage. However, 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 momentarily restricted for about a second after taking damage from enemy attacks.
Maps
The maps in Counter-Strike determine the gameplay and mission objectives. There are three official types of maps in Counter-Strike:
Hostage rescue maps, identified by "cs" before the name (eg. cs_militia, cs_office), 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" before the name, (eg. de_dust, de_aztec), 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. In earlier beta versions of the game another official type called Terrorist Escape also existed and, prior to commercial release, there was a racing map, where player-controlled vehicles were tested and eventually discarded.
Players also have the ability to create their own maps using the Valve Hammer Editor.
Assassination maps, with an "as" prefix, (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 game mode is not present in Counter-Strike: Source.
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 operate their firing movement 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. The Counter-Strike team acknowledges that "not every weapon will be perfectly accurate or realistic".
When early versions of the mod were released, the weapons were presented in the menus with their actual names and manufacturers such as Colt M4A1 and GIAT FAMAS, but versions from 1.6 on featured fictional manufacturers (and some models) instead, such as "Maverick M4A1" and "Clarion 5.56" respectively. However, the internal names used by the console, key bindings and macros were not changed and thus often preserve the original designations; for example, the "Bullpup" (Steyr AUG) is still named "aug" internally, and so is the M4A1.
Counter-Strike: Source features the same weapons as Counter-Strike:
Pistols: USP, Glock, Desert Eagle, P228, dual Beretta .40s, and the FN 5-7.
Shotguns: Benelli M3 Super 90, and XM1014.
Sub-Machine Guns: MP5 navy, Steyr TMP, P90, MAC-10, and the UMP.
Rifles: Galil, FAMAS, AK-47, SG-552, M4A1, Steyr AUG, Scout, AWP, G3-SG1, and SG-550.
Machine Gun: SAW
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 fnatic) have come to earn a living out of it, while other clans such as Counter-Strike Syndicate and similar community based groups neither lose nor earn money via member donations which are self sustaining in return for administrator rights in servers involved in the community. Cheating groups, such as myg0t and JAPS have been known to create a disturbance in the game by spamming the microphone, radio commands, using various publicly or privately released hacks, or even killing the whole team in one round. This is also known as raging or griefing.
LegacyCounter-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. The continued popularity of Counter-Strike has meant that older video cards such as the 3dfx Voodoo3, ATI Rage 128, and NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 remain useful.
However, as criticism 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
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.
Mods and ScriptsThough 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). 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). Other mods provide new weapon skins.
CheatingCounter-Strike has been a prime target for exploitation by cheaters since its release. In-game, cheating is often referred to as 'hacking' (though this is technically incorrect - it is the programmers, not the users, of the cheats that might be regarded as hackers).
Typical cheats are:
- Wallhacks, which allow the player to see through walls. These work by altering the display driver to display objects that are normally obscured.
- Speedhacks, which give the player increased speed. These work by sending false synchronisation data to servers.
- No recoil, which keeps the players gun shooting straight without a kickback by removing gun physics.
- Aimbots, which help the player aim at enemies. These work by moving the player's view to anticipate an enemy's position.
- 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 remove the flashbang and smoke grenade effect.
- Grenade Dodger, which moves player farther or closer to a grenade, depending on settings.
Valve has implemented an anti-cheat system called Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC). Players cheating on a VAC enabled server risk having their account permanently banned from all VAC secured servers.
With the first version of VAC, a ban took force almost instantly after being detected, and the cheater had to wait 2 years to have the account unbanned. Since VAC's second version, cheaters are not banned automatically. Rather, they are banned according to a delayed banning system, and bans are never lifted. Many cheats are still not detected by VAC, and often the only effective anti-cheat device is a human administrator watching an online game, however; it can be very difficult to differentiate between skill, luck and cheating and server admins only have the power to ban users from their server.
In Popular Culture
The ever-growing popularity of Counter-Strike has resulted into being referenced or being parodied extensively in popular culture.
- The online Mockumentary Pure Pwnage features an avid Counter Strike: Source fan, fps_doug, who is often shown "pwning n00bs" with headshots, in which he yells "BOOM! HEADSHOT!" after achieving them. The catchphrase has since become popular in internet forums, chat rooms, and by the players on Counter Strike.
- The web-comic Concerned which is based on the adventures of Gordon Freeman in the world of Half-Life 2 has a recurring gag involving Counter-Strike: Source.
- In the TV show "Mythbusters" an episode briefly mentioned "Now Tory can live out his Counter-Strike Fantasies"
History
In 2004, original Counter-Strike developers Minh Le and Jess Cliffe, along with members of Valve and the Day of Defeat team, brought Counter-Strike into the Source engine as an obvious choice for the multiplayer component of Half-Life 2. The game was first rolled out to cyber-cafe owners, and then selected beta-testers a week later, before going gold on October 7, 2004, when it was officially released and available through Steam (Valve's online content delivery system).
Early screenshot of CS: SourcePre-loading of Counter-Strike: Source to cybercafe owners (as part of the Cyber Cafe program) began on 9 August 2004, being released for play two days later. Vouchers for the pre-release game were available with the purchase of ATI Radeon video cards and with Counter Strike: Condition Zero; the pre-load for these users began on 16 August 2004, with the game again becoming available two days later.
The game was also bundled along with Half-Life 2 on Steam, and was sold along with the boxed retail version of that game. It is currently available in the Source Multiplayer Pack. In the physical retail form, it is either available with Half-Life 2 or in a Counter-Strike branded box that mirrors the contents of the Source Multiplayer Pack. In essence, one can either choose between the Half-Life 2 story game or Day of Defeat: Source when purchasing the game through retail.
Only days after the initial cyber-cafe release Valve began what would become the first in their long line of updates for CS: Source. By the time of its official release almost two months later, Valve had eliminated numerous bugs and added several updates and patches.
The betas and official release versions shipped with only two player models (one per team) - the "Phoenix Connexion" terrorist (a member of the fictional Phoenix Faction) and the Seal Team 6 counter-terrorist. Being an early version, the player models were low quality and out of proportion, giving rise to being commonly described as having "peanut-heads". Valve released several successive versions of the two original characters.
AroundChristmas 2005, an update was released for CS: Source, adding two new player models - the GIGN and Guerilla[5]. This was followed by the addition of the Leet and SAS player models on March 1, 2006, and the GSG9 and Arctic models on April 12, 2006. The Midwest Militia and Spetsnaz characters from Condition Zero have not been brought into CS: Source.
Changes from Counter-Strike to CS: Source include the improvements inherent to the Source engine (such as better graphics and physics), as well as updated models, animations, maps, sounds, and some small gameplay changes.
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