Counter-Strike is possibly the best worst game ever made

Was I ever a gamer? Yes. Back in the 2000s I did spend a lot of money on one particular game, Counter-Strike.

How much did I spend? Well, there was one point where I was spending almost $80 a month for it for something like 4 or 5 months. Why so much? Because I rented my own 16-man gaming server (meaning up to 16 players could play at once) on a service known as ReconGamer. Don't bother searching for ReconGamer because that place is long dead. They just up and decided to quit the game hosting business with no warning one day, screwing over anyone that sent them money. Fortunately, I had canceled my account with them before that happened.

Now for those who don't know what Counter-Strike is, here's a crash course.

Okay. So this game is released back in 1998, Half-Life. That game by the way is still very, very good and I still replay it every so often. Counter-Strike started off as nothing more than a mod of Half-Life. The game spread like wildfire, gained massive popularity and quickly became the #1 first-person-shooter multiplayer game on the internet.

The best version of the game is 1.6, and to this day is almost always in the top 10 of all games played on Steam.

I started playing CS back when the 1.6 release was a new thing, and before there was a requirement to use Steam just to play it. The old network was a system called WON, which means World Opponent Network.

WON is gone, but a user-created recreation of it, WON2, does exist. And yes, you can play CS 1.6 on it as a "Steamless" version of it exists.

Have I ever played CS on WON2? No. All the players I knew on CS were in New England, and when I moved to Florida in the mid-2000s, there was nobody down here who played CS, so I basically just quit the game.

There was a time however when I played almost nothing but CS exclusively. I was really, really into it. While I never got that good at the game, the point is that I was having fun. Well, mostly.

What made CS the worst?

The single biggest problem with CS is that since it was a mod, it was ridiculously easy for any stupid kid to program a cheat even with just minimal programming skills. Being there was zero quality control when it came to the CS mod, there were always cheaters in public servers.

Some guys knew how to deal with cheaters the right way:

If more instances like what happened in the above video happened to cheater kids, we'd see a lot less cheaters, no question about it.

What made CS the best?

When playing with friends, CS was a very social thing and it was genuinely fun. Also, when you were on a team matched against a team at around the same skill level as yours, matches were great. Again, lots of fun.

Some of the best times were when you would trick the other team into doing something just by strategy so you could win a match.

The way CS works when playing on the "T" side is that you either try to reach site A or B. In an example where my team tricked the other to win the match, one time I told my team, "I'm going to run over near A and make a lot of noise. You wait, and when I signal, run over to to B as fast as you can."

The match started, I ran over using no stealth near site A, then threw a grenade and started firing my weapon. During this time, my team was silently moving towards B. The entire opposing team ran to where the noise was, and just before they slaughtered me I told my team to start running to B, and fast. My team had reached B before the other team had any clue what was going on, secured that site and won the match.

When you can pull things off like that, it's really cool.

Team play on CS is a combination of strategy, stealth and having the right team proficient with the right weapons. The right combo makes all the difference.

After CS, I quit gaming

I didn't "rage-quit" gaming because of CS. I quit because that was the last game I played that any of my friends did. But like I said, when I moved, I didn't know anyone here that played it. In America, CS was mainly played either in New England, Texas or California. As for other parts of the US, including Florida, not-so much.

Another reason I don't game anymore is because I don't use a PC anymore and haven't for some time. I use a laptop (a Lenovo ThinkPad E430, for those interested) for everything. Laptops are obviously not good gaming machines, but that's not what I bought it for. I bought it to do real work on it, which I do almost daily.

Will I ever get back into gaming?

I doubt it. The only kind of gaming I do these days is play a few rounds of Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook and not much else. Other than that I play some of the older games I have in my Steam Client. Mostly Star Wars stuff.

It's like I said, I just grew out of gaming for the most part.

And by the way, there is no such thing as as "Gamer 4 Life!" All gamers eventually quit for one reason or another and that's just the way it is.

Published 2014 Feb 23