Games - Counter-Strike

Home > Listing Index > Games > Counter-Strike

	Games - Counter-Strike

:For the African musical group, see Counter Strike.

Counter-Strike (CS) is the common name given to a series of team-based tactical shooter games which originate with Counter-Strike, a total conversion mod of Valve Software's first-person shooter Half-Life. The series also includes Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and Counter-Strike: Source.

Counter-Strike pits a team of counter-terrorists against a team of terrorists in rounds of competition won by completing an objective or eliminating the opposing people. The latest incarnation of the game, Counter-Strike: Source (CS:S), is based on the Source engine developed for Half-Life 2. CS is widely acknowledged as the most successful and popular of the tactical shooter genre. Signs of CS's wide influence can be found in mods for Quake III Arena, Unreal Tournament, and other standalone shooters such as Global Operations and Soldier of Fortune II. CS has been the most widely played online FPS for the past few years and has over 19.5 million legal owners. In 2002 there were over 30,000 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 shows over 200,000 players for Counter-Strike (this includes Counter-Strike: Source, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and Counter-Strike 1.6); accounting for almost 70 percent of the online FPS audience. According to statistics gathered by Valve's content-delivery platform, Steam (), these players contribute to over 4.5 billion minutes of playing time each month, making it the most popular online FPS in history. CS was originally played online through the WON gaming service, but it was shut down in 2004, forcing players to switch to Steam (although some players responded by creating their own WON network, dubbed WON2).

Gameplay

Counter-Strike is a team-based FPS in which players join either the Terrorists (Ts) or the Counter-Terrorists (CTs). 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 both Counter-Terrorist and Terrorist. Counter-Strike: Condition Zero added two extra models, bringing the total to ten). Each player generally starts with $800, two magazines of ammunition, a knife, and a pistol: a Heckler & Koch USP .45 Tactical for CTs or a GLOCK 18c for Ts. Players are generally given a few seconds before the round begins (known as Freeze Time) to buy equipment, during which time they cannot move. Players may buy equipment whenever they are in a buy zone for their team (some zones can be for both teams) provided the round has not been in session for longer than a specified time (90 seconds is default). Surviving players retain their equipment for use in the next round; those who have died begin anew with the default pistol and knife.

Standard bonuses in the game are:

Win a round: $3000
Lose a round: $1500
Kill an enemy: $300
Talk to a hostage: $150
Rescue a hostage: $1000
Plant the bomb: $800

The scoreboard shows team scores plus data for each player: name, score, deaths, and ping/latency (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 the player must be dead during the round to obtain this information about players on the opposing team.

Players killed become "ghosts" for the duration of the round; they cannot change their names, nor can their chat/voice messages be received by the live players (unless the cvar sv_alltalk is set to 1). They 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 case of Internet cafes and players in the same rooms of their own homes, playing on the same server). This technique, known as "ghosting", is considered cheating in many tactical shooters.

Counter-Strike is meant to be more realistic than futuristic FPSs 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, however, is restricted while taking damage from gunfire, and a player cannot run at full speed whilst taking damage.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Counter-Strike ]

Games - Counter-Strike

Gameplay

Searches on eBay

Related searches on eBay