Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Counter-Strike


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Counter-Strike
Box art for the Windows stand-alone release
Developer(s) Valve Software
Publisher(s) Vivendi Universal (PC)
Microsoft Game Studios (Xbox)
Engine GoldSrc (Half-Life)
Platform(s) Microsoft Windows and Xbox
Release date June 12, 1999 (1999-06-12) (Original Half-Life mod)
November 8, 2000 (PC)
March 25, 2004 (Xbox)
Genre(s) First-person shooter
Mode(s) Multiplayer
Rating(s) ESRB: Mature 17+
ELSPA: 14+
Media CD or Steam download
System requirements 500 MHz processor, 96 MB RAM
Input method(s) Keyboard, mouse, joystick

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. 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 puts 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.

The game has both individual and multiplayer options. Bots can be added into the game. The online-multiplayer option is activated via Steam.

Contents

[hide]

[edit] Version history

Early screenshot of the Counter-Terrorist and Terrorist player models
Early screenshot of the Counter-Terrorist and Terrorist player models

On 24 March 1999[verification needed] Planet Half-Life opened its Counter-Strike section. Within two weeks, the site had received 10,000 hits.

On June 18, 1999, the first public beta of Counter-Strike was released, followed by numerous further "beta" releases. Counter-Strike 1.0 was released around Christmas 2000.

On April 12, 2000, Valve announced that the Counter-Strike developers and Valve had teamed up.

On January 25th, 2003, A world wide competetion, held by Valve and hosted by "DELL" (computer manuafacturer) "Dell desktops/laptops were numerous rewards in the competetion", over 10,000 people participated, the competetion went for two weeks, the winner was announced on February 15th on the Valve website, the winner was "VR" (cs name).

[edit] Condition Zero

Main article: Counter-Strike: Condition Zero

Version history[1]

In 2004, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero was released. It contained a single player campaign and bots, as well as other changes.

[edit] Distribution and service

[edit] Sierra

When Counter-Strike was published by Sierra Entertainment/Vivendi Universal Games, it was bundled with Team Fortress Classic, Opposing Force multiplayer, and the Wanted, Redemption and Firearms mods."[2]

[edit] Steam and the WON gaming service

Counter-Strike was originally played online through the WON gaming service, which was shut down in 2004,[3] forcing players to switch to Steam. The non-Steam version of Counter-Strike (version 1.5) can still be downloaded from sites such as FilePlanet.[4] Due to the closure of WON, part of the player community responded by creating their own WON network, dubbed WON2.

[edit] Addition of in-game advertising

In March 2007, Valve implemented mandatory advertisements through Steam in official maps and in the game's GUI overhead. Customers have expressed frustration with the ads, including an over 200 page thread on Valve's official forums, saying that they violate original terms of service and distract from the game.[5] The thread was later deleted by an unknown moderator.

[edit] Counter-Strike:Online

Currently CS:O is only available in South Korea. It is now in open beta test.

[edit] Gameplay

 This section does not cite any references or sources.
Please improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. (January 2008)

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), three magazines of ammunition, a knife, and a pistol: a Heckler & Koch USP45 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.

Screenshot of a player using a Desert Eagle on the map de_dust in the original Counter-Strike (left) and Counter-Strike: Source (right).
Screenshot of a player using a Desert Eagle on the map de_dust in the original Counter-Strike (left) and Counter-Strike: Source (right).

Standard monetary bonuses are awarded for winning a round, losing a round, killing an enemy, instructing a hostage to follow, rescuing a hostage or planting the bomb.

The scoreboard displays team scores in addition to statistics for each player: name, score (kills and bomb detonation/defusion), 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). 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 is known as "ghosting". It is very 'unfair' and gives the player receiving the voice a huge advantage and is considered cheating.

[edit] Culture

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Please improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. (November 2007)

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, NiP, Los Angeles Complexity, Team 3D, fnatic and MovingTarget) have come to earn a living out of it, while other clans and 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.

The Pure Pwnage character fps_doug is a stereotypical Counter-Strike player. He is shown playing the game, getting angry due to in-game issues, and holding a knife when going out for a jog, saying "Everyone runs faster with a knife!" . He also created the saying "BOOM! HEADSHOT!"

Ctrl+Alt+Del depicts the character Rob as a Counter-Strike enthusiast, although it is an unhealthy enthusiasm as he relates everything to the game.

[edit] Legacy

Counter-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 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.

Signs of Counter-Strike's wide influence can be found in mods for games such as Unreal Tournament, and other standalone shooters such as Global Operations, America's Army, Call of Duty, and many more. 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.[6]

However, as criticism of Condition Zero showed, the GoldSrc engine has already been surpassed by several generations of newer engines. Even Counter-Strike: Source has been criticized for not progressing the gameplay enough and failing to take full advantage of the Source engine.[7]

[edit] Mods and scripts

Though Counter-Strike is itself a mod, it has developed its own community of script writers and mod creators. Some mods add bots, while others remove features of the game which some players found annoying, and 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). There are also the Superhero and Warcraft III mods which mix the first-person gameplay of Counter-Strike with an experience system, allowing a player to become more powerful as they continue to play. Other mods provide new weapon skins.

[edit] Cheating

Counter-Strike has been a prime target for exploitation by cheaters since its release. In-game, cheating is often referred to as "hacking" in reference to program or "hack" executed by the user.

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 synchronization data to servers.
  • No recoil, which keeps the players gun shooting straight on the x axis without a kickback by removing gun physics. No spread is used to make a players gun shoot straight along the y axis.
  • Aimbots, which helps 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, and also information about weapons lying around the map, which could be missed without the hack
  • 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.

Many new and improved hacks have been invented since

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[citation needed]. Since VAC's second version, cheaters are not banned automatically. Rather, they are banned according to a delayed banning system, and bans are permanent. Many cheats are still not detected by VAC, and often the only effective anti-cheat solution is a human administrator watching an online game. VAC, while being effective in some ways, has also provided a boost in the purchasing of private cheats. These cheats are updated frequently, as to prevent detection, and are available to those who pay to use them or to those in the community or clan.

[edit] Prohibition in Brazil

 Please help improve this article or section by expanding it.
Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (January 2008)
See also: Video game controversy – Brazil

On January 17, 2008, a Brazilian federal court order prohibiting all sales of Counter-Strike and Everquest and imposing the immediate withdrawal of these from all stores began to be enforced. The federal Brazilian judge Carlos Alberto Simões de Tomaz, of the Minas Gerais judiciary section, ordered the ban in October 2007 because, according to him, the games "bring immanent stimulus to the subversion of the social order, attempting against the democratic and rightful state and against the public safety".[8][9][10][11]

[edit] In popular culture

The ever-growing popularity of Counter-Strike has resulted into being referenced or being parodied extensively in popular culture.

  • 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.
  • On an episode of the TV show MythBusters exploring a myth involving firearms (whether it is possible to shoot out a floor to escape enemies), one of the co-hosts (Grant) joked that "Now [co-host] Tory can live out his Counter-Strike fantasies."
  • Only a few hours after the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, Florida lawyer, Jack Thompson blamed the shootings on Counter-Strike, despite the fact that Seung-Hui Cho had not played the game since he was in high school.
  • At the 2003 Toy Fair in New York, 12 inch action figures inspired by Counter-Strike were displayed at the In The Past Toys booth. These figures were based on the 1.6 model skins.[12]
  • Devoted players have created real life parodies featuring and portraying characteristics of Counter-Strike gameplay. The short videos, frequently hosted on video sharing sites such as YouTube or Google Video, range in quality and comprehensiveness in terms of similarity to the Counter Strike settings, gameplay, costume and props.[13]
  • The machinima series The Leet World bases a reality TV show where the Terrorists (Ahamad, Cortez, Ellis, and Montrose) and Counter Terrorists (Player, Westheimer, Leeroy, and Chet) must live in a house together, in a Beauty and the Geek or other reality TV show style settings.[14]
  • Agent Timothy McGee expresses his interest in playing Counter-Strike online in the NCIS episode "Bait".

[edit] Notes and references

  1. ^ CSNation.net : Counter-Strike version history.
  2. ^ IGN: Counter-Strike Review. IGN. Retrieved on May 17, 2007.
  3. ^ Valve to Close WON Servers. IGN.Com (July 15, 2004). Retrieved on January 11, 2007.
  4. ^ FilePlanet: Counter-Strike 1.5 Full Mod Client [Win32]
  5. ^ Ads Now In CS1.6. CSNation (2007-03-05). Retrieved on 2007-06-20.
  6. ^ Steam: Game and Player Statistics
  7. ^ Boomtown - cs - Counter-Strike
  8. ^ Only In Brazil: Brazilian Government Bans Counter-Strike, EverQuest, Fun
  9. ^ Brazil bans popular video games seen to incite violence - Yahoo! News
  10. ^ Brazil bans popular video games seen to incite violence - Science & Technology - MSN Malaysia News - News
  11. ^ Folha Online - Informática - Justiça proíbe Counter Strike em todo Brasil; Procon tenta recolher jogos - 18/01/2008
  12. ^ CS-Nation - news - gamespy checks out cs action figures - the future of Counter-Strike - csnation.net
  13. ^ Real Life Counter Strike Parodies, Videos! How many?
  14. ^ The Leet World » Machinima web series, Reality TV, Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 2, Valve

[edit] External links

v • d • e
Topics related to the Half-Life series
Main series Half-Life (Opposing Force · Blue Shift · Decay)
Half-Life 2 (Episode One · Episode Two · Episode Three)
Portal
Other games Codename: Gordon · Half-Life 2: Deathmatch · Half-Life 2: Lost Coast · Half-Life: Source · Half-Life 2: Survivor · Half-Life: Uplink · The Orange Box
Playable characters Dr. Gordon Freeman · Adrian Shephard · Barney Calhoun · Dr. Gina Cross · Dr. Colette Green · Chell
Major characters Alyx Vance · Dr. Arne Magnusson · Dog · Dr. Eli Vance · GLaDOS · The G-Man · Dr. Isaac Kleiner · Dr. Judith Mossman · Dr. Wallace Breen
Minor characters Father Grigori · Lamarr · Nihilanth · Odessa Cubbage · The Resistance · Dr. Richard Keller · Dr. Rosenberg · The Vortigaunts · Uriah
Enemies Alien Controller · Alien Grunt · Antlion · Barnacle · Black Ops · Bullsquid · Carnivorous Leech · Chumtoad · The Combine (Soldiers and synths · Combat Tech · Non-combat tech) · Gargantua · Gonarch · Hazardous Environment Combat Unit · Headcrab · Houndeye · Ichthyosaur · Nihilanth · Race X · Tentacle · The Vortigaunts
Locations Aperture Science Laboratories · Black Mesa East · Black Mesa Research Facility · The Citadel · City 17 · The Coast · Nova Prospekt · White Forest Rocket Facility · Ravenholm · Xen
Notable events Seven Hour War · Black Mesa incident
v • d • e
Video games developed by the Valve Corporation
Half-Life series Half-Life (Opposing Force · Blue Shift · Decay) · Uplink · Half-Life: Source
Half-Life 2 (Episode One · Episode Two · Episode Three) · Deathmatch · Lost Coast · Survivor
Portal
Counter-Strike series Counter-Strike · Condition Zero · Counter-Strike: Source · Counter-Strike Neo · Counter-Strike Online
Day of Defeat series Day of Defeat · Day of Defeat: Source
Team Fortress series Team Fortress Classic · Team Fortress 2
Other products Deathmatch Classic · Gunman Chronicles · Left 4 Dead · Ricochet · The Orange Box
Soundtracks Valve Soundtracks Tracklist

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Strike"

posted by D-@3R0M0D3LL!N9_K!N9. . . . !:-P @ 3:13 AM   0 Comments

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