Videogame History Part 1: Half Life And Counterstrike

This kicks off a new series here called Videogame History, where I'll be replaying and talking about some old videogames, and recounting some old war stories. I've been playing a lot of Counterstrike: Source recently, and it made me a bit sentimental for the original, and all the fun I had with the old Half-Life engine. Getting all misty-eyed, I decided to dust off the first Half-Life and give it another play-through, and recount some Counterstrike memories.

Half-Life

I've been playing the hell out of the original Half-Life. I had it back in the day, but on my pentium 166 (overclocked to 200!), I had to run it in a tiny window. Imagine playing an entire game in somebody's animated gif avatar for a forum or something, and you basically have it. Of course, I've played Half-Life 2 semi-obsessively, and by semi I actually mean ridiculously. I've gone through much of the game switching to noclip mode over and over to check out the surroundings and overall level architecture. If I ever get a pet dog I'm going to name it Robot.

Anyway, while playing the original Half-Life, I had some initial difficulty dealing with the look, having become accustomed to Source and its delicate, understated beauty. As you can guess, I like the Source engine, but I got used to the original Half-Life and its modified Quake engine again pretty quickly. The gameplay still holds up really well. The feel of movement is awesome, except for the horrible time I had trying to grab some ladders, which I believe may have been a change to the engine wrought later on, perhaps for the multiplayer part or something. Overall though, the shooting, running, and jumping are all fun. There is also a decent degree of physics implemented fairly well.

The game takes you through some interesting situations. Although the massive, chunky architecture, due to lack of polygons, unsophisticated textures, and pixellated static backdrop images make it a bit of a harder sell than modern games, the game still does a great job of immersing you in the locations, and the story which unfolds through non-compulsory character speech and the occasional scripted event is actually really awesome. Being Gordon Freeman kicks ass. Inexplicably, at one point in the game I found myself all of a sudden thinking the phrase "it resembles nothing more than a crystalline beef processor." It was probably around 5am when I thought that, but it made no fucking sense even to me, and I was the one thinking it.

I've been playing the game in hard mode of course, and this shit is HARD. I usually have to replay each encounter, and then cleverly engineer the situation ahead of time, rigging different spots with trip-mines and moving boxes to create cover. It almost makes it into a puzzle game, because some of the enemies just attack too rapidly and devastatingly for me to fight off in pure, simple combat.

All of the set pieces are still cool, and you can really see how Half-Life 2 grew out of this. Similar to many HL2 scenarios where the Combine soldiers are getting their asses kicked by antlions, or the rebels are fighting Striders, you'll often come upon battles in HL where you can wait for the military and Xen forces to wipe each other out, sometimes giving you control of a cannon to kick a little ass of your own with. You also get nice scenes like fleeing from the giant creature long enough to call in an airstrike on it.

One retarded thing, playing in retrospect, all of the security guards have Barney's voice, and many scientists have Dr. Kleiner's voice. It actually doesn't bother me as much as it may bother others, but it's like I'm playing with a cast that consists of a vast collective of clones of just those two characters from HL2, and they are horribly slaughtered over and over for my enjoyment.

Another problem, I have to turn off my damn bit-torrent downloads to log in to Steam to play. It's fine to turn back on later, but executing the game runs like its setting up a server and then you log into it. Also, maybe due to the fact that I downloaded this iteration on Steam, I got all these weird bugs, like occasionally loading a new map only to have it half load, leaving me either stuck in place staring at half-formed crap or running through a level without some vital creatures and objects spawned. There are some other issues as well, like the fact that the last few levels are pretty crappy. Also, sometimes I'll be riding elevators and just get stuck in them, and the vehicles are mostly buggy pieces of crap, although hilarious and fun as hell to use. I owe hours and hours of my life to the buggy Half Life vehicle code, but I'll get back to that in a bit. First, I have to talk about the most important mod ever created.

Portal to Xen

Counterstrike

Everybody knows about Counterstrike, it's the greatest mod for any game ever made. It's still got more players than Counterstrike: Source, and it's been the main event at videogame tournaments for years running. The first game to take a realistic approach to bullet damage and burdened movement, Counterstrike raised the bar on competitive gameplay for first-person shooters to a degree that Source couldn't even surpass. Up until version 1.4, where the jump lag that is the bane of my existence was implemented, no online shooter could possibly compete with CS for purity of control and balanced combat. Before World of Warcraft, CS was the original online destroyer of lives.

In addition to the regular map rotation in CS, dust, dust2, office, aztec, seige (at one point), assault, and a few others, eventually some custom user-made maps began to see some regular play. Almost any CS player is likely to have played fy_iceworld at some point or another, and probably scoutzknivez as well. These maps were and still are far more common than some of the original maps and playmodes implemented by the designers of CS, such as the escape missions. The real fun starts with the more rare custom maps, usually played on all custom servers.

In the climber maps, your job is to make increasingly impossible-seeming jumps

Nipper

Any true veteran of custom Counterstrike maps will be familiar with the name Nipper. An incredibly prolific map-maker, specializing in unrefined but conceptually innovative maps, produced such classics as crazytank, megacrazycar. All of them feature the buggy Half Life engine vehicle code at length. For those who haven't played crazytank, imagine the CT's starting off next to an enormous drivable tank with multiple floors, traversing a set path to the escape zone, including a cliff you have to drop down, versus a group of terrorists each with their own personal motorcycles and mounted turrets assailing the CTs as they are trying to escape. It was neverending fun. Half the time the tank driver would get you stuck in the walls and smash half of his own team, but the times I would slam my motorcycle over a ramp, crash headlong into the tank, infiltrate it and slaughter the entire enemy team from the inside stand out as some of the greatest times I've ever had playing any game in my life.

As the years following Half Life's original release went by, Counterstrike maps saw increasingly over-the-top retrofits to keep things fresh. I remember an entire 48 hour period straight my friends and I spent on one server that had ninja ropes that let you swing like spiderman across the map. On crazytank3, Nipper's third version of the legendary battle, the tank is placed on a giant boat that the CTs are trying to navigate through mine-infested waters. The Ts get smaller boats, but with ninja ropes the boats were meaningless, you were already totally free. Getting good with them turned battles into graceful airborne carnage.

Interestingly, Nipper still makes maps for CS:Source, much more refined in look this time, but still hilarious. His website can be found here. If anybody has any of their own crazy custom map experiences they want to talk about, hit the comments people!