Anyone else played Counter Strike?

[Darwin]

I rented counter strike and played about 2 hours of it online tonight. It's starting to grow on me. I may actually buy this game.

I'll wait till I play it more to render a final verdict, but so far it's very competant. Counter strike is kinda fast paced, and arcadish. It plays a lot more like Wolfenstien than Rainbow Six or Ghost Recon, however it's not as arcadish as Unreal Championship. It's kinda in the middle between run-and-gun verses slow-methodical movement.

The graphics will definitely underwhelm you at first. However, once you get used to them, it doesn't bother you. The good news is that the game runs at 60 fps and is very smooth. The controls are responsive. The game is quite easy to get into at first.

Gonna play more.

[Darwin]

Ahhh, nothing like replying to my own thread to make it look bigger. Anyhow, I'm sure all of you are just dying to know about Counter Strike for the Xbox. I'm at about the 4 or 5 hour mark with the game, and here's what I think.

The short, short version (for those of you short on time) first:

- Yes, I am probably going to buy this game. Very fun.
- No, it's not as good as Rainbow Six 3 or Wolfenstein. As a rough estimate, compared to other FPS's for Live I'd rate it:
Rainbow Six - 9 out of 10, Wolfenstein - 9 out of 10, Unreal Championship - 6 out of 10, Soldier of Fortune II - 5 out of 10 ... and I'd give Counter Strike a 7 out of 10.

Now, I'll elaborate a bit more. To be blunt, the game does look 5 years old. Low detailed graphics and simple character animations. However, nothing in the graphics detracts from the gameplay ... except it may take a little while to learn how to recognize enemies from allies (cause the graphics are so low detailed). But, to it's credit, the game runs at a consistent (what appears to be) 60 frames per second. The game is very, very smooth.

The controls are very responsive and very easy to get into. Everything you need is right at your fingers. On the other hand, the controls are very simplistic when compared to Rainbow Six 3, which means you cannot do as much with your guy. You can adjust the sensitivity of the sticks and you can pick the standard setup (left stick to move and right stick to turn/look) or the "Legacy" setup we saw in Halo.

The game is very different from Rainbow Six. The game is a lot faster paced. There is also less planning and coordinating than what you see in Rainbow Six. It still has strategy. However, it does not provide as much team cooperation as what we see in Rainbow Six 3. There is less cognitive strategy and more hand-eye coordination strategy than compared to Rainbow Six. But it is still not a complete free-for-all, arcade shooter like Unreal. It's sort of a mixture between the run-and-gun and the carefully-calculated-movement styles of play, leaning more to the run-and-gun side. In fact, the pacing and style of Counter Strike is very similar to Wolfenstein.

And this is perhaps Counter-Strike's biggest barrier. It doesn't offer much better than what you see with Wolfenstein. Wolfenstein has the same faster-paced team play, with objective-based game modes, all with excellent levels. However, Wolfenstein also offers the added depth of character-specific roles (medic, engineer, etc.) for which Counter strike lacks. Also, Wolfenstein has more variety in it's game modes, offering some modes where you sit out the round when you die or modes where you can repawn after death. Counterstrike has only two modes of play (plant/diffuse a bomb, or rescue hostages). Also, there is little differentiation between the terrorists and counter-terrorists, with each side's guns being almost identical. Counterstrike does have good level designs as well, but I think Wolfenstein is slightly better.

Counterstrike does have one advantage over Wolfenstein: the ability to add bots to online play. I find the humans verses bots a little more enjoyable. You can even use this to stack the odds against you ( for example, 3 humans verses 6 bots) to really fine-tune the difficulty to your liking. The bots are good-enough to get the job done, particularly on the harder levels. However, they are not as smart as the AI in Rainbow Six 3.

One problem I have with Counter Strike is the ability to talk to your remaining comrads, even after death. See the problem? The dead guys can watch anyone (even the enemies) to see where they are, and then relay that info back to their remaining comrads via the headset.

Like I said, Counter Strike is very smooth. Also, the game seems to have a higher tolerance for lag than Wolfenstein and (especially) Unreal. It will suffer some lag if the rooms are large or people have slow connections. However, the effect of lag seems to be much less than Wolf and Unreal. Perhaps it's because we're dealing with older programming that doesn't require as much info to be transmitted.

Another problem I have with the game is not the game itself. Rather, the "clientelle" that play it. There seems to be a lot of immature people playing Counter Strike. You'll find this with Wolfenstein and other games, but it seemed to be highly prevalent the last 2 nights on Counter Strike. And even when I managed to get into rooms with more mature gamers, there wasn't much team-work going on. I was following some guys to back them up, but they didn't seem to care. Most people run to the center of the map as soon as the round starts, no real concern for strategy. I would talk to them like, "I don't see anyone to the left", or "I've got the bomb, so I'll hang back a bit", or "You go left and I'll flank them from the other side" ... but noone was talking back. I played in about 15 different rooms, and have yet to experience one game where the guys wanted to talk strategy. I've also gotten the feeling that many of these guys are vetrans from the PC version and have little patience with new guys. I had countless number of people saying, "Stop stealing my kill, Methadone Man", when I wasn't trying to steal their kill, I was backing them up so they wouldn't get shot. It's a team effort, for crying out-loud! A stark contrast to Rainbow Six 3, where I can join a random game and you'll usually hear them talking strategy. There's just something about Rainbow Six that promotes team comrodary ... and this is missing in Counter Strike right now.

Counter Strike seems to be void of any kind of frills. It is very plain, from the controls, to the goals of the game, to the graphics, to the very short and pointless training modes, to the laughable "single player mode". The game would be better priced at $20 or 30, because it does not offer as much material as what you get with Wolfenstein or Rainbow Six.

For some reason, I seem to have taken a shine to Counter Strike. I seem to like it better than what the game deserves from a critical/review standpoint. It's something that I can pick up and play and have instant fun. However, Counterstrike seems to lack the overall depth that we see in Rainbow Six 3 and Wolfenstein. Also, Counter Strike offers a very paltry "single player mode" which is the exactly the same as online play, only with bots. Rainbow Six and Wolfenstien, on the other hand, offer very rich single player modes.

[TwiztidFreakMike]

i play alot of CS.. Rs3 got boring after a week heh... its just another FPS to me... but yea... i like alotta the stuff on CS. i havent played it on pc in like.. forever cuz i hate playing games on PC.. especially FPS's yuck.. odd huh?

but after gabbing on being the tired man i am not knowing what the hell im talkin about... CS = awesome RS3 = mediocre (only thing above average is its graphics)