Counter-Strike

" I will have to counter all the fanboys and duck low with this one"

There are some games that are great, there are some games that are horrible, and then there is counter strike. For those whom made love to their pc screens while waiting for their next turn to play, Counter-Strike is alive and kicking once again, but now for a more normal group of chaps. The Xbox gamers. I know, I know oh my god counter strike is reaching deep into the reaches of hell right? Exactly. Counter-Strike on Xbox is definatly less impressive then it was so many years ago.

First what strikes me as horrendusly terrible is the A.I. for bots. Sometimes they are fricking smart, and other times...they perform so poorly. There is really no reason to play with the bots as they are boring, and have no actual personalitys. They need a bot to be the guy that jumps a lot, the camper, the ambusher, etc.

Anouther reason you will not want to play offline is that there is no replay value. Honestly, you run around you kill people, or take part in your severly clean cut missions. Pretty poor territory for such an aging game to tread. I expected all new missions and everything. Well, if you have yet to play let me explain. There are missions in the game which for the most part corespond with your side. On the counter Terrorist side you defuse bombs, and rescue hostages, or kill all terrorists. On the terrorist side you either kill CTs, fuse bombs, or secure hostages.

Killing is easy. To accomplish this mission on either side, just kill all the members on the opposing team. Actualy the easiest way to victory is to kill. Now planting a bomb seems like on of those huge complicated things, but actualy all it is, is finding a bomb site, holding down X and waiting for it to blow up to win. Defusing a bomb can only be done once its planted. You do this reverse the steps of planting it. Rescuing hostages is also a daunting task. It brings in much money, and is also fairly fun to do. Just don't shoot the hostages even if you are a terrorist, becuase it lowers your money.

I definatly suggest playing through the tutorials on this one. It teaches you how to buy weapons, what they mean, how to play the game in general, how to plant a bomb, and how to rescue a couple hostages. It also teaches you how to get ammo for your guns which will become extremely valuable, becuase god forbid if you run out of ammo and have to knife your way back to base, well it isn't a pretty scene, lets leave it at that.

The graphics in this game are ridiculously beautiful. The way the rain drops down, the way the sun beams on your in-game skin. The way your hands look so vibrant in all the great lighting. Lighting...wow. It is all good here! Lights flash in from the windows, and all around, and I found some shadow casting, although that didn't do much for me. The characters look like of like an older PS2 game might have been at the top of its game. It looks good, but it still has the old feel to it. The guns are shiny, and that makes fastkilr happy.

A great game dosn't come without its drawbacks. For mario it is invisable walls, for steel battalion it is price, for halo it is over-hype, for counter-strike it is dying. Yes, I know dying should be a huge part of an action packed shooter. But this isn't your fathers shooting game either. It is not even close to the arcade wonders which Unreal Tournament brilliantly investigates in its full scale collasial xbox hit Unreal Championship. But you know what happens when you die? You get to watch the rest of the round play out. You may sit there for 5-10 minutes before you actualy get to play and HEY what do you know, youv'e been sniped. Go back to waiting. This is why camping has always been a problem in CS for me.

The guns firing off is music to my ears. Blood flowing out of the vital wounds in a comrad can be heard all around as he is filled with bullets of metal. Stinging bullets of death. You must move quickly, becuase in CS there is no turning back. One other thing about the audio is the in game composition-its silent, which can make for tense situations but you would think it odd that a game with this much fan-backing power couldn't have included a grand scale musical to the equivlent of MOH: Rising Sun.

Rivals are aplenty for the xbox. Before, on the PC there wasn't really such a thing as tactical shooter. It kind of marred too overly ignored catagorys together, to burn them into one happily family, which would soon take over many kids and consume the life of the chessclubs across the globe.

When not online with the game there is really nothing to do. Once online there isn't really a whole lot either. Each mission has its one theme, go bomb this, rescue that, kill him. It all gets very tiring, fairly quickly. I think CS was one of the most over-rated games ever made.

To put things into full perspective, counter strike really feels like a real life event. The controls are spot on, along with every other ohysical gaming element known to man on this side of unreal championship. It is nice to keep good ties with gates, and the CS team sure likes to follow his newest profitable inventions dont they?

8/10
Could have been a nine if 1 player was good.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 02/01/04