CSGO - No Game For Old Men

No context, I'm just amused by how badly the guy on the left is craving my sausage.

If you're into FPS games, then there's a decent chance you're already looking forward to the impending releases of Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 or Star Wars: Battlefront. There's no doubt both games will feature a hilariously overpriced season pass, which will grant you access to 3 or 4 map packs, most of which (in case of CoD) contain regurgitated maps from previous games of the series. Activision will announce the next CoD less than two weeks after Black Ops 3 is out and you can be sure that Battlefront will see a sequel within a year if the game won't absolutely bomb. That way you get to pay full price for the same, slightly modified game year after year without the possibility to create any content of your own. Remember when that was still a thing? The possibility to create maps, skins, models, modifications and whole total conversion mods for AAA FPS games? Or to host a server containing all your favourite custom mods?

One insanely popular Half-Life mod back in the good old days was Counter-Strike. My classmates would talk about this game where somebody shot someone through the seat of an airplane with a desert eagle and apparently there were terrorists and counter-terrorists and I had no idea what the fuck they were on about. Then I grabbed an early CS beta and I absolutely hated it.

I was used to playing death matches on Half-Life. You know, rush in there, shoot anything that moves and if you die, you're just one click away from getting back into the action. Winning matches by scoring the required amount of kills was relatively easy, especially when your hardware and internet connection were better than anyone else's. Simple, braindead fun. And then there was CS.

Shut up! It was 1999!

If you die in CS, you're out for the rest of the round. And I died all the fucking time. Footsteps from at least three guys coming from around the corner? I'm all by myself? Great! Let's run there, I can totally take them all! Except this is a game where a single bullet to the head will usually kill you and you're not gonna hit anything if you press and hold that trigger until you run out of ammo. Especially when you move around a lot while shooting. Not that a lot of people were super awesome at circle-strafing or anything. Heck, some folks still turned using their keyboards!

I would have quit there and then, but suddenly the game turned into this huge phenomenon. My friends would no longer show up on Quake 3 or UT, everyone was playing CS all day and night and every other weekend they had major LAN-parties where, in between sharing pixellated hentai clips, people would play CS. Hundreds of gamers gathered at Terafusion 2K, which owes his name to the fact that about one whole Terabyte of data (music, movies, games etc.) had been shared by the community, or so the legend goes. The dark ages, I know.

Deorum Concordia were my classmates. The lady in the background was one of only two girls at the event.

If you search the web for pictures of that event, along with my old user handle, you'll see a picture of my buttcrack, that somebody took while I was asleep. The first, but most definitely not the last picture of my ass on the internet!
Long story short, you either played CS back then or nobody would play with you at all. And I got okay at the game over time. I was always too impatient and too aggressive to play this thing on a professional level, but I had my moments. My brother got into it, as well. He's responsible for one of my all-time favourite moments in tv history.

You see, NBC Giga was a tv channel  back then, which would occasionally show CS tournaments, where some of the best clans competed for fame and presumably a ton of money. And before every match they'd introduce some of the players, showed the clans and their kit. And there was that scene where you'd see this ancient, nicotine-stained Windows natural keyboard. The windows keys were brutally ripped out, the whole thing was stained and looked hilariously old, filthy and like somebody took it straight out of a dumpster. Then there was this shoddy 1st gen Microsoft optical mouse next to it.

Basically this...

...and that, but with missing parts and covered in filth.

The player using this old shit to compete in the professional games was my brother. His clan eventually found sponsors and he'd switch to proper gaming hardware, but he was living proof that overpriced, fancy-ass gaming gadgets are pretty overrated and that nothing beats skill.

I ran my own clan for a while, nothing fancy, but we had fun and scored a few (casual) victories here and there, but the years went by, the new Counter-Strike: Source happened and split up the community and suddenly there were things like Ragnarok, then Final Fantasy XI, the first MMO of the series, and finally World of Warcraft, so FPS games kinda lost their appeal.

Even Counter-Strike's photorealistic visuals couldn't keep me.

WoW lasted for quite some time, it still draws millions of paying subscribers every month, but eventually I missed shooting people and I got into Call of Duty, which was insanely addictive, because it requires pretty much zero skill and you still get to feel like a badass.

I'm not trying to make fun of it, either. I have about half a dozen CoD games in my Steam library, because I genuinely enjoyed playing (most of) them. I just don't believe they're super difficult, especially in softcore Team Deathmatch, which is the most popular game mode by far. You spray your gunfire in an enemy's general direction, they usually die if you start spraying a half second before your enemy does and if all else fails you'll win by lag compensation. The truth is a tad more complex than that, of course, but in a nutshell, it's all about spraying shit whilst running around your enemy like a spastic squirrel on mescaline. I have two friends, who are well into their 40s, who regularly play CoD and just fucking destroy everything. I don't think you can ever get too old for this shit.

And sometimes rabid canines make love to you.

And then came Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, a game whose user count is bigger than the population of some small countries. A game where pro-gamers get caught cheating during tournament livestreams, where people literally shit themselves on youtube whilst unlocking random cosmetic weapon skins and where prepubescent Russians will shout random insults at you via voice chat. A game with visuals and gunplay so dated, this thing should be some obscure niche title compared to the CoDs and Battlefields of this world, but it's not. It's so hilariously big and so popular, Asia even gets its own spinoff with scantily-clad anime chicks.

I don't understand this new generation of CS fans. Some people spend hundreds on virtual loot boxes and unpack them on live streams and youtube for the sake of clicks and when you check out their user accounts they never even fucking play CSGO. They're fucking faking it, because there's an audience for this kind of shit. How is it possible that some weapon skins sell for hundreds or even thousands in RL cash, when all they do is add a new texture to your weapon and do absolutely nothing else?

Yeah, I can totally see Seal Team 6 rocking some of those.

In terms of gameplay, however, CS hasn't changed one bit. Heck, people are still playing mostly the exact same maps we've played 16 years ago and there's still no aiming down sights. You tap that trigger and try to go for the headshot or figure out your gun's spray pattern and counter it by moving the crosshairs away from the enemy. All these years on Call of Duty have completely fucked me up when I decided to give CSGO a try. TotalBiscuit uploaded a video of it a while back, it looked good, I wanted to try it and it was just like the old days. I fucking hated it, because I died all the time and I couldn't kill shit. I circle-strafed and sprayed like an idiot, I rushed right towards enemy players no matter how badly outnumbered I was and gave up on the whole thing very quickly, at least until giving it a second chance a few days ago.

It came back after a while. In case of doubt, stand still or even crouch. Shift-walk and make no noise. Don't fucking reload after every single kill. Don't stand out in the open like a retard. But even then, the game has been out for a few years now, people play this thing 24/7, they know their spray patterns and they're younger, faster and more experienced with this shit than I'll ever be again in this life. Eventually, I gave up on trying to get any good with an AK47 or an M4 and just went for an FN P90 which can be sprayed fairly safely. Or one of the scoped rifles when I had the cash, so I could actually see and hit shit from a distance. I'm not shy to admit I cheesed it. And eventually this happened...

It'll only go downhill from here. Time to uninstall.

I remained on top of the scoreboard for the rest of the match and, for a moment, everything felt like the good old days. I didn't freak out, panic and fuck up whenever I ran into enemy players. I snuck around, ambushed them, felt in control. Basically the exact opposite of how I normally play CSGO.

The amount of skill it takes to be good at CS is ridiculous. You need an insane level of awareness, map knowledge, a sense of timing when it comes to peeking and reloading and don't get me started on how difficult it is to kill shit when you're used to gunplay mechanisms of games like CoD. When you finally get the hang of it and completely dominate a round or two, you get a sense of reward far more satisfying than any CoD killstreak.

I'm not claiming to be any good now. I had an epic moment and I'm hoping to repeat that at some point, but that's as good as it gets for me. I have so many games to play and so many articles to write for my job, I doubt I'll ever get dedicated enough to reach an at least average skill level on there. But I can see where the hype and fascination stem from, even 16 years later. And the insane amount of pressure when you're the last surviving member on the team and everyone gets to watch when you save the round - or utterly fail by being a complete noob. I think I'm gonna get my FPS fix on CSGO from now on. Sorry, CoD, we had some great times together, but I've run into an old flame and she's still surprisingly hot.

-Cat