CounterStrike Culture
In today’s gaming world, any gamer will tell you that there is nothing more addicting and challenging than a good game of multiplayer. Doesn’t matter if it’s a LAN party, or an online battle, multiplayer games create a sense of skill rather than class. With the release of Half-Life winner of 50 “Game of the Year” awards and “Best PC Game Ever” by PC Gamer came the modification Counter-Strike (CS). Based on the Half-Life engine, CS separates itself from other multiplayer games by establishing itself as a realistic mod.

CS is a team-based multiplayer where one team plays the terrorists and the other team plays the counter-terrorists. The opposing teams battle each other on urban maps while trying to achieve goals with modern day weaponry. With each round averaging from three to five minutes, weapons are purchased at the start of the game from a list that range from pistols, sub-machine guns, sniper rifles and flash-bang grenades. But instead of being able to easily pick out your guns and accessories at the start of every round, each player has to first earn money by killing the opponnent, winning rounds, rescuing hostages and so on before being able to afford the weapons of choice. The game keeps track of all the rounds and ranks each player by their number of kills and deaths in the game, pushing each player to do their best to be at the top.

    
These screenshots are courtesy of counter-strike.net

CS can be acquired in two ways. First, you can purchase the Half-Life game and then download the CS mod off the Internet for free. This way you can have both Half-Life and CS. The other way is to purchase CS as a retail version, meaning that it doesn’t require you to have the Half-Life game.

Due to the increasing popularity of CS, resources about the game can be found just about anywhere. Whether it’s an official or an unofficial site, these sites will update you with the latest news and the newest updates that are available. Sites like Counterstrike Center will give you the latest downloads, new maps, skins, and weapon skins. Other sites dedicate themselves to improve the anti-cheat movement. With many of the multiplayer games, cheating has become a big concern for those hard-core gamers. Cheat downloads range from allowing players to see through walls (wall hack) to auto-aim. Sites like Punk Buster (PB) will allow you to download their files to install into the game. Once you have these files, you can play on servers that require these PB files. These files will allow servers to determine if the gamer is using any cheats during the game, and if cheating is detected, the player will be removed from the server.

With today’s high performance cards and blistering processors, programmers are able to design extremely detailed and realistic environments for games such as CS, setting new standards for future first person shooter (FPS) multiplayer games. CS is supported on all APIs: 3dfx miniGL, OpenGL, and Direct3D, giving you the ability to experience improved 3D models, fantastic animation, and smooth game play that meets today’s standard definition of 3D gaming. Inside the games options menu, users are able to specify which API they want use depending on their operation system and video card. Most cards support Direct3D and OpenGL, other cards like 3dfx cards are supported by miniGL, which operates similar to OpenGL. What are APIs and what’s the difference? APIs are methods that programmers use to design and harness the power of hardware acceleration to thrust games into the realm of professional-quality rendering, texture mapping and special effects. Differences between the two: Direct3D runs only on Windows operating systems and OpenGL is a cross-platform for other operating systems like Linux and MAC. Having the latest API drivers will definitely help solve display errors and improving game play.

Here are a few common problems gamers experience when trying to play the game.

During game play, gamers will sometime experience garbled or unexpected polygons also known as “tearing within scene”
Solution: Update to the latest DirectX or OpenGL (depending on which one is used). Update to the latest video display driver.

Systems may sometimes crash back to the desktop or even lock-up
Solution: Update the latest chipset driver for the motherboard. Check to see if the video card is sharing the same IRQ with other PCI devices such as a sound card or NIC. The video card should have its own IRQ and not be shared with other devices. This can be checked by going into your device manager under windows.

Cannot achieve any faster frame rates in the game
Solution: Your computer and video card may limit you to the FPS that your are experiencing. FPS may sometimes want to be improved but one thing to keep in mind is that CS defaults it FPS to 70-80. To achieve better FPS, a player would have to manually modify the default settings inside the game console.