|
Enough with games that’s just a slugfest with big weapons
and infinite lives. Give me objectives and a noble cause.
That’s what Counterstrike (by Sierra) is all about.
This highly entertaining multiplayer first-person shooter
pits two teams against each other with specific objectives.
Sure, you can kill all members of the opposing side to win,
but you can also carry out objectives that make the other
side sweat and force them to look for you.
The two teams are the terrorists and the counter-terrorists.
Both sides are heavily armed and lethal with modern day weapons.
The graphics are decent, especially considering the age of
the game. After a few seconds to purchase equipment, armor,
and weapons, the teams are let loose on each other. The two
most frequently encountered objectives are to free hostages
(or to prevent that from happening) and to bomb a site (or
to defuse the bomb). Other fun variations include the VIP,
where one person is equipped with only a pistol and the game
ends when he is shot or when he reaches the final extraction
destination, and jailbreak, where one side is lightly armed
but trying to escape.
One example is a hostage situation on board
a plane that is parked in an airport terminal. Counter-terrorist
forces start in the waiting room or in the luggage handling
area. Their goal is to enter the plane and to extract the
hostages to safety. The terrorists, on the hand, start within
the plane with the hostages. Their goal is to seal off as
much of the plane as possible and to completely eliminate
the counter-terrorist forces to end the round. Protecting
all hostages is very difficult, so choices have to be made
on which section(s) of the plane to protect. On the flip side,
terrorists plant bombs. A favorite bombing scenario occurs
in a natural history museum. There are two precious skeletons
of dinosaurs. The terrorists must plant the bomb in one of
the locations and protect the bomb long enough for the bomb
to go off. Even if the counter-terrorists manage to kill all
of the terrorists, the terrorists win if the timer on the
bomb expires and it detonates.
Counterstrike adds the element of earning
money with each round that I really enjoy. Initially, there
is not enough money for anything other than light weaponry.
With successful rounds and/or kills of the members of the
opposing team, money flows into your coffers. This makes a
team that is winning that much easier to extend the win streak.
More money means more weapons and more armor, or perhaps grenades
and specialized equipment. It forces players to decide whether
they want to spend on offense, or defense; to spend money
in this round in hopes of earning more money, or to save money
for the next round.
The weapons range from knives, to pistols
of many types, to small machine guns, semi-automatic rifles,
sniper rifles, and machine guns. The special weapons include
explosive grenades, smoke grenades, flash bang grenades, night
vision goggles, and explosive defuse kits. Many weapons have
secondary attack features that would use the scope or place
a silencer on the barrel.
As for the objectives, typically there are
at least two ways to get into any important area and two places
to plant a bomb. This makes tactics important for a team-against-team
style game play. Does one concentrate all the team members
in protecting one site? Does one send out a few scouts to
the second site to look for trouble? Does one attack all out
on one site, or split the forces? These real decisions make
the game entertaining. Maps are generally small though, so
lots of action takes place in a small span of time.
If team play is done, subsets of the group
will specialize. These include snipers, scouts, and semi-automatic
rifle ‘clean-up’ forces. Strategies can be designed
to suit the style of play of the team members and their specialties.
These factors combine to make Counterstrike
a solid game. What else is great with the game? The sounds
of the weapons, shell casings hitting the ground, funny hostage
voices, and (sometimes) the ambient music get top notches.
The key commands should be familiar with first-person shooter
players.
What don’t I like? I don’t like
how one has to jump and crouch at the same time in many maps.
I don’t like how the game hangs in strange places when
joining a network game. I have not had problems once the game
starts, but there have been times when getting into the game
were problematic. For the last round of play, you can also
see the last person that was shot “dance and jiggle”
on the screen as the computer computes the scores for the
round and loads the next map. For a game that has been out
so long, you would think these bugs would be cleaned out by
now.
It’s easy to understand the popularity
of Counterstrike with its blend of weapons, fluid motion,
and game play. Although it lacks the specialization in roles
of soldiers of later games, it is a solid and well made game.
|
Counter-Strike