Geez. That’s the largest number of Half-Life players I’ve seen yet. I guess nobody gave them the Tom Chick diatribe: THAT GAME IS THREE YEARS OLD! IT’S SO 1999! GET OVER YOURSELVES!
cstrike
24699 servers, 96432 players
dod
1086 servers, 4994 players
tfc
1358 servers, 4240 players
ns
432 servers, 2046 players
(and the rest)
For the record, even I am sick of Counter-Strike now, and I have been for a year.
I’m sure I could pick it up again, but it has evolved from being Best. Multiplayer. Ever. into the new standard baseline for all subsequent multiplayer FPS games.
Isn’t progress great?
I think it’s good. It means (at least until Doom 3 comes out), we’re at a point where gameplay (CS, Battlefield 1942) is more important than graphics (UT2K3). I mean, BF1942 has double UT2K3’s players! That makes me happy.
Of course, that just means there’ll be a spate of CS and BF1942 clones coming in our future.
I guess nobody gave them the Tom Chick diatribe: THAT GAME IS THREE YEARS OLD! IT’S SO 1999! GET OVER YOURSELVES!
And where did Tom Chick deliver this diatribe? Oh, that’s right, he didn’t.
I don’t see what the big deal is about being three years old. Is that supposed to be the magic ‘you’re too old’ number for a game?
Have you guys seen Natural Selection? Looks really nice. Even that James Bond Nightfire game has a few decent looking bits for a Half-Life engine game. The Specialists mod looks pretty sharp. Day of Defeat still looks nice.
Maybe I haven’t been playing the right mods, but I’ve seen some Unreal Tournament stuff lately that looks way more dated than the latest Half-Life mods.
-TomCounter-Strike is not a force that magically transformed the industry with the sheer unprecedented brilliance of one little man’s humble efforts. The things that made:
- multiplayer gaming,
- the mod community, and
- realistic weapon effects
what they are today were in motion well before Valve started siphoning funds into Minh Le’s figurative garage.
Your fanboy stance towards CS is obvious, but I don’t see why the above is so hard for you to understand. CS can still be a great mod without being the Second Coming.
And it’s still not the Best Game of 2000.
-Tom
the problem with CS is not the engine or how dated anything looks or runs…the problem is that valve has been completely unable to stop the rampant cheating that goes on. steam and almost weekly security module updates haven’t even come close to helping. recent changes make 3rd party admin tools less effective not more.
CS is still very fun and plays great, unfortunately, you almost need to play on a private server to have a clean game. to me that completely ruins the it…so i disolved my clan ND quit playing. too many good games out there to suffer through ‘teh 1337 n0085’.
Ah, no, you guys had this exact same argument before, Wumpus even posted that exact same quote… :cry: Look what you made Daddy do…
I was on the verge of re-installing CS several times in the past year, every time I was talking to one of my friends about it. And, inevitably, just as I was reaching for the disc one of us would recall the cheats.
Then I’d throw the HL disc off into some neglected corner, hoping to remember next time why it’s there.
Ah, no, you guys had this exact same argument before, Wumpus even posted that exact same quote…
I don’t even see what that quote, which is hardly controversial, has to do with the diatribe he credited to me.
Note to self: remember to ignore wumpus.
-TomAh, man, that’s what you said last time! (Turns out that was not the same quote, but you expressed nearly identical sentiments)
http://www.quartertothree.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1056&highlight=counterstrike
“Have you guys seen Natural Selection?”
Its a pretty good mod although I agree with a few other friends that have played it who think there’s a definate “steam roller” effect in the game, in that its seems to be pretty much impossible to come back from behind. Having a good commander is very important and can screw up everything if he/she is a dork.
As for Cstrike I still like it, and have played some lan matches but I don’t play online anymore with the cheating and such around now. But the continued dominance of HL/CS is still pretty amazing.
Natural Selection plays really well too. It’s the successor to Gloom, which was my all time favorite Quake 2 mod.
Another reason NS servers will never see CS numbers is that NS is a huge bandwidth and CPU hog. You can rent a public CS server for about $60 a month, private CS servers for $30, but NS servers are $150.
Good game, though the commander’s job is thankless.
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think that’s necessarily it at all. I think the viral nature of some games is the reason for their building success. It’s a momentum thing. If you play CS, and it’s what your friends play, then it’s what you play. It’s on the machines at the local LAN PC game place, and it’s what those people are playing. So you fire it up, too. Switching to BF1942, UT2k3, or whatever else is easy. But leaving your buddies or being one of two people playing that game at the LAN parlor is tough, and getting a GROUP of people to switch is tough.
I know the words sound silly as they come out of my mouth, but CounterStrike is wildly popular because CounterStrike is wildly popular.
It wouldn’t have gotten there if it wasn’t also a very good game. But I don’t think that it proves gameplay is more important than graphics. What would prove that would be if a game with graphics that are NOT better than CounterStrike came along with superior gameplay and started siphoning off CS players.
I was more referring to BF1942 pulling in double the people over UT2K3. They were released in close proximity, both with demos, and the better game is winning over the better graphics.
I agree with what you say too, though.
Cstrike is a perfect example of gameplay over eye candy. Even when it first started to get known there were better engine graphics wise with Q3A and Unreal. The Quake engine had been the engine of choice for online gamers and mod teams untill then. Cstrike came in with great addicting gameplay and built a name by basically word of mouth. People played it and told their friends and they got into it.