Play Counter Strike 1.6, with full multiplayer, in the browser

When did it go downhill? I thought CS: Source was great fun. Didn't really care for CS:Go

op implies that after half life 1 engine cs 1.6 it wasn't same game anymore, which is a common sentiment among people who were there. first, besides I think "urban terror" which was a mod for q2 engine, cs was the first "realistic" shooter, so if you played it beta to 1.6 you were part of the creation of the new genre. second, most of the mechanism from half-life engine were still exposed and the path from beta to 1.6 was at least in part about tweaking your cfg to give you a little edge. each new release would nerf and remove some "exploit", and it was kind of exciting in its own way. third, cs after it got bought by valve and later cs:source became big publisher game, explicitly "e-sport", crystallized in the conventions, big and flashy, one of many "realistic" shooters, that came to dominate the shooter genre.

Source wasn't well received by a portion of the community. The community bisected for a while with some folks staying on 1.6. I don't recall everything behind the 20+ year old drama but it was a thing. Source eventually won out and the rest is history.

source engine is different from goldsrc, and the "feel" of goldsrc goes back to q2 (and some idiosyncrasies from q1). so if you spent several years playing from beta days, or for some people transitioned into cs from even more years of q2 or q1, then source would just be an entirely new experience. there's nothing valve could've done to preserve the right feeling, which is fine. old timers continued playing goldsrc until full blown grown up took over, where's new timers were formed by the conventions of source and further.

seems like a absurd reason not to like a game, stuck in nostalgia and district elitism reserved for the "hipster" crowd

I agree. The devs couldn't continue working on CS 1 forever, and eventually a sequel would HAVE to be made somehow. It was never going to please everybody, no matter what they did. Im glad that, despite the controversy, CS: Source still ended up being good.

I remember I got it for GMod, and played it out of boredom one day and I ended up loving it!

Source was a complete mess. It took years of updates before that game was playable competitively -- it never truly was. The half-life 2 engine was a disaster, and most players didn't have the hardware to run those games well at the time. That's what made 1.6 so wonderful - you could run it on single core Pentium 4 processor and literally anything better. For 10 years, it had the best gameplay and a huge playerbase, with entry level system requirements. Many people I knew didn't move to CSS, because getting a $1000 PC was out of the cards - most of us were kids.

In 2007, DirectTV killed the North American professional CS scene by pushing CS:Source into their televised CGS league. The top pro players all left the 1.6 scene for 30-40k/yr contracts to play in CGS (a no brainer)... most of them openly hated the game while playing in this league too. The 1.6 scene in the US was still large and active, but never the same. Teams in Europe, Asia, Brazil & elsewhere continued to play 1.6. After CGS folded in 2008, global competition sort died off and many of he top NA players retired. There weren't many NA 1.6 players good enough to keep up with European pro teams after about 2010.

Imo, CS was an incredible scene from like 2000-2008. CSGO has enjoyed a great run from like 2013-2018?. It's definitely lost steam from the battle royal shooters (PUBG & Fortnite), and now Valorant infringing on it's player base. Valve hasn't really been very active in its own competitive scene, which may also be hurting.

I don't think the Source engine is a mess, personally. Even if CS:Source isn't as good as CS1.6, Half Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Day of Defeat, etc. are all solid games that feel good to play. I personally like CS:Source because thats the one I grew up with, it being packaged with G-Mod and all.

I'm surprised is wasn't mentioned yet but towards the end of CS:Source, just before Go, Valve nerfed the aiming and added in randomization to bullets fired that couldn't be corrected for. It was done to make the game more approachable to new players as a skill equalizer.

(q2 mod wasn't called urban terror (which is a name of a free software cs remake) but I can't remember what it was called. cs guys originally made "action quake", which was a proto-cs but on quake engine, but I have a strong feeling there was another such mod with "urban" in the name. unlike that anybody who remembers will read this comment…)

IIRC Hitboxes were different in the early days which kept many folks on 1.6

CSS got better as it got older, but I heard about grumblings from the 2010 update after I had already quit playing it. I probably played until 2008/2009, and then started CSGO again in 2012 or something.

Some of my CSS memories - We used to shoot barrels on top of the bomb that would prevent defuses until you shot them off. If you didn't have a grenade or extra ammo (pistol rounds?) this was hilariously difficult. Leagues had to ban this tactic, but there was no setting to just get rid of the movable barrels so it still happened occasionally.

- There was a bug where a players view would sit above their player model - so they could duck behind a box and see over it without being seen. I never learned how to abuse it, but it was obviously very effective.

- Head hitboxes were bigger in CSS than 1.6. The game was just easy.

- The deagle was way too good in CSS.

- Hacking in CSS was really bad. It took a while for 3rd party anti-cheat clients to catch up. League play was plagued by hackers.

- CSS had ragdoll physics instead of death animations. Occasionally players would die while sitting or leaning up against a wall. If you took a quick peek this might make you think it's a player crouching and still alive. The ragdoll deaths made it harder to detect if a player was dead or not

- if they were running at you and died they might still be falling forward in what looks like a running/ducking animation for 100ms or so.

- The maps were needlessly complex. The addition of flower pots, cans, trash, arches, window sills, steps etc etc made grenade physics less predictable. There were times where trash would block a doorway and make entry into a site impossible without sounds from it as you walk over. CSGO has this same problem, even with the chickens. (https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/7ygcve/chi...)

- I remember play shadows being something that was a huge competitive advantage for players with a better PC. If you set your shadow quality too low, you wouldn't see them - and there were certain areas where you could see a players shadow if you had the setting on high.

- Bullet impacts into walls were harder to see because of how "dusty" CSS was. When you sprayed into a wall, the clouds of dust that would come off made it hard to see where the shots were landing. CSGO greatly improved this. (https://youtu.be/Y4TVegjgvXc?t=180)

I could go on - obviously I kinda hated the game, but I also had a trash PC at the time and was fraggin out with 45fps-110fps and a single core processor for a while.

> That's what made 1.6 so wonderful - you could run it on single core Pentium 4 processor and literally anything better.

I played CS 1.6 on a Pentium 1 133mhz processor and no discrete gpu and it worked fine, though I did eventually get an athlon xp 1700+ and geforce 3 ti 500.

The game ran on practically everything.

ActionQuake2 was a hugely popular mod for Quake 2 and for a while it coexisted with Counterstrike. The gameplay was way faster compared to CounterStrike with itsclassic Quake2 movement.

In the end Valve supported CounterStrike whilst ID software did not support mods at all for their platform which in turn sealed the fate for Actionquake2. There was attempts to port it to Quake3, but the gameplay never compared.

Some of the same people were behind Actionquake2 and Counterstrike and there's an argument to be made that AQ2 was the proto CS game.

yeah I even remember playing actionquake2 in maybe 98 or 99 shortly before cs became a thing. tbh I played it maybe twice, because at the time I was playing q2 competitively and actionquake2 seemed more like a novelty. also I might be wrong, but my impression is that actionquake2 never got big in Eastern Europ: since we mostly played at lan cafes, without internet, you were kind of forced into a handful of games. q2, cs, sc. but I could've sworn there was another mod that had the word "urban" in the name. like "urban assault" or someshit.

Don't think Source ever won out, Global Offensive was the game to dethrone 1.6. At least in our "semi-professional" neck of the woods CS:S adoption was 30% at best. A clear majority were still playing 1.6 even when Global Offensive came out, and even then it took a year or two of updates to make that game good enough to start convincing significant portions of people to switch over. For example in 2011 Electronic Sports World Cup just before Global Offensive came out 1.6 still had a significantly larger price pool than CS:S. Funnily it was also the first and last ESWC to even have a CS:S tournament, even though the game had been out for 7 years at that point.

Cool. Thanks for the history. I fell off CS except for occasional casual sundays and dove head first into MMO land around that time so it's all rather fuzzy. I kinda forgot Global Offensive was it's own release.

The headshot adjustments were so bad. It felt like everyone in source was getting a headshot. And completely agreed on deagle - you had players _just_ rolling with it the whole time.

One other change I remember is that the AK became a proper sniper weapon. It was a little more uncontrolled pre source.

OP here - maybe you're right.

You have to remember, these kinds of games ingrain heavy habits. You get a feel for various nuances in the game (eg shooting people through a wall, recoil of a certain people). They may feel surface level but it can be jarring when it all gets changed.