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

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.

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!

(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 cs guys originally made "action quake", which was a proto-cs but on quake engine, but I have a strong feeling there was another such mod with "urban" in the name.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…)

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.

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.