4 ms·
> On a side note, it's a bit tough to think that all this was 25 years ago now, but I still remember all this quite well I also remember it like it was yesterd
by lqet 2y ago
> On a side note, it's a bit tough to think that all this was 25 years ago now, but I still remember all this quite well
I also remember it like it was yesterday when, after school on a hot summer's day, a friend showed me this "cool new mod" he recently downloaded for Half-Life. It was an early version of Counterstrike. It took him an entire night to download the mod, and it only ran on his machine with a 320x240 resolution. It looked like crap and was basically unplayable. 6 months and a hardware upgrade later, we all played it for hours each day, and often non-stop for 12 hours on LAN parties. I also remember that you could contact the internet provider (Telekom) by mail, and after a few weeks they would activate something called "Fast-Track" for your connection, which would drop the latency from around 110ms to only 35ms, a huge advantage for MP games... it really blows my mind that all of this was 25 years ago.
In the early 2000s, CS was arguably better known than the original HL. I had some friends who probably played CS for thousands of hours, but never even touched the original HL.
- time0ut 2y agoI was just reminiscing about this with a friend last night. We had tons of free time and games like Counter-Strike were the wild west of creativity. My fondest memory was a Spring afternoon in 2000 after school playing some janky fan made map whose name I don't remember and feeling so happy. Everyone was playing. We played every day. We went to a 300 person LAN party that summer. We formed a 5 man team and competed online. It was so fun cobbling together a computer that could run it. Trying every trick to squeeze a few more FPS out of it. Trying to shave a few milliseconds off my dial up ping. Going to that one guy's house who had broadband internet. It really felt like a golden age back then. My friends and I planned our own mod and started working on it, but our ambition outstripped our ability. That's how we all got our start though. Now we all work as software engineers. About six months ago, I felt nostalgic and started looking into what was up with CS. Amazingly, it is still going and is popular, but seems very focused on competitive play. I wanted to experience that public lobby on a janky fan made map feel. I found a server running custom 'zombie' maps which scratched that itch for a few days. Then I got busy again and haven't touched it since.
- hypercube33 2y agoRats maps or the ones with a ton of vehicles were the most fun before the game got way too serious (before 1.5)
- fuzzzerd 2y agoI ran a server that was primarily rat surf maps with a Warcraft/RPG server mod for years back then. It was super fun and something that modern games just can't touch in terms of that kind of niche.
- rightbyte 2y agoSurf maps were so strange as a concept. Dunno how stuff like that can become such a big thing. I miss the custom games of Warcraft 3 and the likes. The creativity was running wild. It is sad that hats, loot boxes amd dlc has killed modding in commercial games.
- lqet 2y agoI still remember the name "gimli", a creator of high-quality maps around 1.3.
- jamiek88 2y agoHe still publishes maps!
- RGamma 2y agoCS2 community servers are nothing like the 1.6 or Source golden era. Those games are still going, but the playerbase has shrunk considerably. I'm glad I got to experience it all (primarily in Source): gun game, deathmatch, RPG, surf, jailbreak, zombie mod and escape, iceskate, sliderace, hide'n'seek, trickz, xtreme climbing, multigames, deathrun, knifeball, HE wars, vehicle maps, bob, nipper maps, even hack vs hack, and the many many communities, each uniquely flavored and with their own story. Back then I took it for granted...
- t4h4 2y agoI think you meant "FastPath"? - an alternative error correction scheme for DSL connections.
- lqet 2y agoI did!