Amer Ajami Senior Editor, PC Games	Now Playing: Counter-Strike, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting, Battle Realms Recent Favorites: Jet Grind Radio, Virtua Tennis, Mario Kart Super Circuit, Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec All-Time Favorites: Duke Nukem 3D, Metal Gear Solid, Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting, Half-Life

The Next Counter-Strike

More than two years since the first Counter-Strike beta came out, another game is finally threatening to topple it from its mighty throne. A lot of online first-person shooters have been released between June of 1999 and today, including some heavy hitters such as Quake III Arena, Unreal Tournament, Quake III: Team Arena, and Serious Sam, as well as numerous high-quality mods like Q3F, Day of Defeat, Firearms, Opera Half-Life, and many, many more. And while a lot of them have provided me with many enjoyable hours of fragging, I always seem to migrate back to Counter-Strike. I've gone through a lot of fads and played a lot of similar games in the past couple of years, but Counter-Strike is my bread and butter...I've never put more hours into a single game than I have into this one. Of course, I'm not the only one, though. There are literally thousands of servers hosting more and more players every night. There's an Internet café near my apartment that hosts Counter-Strike, Diablo II, and Starcraft LAN games every night--but Counter-Strike is quite literally the only one that anyone ever plays in there.

But all that might be coming to a sudden end now that Return to Castle Wolfenstein is only a few weeks away from release.

The feeling of being at Normandy instills a sense of camaraderie among players.

			Which do you think will be better? Medal of Honor: Allied Assault Return to Castle Wolfenstein I don't know

I expected that Medal of Honor: Allied Assault would be the first game to really come close to capturing the feeling of being on Omaha Beach during the D-Day invasion, but Wolfenstein's beach invasion level is essentially Saving Private Ryan as a computer game. It's more than just a French beach and a Thompson machine gun that capture that essence of the combat--it's the way the game (or at least, the level) forces you to rely on your brothers in arms. Medics huddle over fallen comrades, soldiers provide covering fire for engineers as they place charges on hardened doors, and lieutenants call in mortar attacks to level an enemy advance. In its early days, Counter-Strike was unique because of the way it forced players to act as a team in a way that early CTF mods didn't. But on some of the smaller levels, one or two good players can completely dominate the map and dictate which side wins. Just a few days ago, however, we had a group of editors playing Wolfenstein late into the night, screaming orders at each other and whooping and hollering every time we were able to make a mad dash to the radio room or a precision airstrike was able to take out a handful of dirty Nazis at once. Greg remarked that he hadn't seen that many of us that animated in a long, long time. Even in a LAN environment, this sort of camaraderie is hard to come by in Counter-Strike. Most players know nearly all of any given map's ins and outs, and they will go about their business with or without the help of others. A gung-ho attitude will get you nowhere fast in Beach Invasion.

Teamwork is essential for survival in this game.