“Counter-Strike.” The name is legendary for first-person shooter fans, and for the better part of a decade, Counter-Strike has been a compelling reason to game on a Windows computer, or head to your Mac’s Boot Camp partition to get some frags in. Finally, Valve’s Steam digital storefront has brought Counter-Strike: Source to the Mac, even if it means you’ll wind up being killed while fighting. Over and over again.
Counter-Strike’s beauty is its simplicity: You play as a terrorist or a counterterrorist on a variety of maps. Once a match begins, you have to either wipe out the other team, free or hold hostages, or defend or blow up bomb sites to win the round. In the six years since its release, Valve has loved and maintained the graphics, sound, and physics engine of its baby, even if it’s not bleeding-edge anymore. Textures are detailed, the vocal work remains strong, nearby bullet-impact sounds still seem as if they’re happening within inches of you, and rag-doll physics still make your character realistically tumble after being hit by a grenade.
Keeping zombies at bay is hard work--too bad there aren't any plants around.
But aside from the eye candy, it’s the gameplay that sells Counter-Strike: Source, which differs from almost every other FPS on the Mac. This isn’t a realm where your all-powerful character can take several grenade rounds to the head, laugh it off, and go on to slay all opponents. Instead, you control a fragile character who dies after a realistic number of wounds. The game factors in an appropriate amount of damage depending on where you hit an opponent or are hit yourself. Upgradeable weapons and body armor help, but aren’t enough to ensure your survival.
Instead, the game comes down to players knowing the map and working together. Everybody has a single life per round, so better players live on while the fallen players have to wait until the round ends to respawn and continue fighting. Self-preservation is key, and you’ll have to find a play style that allows you to stay alive in a game that offers no advantages to any specific player.
The game-modification community exists to keep older titles fresh, and Counter-Strike: Source is no exception. If you get tired of typical gameplay, it’s easy to hop online and find a modification server running goal-oriented mods designed by other users. Perhaps the most popular are the zombie mods, in which your team has to outrun a group of zombies, while anyone the zombies touch turns undead. What begins as an almost assured victory for the humans turns into a mad scramble, with survivors using anything they can to barricade themselves in a room and repel the invading force with gunfire until the clock runs out.
Even as a new port, Counter-Strike: Source performed almost flawlessly under Mac OS 10.6.4 in our testing. You can even Command-Tab over to other open applications and get work done while waiting for your character to respawn! Features like in-game voice chat worked well to help our team coordinate strategies. Still, a bug kept us from adding recently played servers to our favorites list, a moderate annoyance.
In spite of a few bugs and its getting-long-in-the-tooth status, Counter-Strike: Source still holds up as an incredibly fun, challenging title. Yes, you’ll die ad infinitum, and there’s a long learning curve, but when the moment comes and you have the other team’s best player in your sights, there isn’t a feeling like it.
Counter-Strike: Source
COMPANY: Valve
CONTACT: www.valvesoftware.com
PRICE: $19.99
REQUIREMENTS: Intel-based processor, Mac OS 10.5.8 or later, 1GB RAM, ATI or NVIDIA graphics card with 256MB of VRAM, 1GB free disk space
Terrific but challenging first-person shooter, die-hard but friendly community to play with, solid performance, terrific mod scene, realism provides a fun change of pace to most first-person shooters.
Somewhat dated graphics and physics, small bugs need tweaking in forthcoming updates.
