Headshot!

Camper. Artic. Chiong. Dust. Flashbang. USP. Headshot.

Some of you might know what the hell I'm talking about, and among those that do, some wouldn't really care too much. Counter-Strike, or CS, was at one point of time arguably the most popular multiplayer game in the world.

CS is a "mod" of the popular First-Person Shooter (FPS) Half-Life, released by Sierra and developed by Valve. To this day, there are still multitudes of mouse clickers who swear to it, and it has perhaps paved the way for the successes of games such as Battlefield, basically CS on an epic scale. With vehicles.

Personally, I prefered Day of Defeat (DoD) myself, though I was pretty good at CS at one point. Of course, I did play it for hours every day. Those were the days.

I piked it up again a few months back, playing with my brother via our wireless network at home, and now Khadi's picked it up too. And it looks like she'll be more addicted than me.

Ring, ring

"Hello?"

"Baby, can I ask you something?"

"Sure babe."

"Ok, which gun is the M249?"

Yeah, that was an actual conversation we had a while back.

CS has always had alot of good memories, for me, tied to it. It reminds me of days when I was just a young kid, without much to worry about except if I might see any girl on the bus on the way home from school. Days when we would go in a group of ten or more and spend the whole afternoon at the cybercafe. Or five of us taking on fifteen even younger kids who thought they had what it took. Playing CS in Sai-Yok Military Camp in Thailand where I totally owned all the senior officers ("Sir, that's how you should outflank the enemy during the mission tomorrow")

Course, everything's moved on since then. Gaming-wise and in other aspects of life. Most of my CS posse, I haven't spoken to them in months. One of them in particular, one of the most hardcore of the CS addicts, isn't with us anymore.

But everytime I hear Khadi talk about it (and Nadya now as well), I smile. Not very often can one say that when you hear your loved one talk about guns and blowing people's heads off.

"Baby now I'm very good already you know. I know where to camp all, I can buy weapons quickly and shoot and kill the whole team!"