Tactical-Retreat: a freely available, multi-platform QuakeC-based Counter-Strike v1.5 port

Wow, amazing to see this ported back to the Quake engine.

Half Life had an amazing single-player game. I think it was the first FPS I actually finished in single-player mode. I made it through Act 1 of Quake, but it got incredibly grinding and repetitive. Half Life had a story and a variety in level design that made it continue to be enjoyable for the whole game.

But it was not that great in multiplayer. It was fine. The levels could be bigger than the Quake engine supported (I think it was using a modified version of the Quake 2 engine?) but that was not always an advantage with 4-8 players: you could spend ages wandering around bits of the map away from everyone else.

The two most popular games at LAN parties I went to in the late ‘90s were both mods: Team Fortress for Quake and CounterStrike for Half Life. Team Fortress built on earlier capture-the-flag mods and added different character classes and meant that you had to consider tactics as a team because different class combinations had different advantages.

CounterStrike initially felt like a faster-paced and less-realistic version of Rainbow Six, a game where each team spent ten minutes getting in position, thirty seconds exchanging gunfire, and then five minutes with one person limping away and the other survivor limping after them. CounterStrike had a variety of weapons, giving the Team-Fortress-like team tactics and Rainbow Six’s asymmetrical objectives. I don’t think many gamers would have bought Half Life without it, and Valve apparently agreed: they bought CounterStrike and made it an officially supported mod. They did the same with Team Fortress but the Half Life version of Team Fortress lacked the fun of the Quake one and Team Fortress 2 took so long to ship that Valve’s DRM push had made me stop playing these games so I have no idea how well it worked.

There’s probably an alternate timeline where CounterStrike had started as a Quake mod and Half Life had been just another ‘make an actual game with iD’s engine’ effort, where Steam never launched.