Minecraft is the most creative thing you can do with computer games short of stopping playing and starting to build things – and it lets you do that without the “stopping playing” part. The one-man wonder was programmed by Markus “Notch” Persson over the course of a year and is so spectacular it got a shout-out from Valve.  When the people behind Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead start saying your game is great, that’s past “compliment” and into “apotheosis.” It’s so successful it’s already got idiotic whiners complaining that he doesn’t update enough.

So what can big developers learn from the little guy?

Gameplay over Graphics

Back in the mists of 16-bit time, there was a huge debate over “Graphics versus Gameplay.” Graphics-fans thought impressive games were much more fun, gameplay-proponents thought they were superior to those shallow fools, but both fell for the company line that developers could only afford one or the other – as if games were an RPG and the developer only had a certain number of skill points to spend. The truth was that small developers couldn’t afford more development time, and big ones didn’t want to.

Behold the visual splendor! Which caused some people to think this was better than Street Fighter 2!

What’s worse is that the graphics won. Absolutely and utterly. Most major series now crow over their incredible visuals, whether it’s the latest Call of Duty or an iteration of the Unreal Engine. That’s no problem – especially when the games are as good as Modern Warfare and Unreal Tournament – but the problem is where they’ve invested millions of dollars in an entire game world, it’s all too easy to add another level and call that a sequel. The first Halo revolutionized the world of first person shooters. Reach just added five powerups, and cost $10 more.

Enjoy it, you got that instead of a better game by your favorite developers

The graphics on a Minecraft server are almost confrontationally ancient. Many cosplayers insult their inspiration by painting cardboard boxes in incredibly inaccurate costumes, but in Minecraft they’re wrong because they have too much detail.

And the shading is far too realistic

And it doesn’t matter. The graphics couldn’t be more pixelated if they were porn on the Disney channel, but after a few minutes you don’t see blocks the size of your face – you see your house you built with your shiny metal pickaxe. And you’re more impressed with that iron tool than you were with Doom’s BFG9000.

This doesn’t meant that modern games should revert to blocks and pixels (besides, we’re already full up on deliberately retro games). The mega-market scale of “being the latest shooter” means they can’t risk looking less than the best. But they’ve got the awesome texture-mapping down to an art, and they’ve shown they can port it from game to game without even pretending to make an effort (we’re looking at you, Madden series). Minecraft servers prove that just one guy can create unbelievably immersive worlds in a year. So why not hire a few more creative types to give those great big graphics teams something worth animating?

Keep Improving Because You Want The Game To Be Good

This is vital, and that’s literally vital as in “to do with life.” The constant improvements have grown Minecraft from a simple sandbox to an ever-expanding world with a real sense of wonder and exploration, of growth and evolution.  Life.  Of course every company makes an effort to improve their games, but that’s “Keep Improving Because You Want More Money.” Which is a very, very different attitude and can lead to the exact opposite effect.

For example EA “improved” the incredible Modern Warfare series by removing private servers and firing everyone involved in actually making the game. Eidos improved Kane & Lynch for a sequel because they wanted to make at least a bit of money out of the dog’s breakfast of a game, when anyone who wanted to make a good game would have started by building a time machine to erase K & L from history.

Give Players The Game They Bought

This is the big one, and more difficult for large developers to swallow than a sentry gun.

Not to be taken internally

Notch has made over half a million dollars from Minecraft with less electronic security than a stone age village: he has no DRM, no paid updates, no online validation, just this crazy idea that once you buy the game you own the game. Every owner gets all improvements for free, and as far as he’s concerned that’s the end of the story.

Which raises the question: why isn’t it? If you can come up with a good answer please let us know.

Trust The Players

This trust is understanding that gamers are quite capable of doing things – that’s why they’re playing a game instead of watching a movie. Minecraft doesn’t even have a narrative yet, just a world where you can walk around digging dirt and building buckets, and because you can do exactly that it’s more fun than you’d believe. In most modern games opening doors is a delay, a press of the “use” key, and often a poorly disguised loading delay. On a Minecraft server it’s an incredible sense of pride: because you built the door, and the house it’s at the front of, and you’re now in that house instead of being murdered by terrifying green screaming creepers roaming the landscape.

Meanwhile, Call of Duty: Black Ops doesn’t even trust you to shoot the bad guys.

The CoD series has had some awesome sequences, but when it’s possible to complete an entire level without firing your gun – because the writers didn’t want the pesky player to screw up their awesome pacing – you have to ask exactly what a game really is. Is it an electronic wonderland where imagination is the only limit? Or is it a massive graphical update to Simon Says?

Call of Duty: Rainbow Ops

There’s a battle in progress for the very soul of gaming, and it’s the most classic premise possible: an elite team versus an endless horde of brain-dead enemies, and just like Left 4 Dead, the good guys aren’t guaranteed to win. It’s also the only conflict in the modern world where terrorists are the good guys, and that sentence just got us on a Pentagon list so make sure you enjoy this article.

Because it’s about Counter-Strke vs Farmville. There hasn’t been a clearer battle of good vs evil since Star Wars, or a more pointlessly terrible bad guy since Star Wars with Hayden Christensen.

If he could just fire now we'd be sorted

Counter-strike is the embodiment of everything the players want. Literally. It was built by players, expert Half-Lifers who had an idea that seemed so much fun they decided to make it. They were so right everyone else played it as well, and so many people played it companies elevated it all the way to 1.6 and Source. Every point in its development was driven by gamers who’d playing it harder than diamonds on Viagra.

It’s the ultimate in expert gaming, with crack-shots sniping across the map for over a decade and new players discovering this “de_dust” place every day. Expert Counter-Strikers make heart surgeons look like amateurs, with finger-twitches more precise than jeweler’s lenses balanced on atomic clocks. The only reason the climaxes aren’t nailbiting is because you couldn’t pry the players fingers off the keys with Gordon Freeman’s crowbar.

On the opposite and unfortunately popular end of the spectrum you have Farmville. Designed by committee with the express intention of converting bored office drones into money, with a subtext of more money. The core mechanic of the game is “It doesn’t at any point look like you’re playing a game. It looks like you’re clicking on some pointless menus.” There’s a very, very good reason it looks like that. True entertainment hasn’t been further from an organisation’s priorities outside since a court last prononunced the death penalty.

Farmville isn’t just a waste of time, it’s a electronic nightmare. It’s Political Correctness and the death of personal responsibility given flesh, an electronic poison crawling across the internet and infecting everyone with nothing better to do. Because anyone who plays Farmville has nothing better to do. If you’re not convinced, here’s the proof that Farmville’s not a game: IT’S NOT POSSIBLE TO BE BETTER AT FARMVILLE THAN ANYONE ELSE. There’s no skill, or challenge, or tactics – the only way to be “better” is to spend longer on the game and check more often, which is the exact opposite of improving.

Spending longer playing will help you in any game, but that’s not meant to be the only measure: you can spend all day in the gym, but you won’t put on any muscle if you spend it all sitting in the toilet. Farmville is that toilet: as long as you clock in the hours you’ll get the “rewards,” as long as you have sufficient brain-damage enough to think differently-colored seeds count.

Some players are pissed off with Counter-Strike because they hear about it, load the game up, arrive on de_dust and are immediately shot in the heat forty times in a row. We’ll admit, that can be a bit of a drag. But instead of being a negative publicity, it’s a fantastic filter. If someone can’t enjoy a game unless they’re winning, screw them. You don’t want those people on your server. Worse, imagine the type of game they want: a game they can win, instantly, against long-term players despite never having played before! What kind of idiotic, entertainmentless, skill-free wreck of a program would allow any idiot to compete on even ground with someone who’s been playing since the first version?

Farmville.

Beauty and magnificence aren’t words you get to use often in Counter-Strike, unless you’re describing your abilities and way too impressed with yourself*, but they’re true of de_wanda.  This gorgeous map also offers something even more incredible – a reason to play anywhere other than dust (if only for a little while.)

*And we guarantee whoever you’re talking to is bored

De_wanda is an epic adaptation of the Italian maps, rebuilding the whole town around an Colossal display – and that’s not “colossal” as in big, that’s “Colossal” as in “To do with a Colossus, Shadow Of The.”  Map-modder “warby” brings the most artistic enemy ever to grace videogaming into the source engine, so that terrorist teams might contemplate their own insignificance while killing the hell out of each other.

First you see the exhibition’s posters….

…then the image gets bigger…

…then it gets a LOT bigger.

The above pictures really don’t do it justice – with full 3D, bloom effects, the very motes of light themselves dancing around this still combat (combined with how running around the map really puts you in scale of a suddenly very small human) it’s an astonishing centerpiece.  The tragic Colossus locked in battle with a Combine tripod, which at least isn’t some bugger crawling over it with a magic knife.  (Hey, it happens.)

The entire map is designed to show off beautiful source effects from flowing waterfalls to brilliant balloons.

It’s really somewhere you’d rather take a holiday than an AWP round to the head.

The usable beach-telescopes add to the holiday atmosphere, but don’t be fooled – this is a serious slaughter map, stuffed with blind alleys, sniper perches and alternate routes for combat.

In real life that ladder would be useless.  In CS, it’s going to give at least one arch-exiter a very nasty surprise.

The artistic feel is kept up with a few original additions to the museum basement.  The first is a stirring monument to the eternities of combat.

I call this piece “Violence”

The second is an even more stirring piece of total kickass you only wish you could use.

And I call this one “HELL YEAAAAH!”

There’s even an easter egg hidden in the vast village beyond the boundaries of the map.  You won’t see much in play…

… but some telescope (or good old Garry’s Mod) will reveal a rather out-of-place extra.

I say, my dear, you seem somewhat incongruous.  And rather excited!

It’s not something you’ll see on public servers – optimization has brought the file down from 160 MB to a positively anaemic 70 megs, but that’s a lot more than anyone wants to download.  Where you will find it is on LANs or your private counter-strike servers.  It’s an excellent addition to a clan rotation, where you can make sure everyone’s added it to their map folder in advance – and where expert players can truly appreciate the love that’s gone into this most magnificent of all slaughterhouses.

The wonderful world of Counter-Strike:  “advanced military hardware”  and “basic illiteracy” haven’t been so effectively combined since the last  National Rifle Association convention.  We only wish we were competently insulted while defending de_dust (we’re pretty easily pleased as long as we’re playing CS), which is why we’ve written this handy guide!

With a typical Valve overkill of awesome, Left4Dead 2 introduced the idea of Mutations: officially supported optional weekly variant gamestyles to keep things fresh and exciting.  The only problem is that it’s a game about murdering clowns using electric guitars and combat shotguns: it needs to be kept fresh in the same way the Marianas Trench needs to be kept wet, and it’s an even greater example of the sheer awesome majesty available on Earth.

What we want is some Special Ops Mutations for Counter-Strike.  It’s still the most popular shooter despite an absolute lack of anything that even rhymes with “innovation” for over a decade.  Valve have already shown that they’re still thinking of the supreme tactical shooter, as a company that makes shooters really should, with the Beta update bringing a bunch of recent improvements across to the ultimate in terrorist-shooting-in-the-face-ing.  We can only hope that this is the thin end of the wedge, getting the mandatory “players whining about change” out of the way before brining out some real upgrades.

We’ve got some Special Ops ideas, and want to hear yours as well!

There can only be one (AWP)

On Counter-Strike servers the Arctic Warfare Police sniper rifle is all-powerful, all-known and can smite you from any distance – it’s like a very local and angry god but with far more proof of its existence.  This mutation means only one player on either team has the option to buy the AWP, the last survivor (or the highest-scoring in the event of multiple survivors.)

You might think this means things are unbalanced, with that one best player having the best gun, but you’re not thinking it through.  This will bring some seriously Splinter Cell twists to both teams.  Sure, your team-mate might be defusing the bomb and about to win the game – but his back’s to you and that AWP is oh so very sweet.

We’ll Bomb You Back

This week the Counter-Terrorists take a lesson from Commando, deciding that not being the people blowing things up is for pansies.  Instead they decide to deny the bomb sites to the enemy – by blowing them up first!  It’s a race against time as teams try to show each other who’s the real threat, with maps like de_dust gaining extra CT bombsites (otherwise the way they start between A and B could be a little unfair.)

To win the map you must successfully bomb your site first – simply killing everyone on the opposing team doesn’t count as a win.

Now You C Me

Random bombsites!  C marks the spot, and that point is selected – but not announced – every time you spawn so you have to search and destroy.  To compensate for the increased difficulty, teams switch every round and there’s a match-break scoring system – one team must win twice in a row, once on each side, to claim victory.

Keep It Together

An alternate scoring system, Left 4 Dead survivor style, with the surviving members of each team adding up their health for a final score (of course, with a bombing success/prevention bonus).  Scores are added up over five rounds, so that one guy in the corner with an AWP doesn’t necessarily even score the highest, as well as not actually helping his team.

Arms Race

This one’s simple: GunGame mapped over multiple rounds.  If you haven’t played GunGame, you really should, as it’s Counter-Strike rewired via the arcades and an experience-based leveling system.  In the original mod killing enemies raises you through the weapons – on a mutated CS server, the new level would be evaluated at the end of each round, leaping you to a new weapon, with every member of the team succeeding in bombing/preventing jumping one level.

And before you think this sounds less balanced than a drunken giraffe, it’s not an uphill trend towards the AWP – the highest level is the knife, preceded by the HE grenade, with the idea “Let’s see how well you do with these if you’re so great!”

We’re not the only people here who love CS – what are your ideas for Special Ops Mutations?

Valve have returned to the most popular “Shooting people in the head” simulator since CIA Assassination Camp ’63, adding achievements and all sorts of player stats.  Particularly important are the new “lifetime achievements” screen, almost sarcastically accurate for people still complaining about camping.

But what would Counter-Strike be like if they’d been supporting it like Team Fortress 2?

FROM THE DESK OF GABE NEWELL:

When we decided to add our most important inventions of the past decade to Counter-Strike, we ran into a serious problem – the counter terrorists already have hats!  This shattered morale.  Many staff quit, or cried, or committed the final Valve option of “Hati-kiri“, pulling their hat down over their eyes so that they could no longer see and retiring from human existence.  What could possibly replicate the insane dedication displayed by hat-hunters have without accidentally including actual function?

(the remaining notes on the desk appear to be a termination notice, a government announcement that any company not currently producing food or post-dystopian leather gear was to be liquidated, and a crude attempts at fashioning small paper hats from food stamps.)

The world of counter-terrorism was rocked yesterday, even more than a world punctuated exclusively by explosions and/or slaughters every three minutes normally is, when Arctic Avenger terrorist “**DIX**2mch4u” killed an SAS operative engaged in an entirely different police action on a separate server. Counter-Strike players around the world cried “FAG!”, though whether they’d actually noticed the shot or this was simply their standard once-per-second intimation of homosexuality is unknown*.

*The irony of such players claiming to know anything about any kind of sexuality is, conversely, very well known, and hilarious.

“2“, as he will heretofore be referred because simply writing a name like that is an offence against intelligence and letters, was covering the entrances to bomb site B with an AWP. After headshotting the entire CT team, he fired a ninth and final shot which killed an extraordinarily surprised “[XD]Killah!” on an entirely distinct cs_italy server. Killah responded in the rational manner of any counter-strike player, blaming his unexpected death of hax, fags, and AWP whores, all in a single incredibly expletive-dense second.

Fellow players assured Killah that he was a nub and that he should learn to [VERB DELETED] play – though exactly how you’re meant to learn to avoid an one-hit instant-kill zero-warning long-distance weapon with a ten shot clip was not made clear. Leading counterstrikologists have theorized that the Arctic Warfare Police sniper rifle’s insane lethality has finally exceeded the restraints of local physics (instead of the mere idea of game balance it normally violates), and after killing all local targets reached across the matrix of servers to find something else to instantly annihilate.

This result has provoked spirited debate among the pretending-to-kill-each-other-every-day community, unless you define “debate” as something other than “trading insults and misspelled capitalized intimations of maternal sleeping partners.” No clear resolution could be reached, with a clear fifty-fifty split among players. The first party believes that the AWP is for nubs, while the second believes that those killed by said weapon – and in fact everyone other than the wielder – is a nub. At this point talks stalled and everyone was kicked.

Counter-Strikers are among the most competitive creatures ever to exist – Darkseid once crossbred piranhas with Vikings, teleported them into a CS server, and they were crying into their fishy beards with AWP-holes through their gills within a day. But while twitch-reflexes and noscopers dominate de_dust, how do they stack up against unconventional foes?

vs Skiers

Many countries are confused about how to deal with computer gaming – Australia only recently stopped trying to ban them altogether, while the lack of imagination in setting obviously bothers Germany more than most – but Norway’s sending an Olympic skier to a LAN party. It’s not clear what they’re expecting to happen apart from a horrific demonstration of just how few advertising opportunities there are for world champion skiers.

SteelSeries gaming is deploying double Olympic gold medalist Petter Northug in a two-man team with Counter-Strike champion Patrik Lindberg, in what could be the most insane buddy-cop movie of all time. Though at least we’ll get some original one-liners: “That n00b looks piste off!”

vs Strippers

Probably the most famous photos of a LAN party on the internet, enabling delighted (if unoriginal) gaming sites to sneak tits into an article without resorting to cosplay.

The pics were copied more than Elvis, with every half-snarky internet commentator

1. Making the same sad jokes about nerds ignoring women
2. Demonstrating that those players are far smarter than everyone talking about thome.

Those gusy are top Russian teams (Virtus.pro and forZe), they play Counter-Strike servers constantly, and that means they have the internet. They don’t need to embarrass themselves slobbering over cheap Russian slappers in public – unlike every single person trying to mock them. They can see that, and much more than that, any time of the day or night, when they’re not busy playing a national-level match in the coolest lan ever – look at that place, it’s like a Borg Cube of Counter-Striking.

Craning your neck to see past a stripper isn’t just dedication, it was the only dignified response. Because the only photos more embarrassing than being harassed by half-naked women would be ones of you ogling them like a twelve-year-old.

Note: Even when professionally paid to be there they look bored to tears.

vs Porn

See, Counter-Strikers know about online porn. Though some of them don’t know about “display monitors.”

vs Cheats

Counter-Strike servers are plagued by cheat, dual-wastes of both virtual and physical space who believe steering a computer around as it plays the game for you counts as “fun” (as opposed to a vicious parody of the concept of life.) One such scummy super-powered-player was playing in a Chinese internet cafe, using a wallhack to make obstacles in the game transparent.

Some other people saw him, and, well

He survived, proving that karma isn’t an active force in the universe. Of course we can’t recommend brain-stabbing as a method of conflict resolution (we prefer private servers and competent admins), but on the list of people we actually feel sorry for this guy’s somewhere below the “Smashing our hands in drawers for fun” society.

Fans simply don’t get more dedicated than Counter-Strike players. If you don’t believe me, log on to a clan server and start playing – you’ve already died before finishing this sentence. These people understand the recoil mechanics of an AWP better than those of their own legs, and sport intensities which make a mountain monastery dedicated to World of Warcraft look like casual gaming. So when a team decided to build the ultimate version of CS, it was expected to be better than an Ark of the Covenant filled with cures for cancer.

The Origin of Promod

Promod grew out of dissatisfaction with Counter-Strike: Source, where longtime players were horrified to discover that an entirely new version meant that some things had actually changed. This would not stand! But not all problems were nit-picking – the worst were with the netcode, hitboxes and recoil mechanics which meant that running-and-gunning actually worked some of the time – eliminating years of practice for previous players.

Dedicated fans directed torrents of abuse at Valve who, looking at the number of new fans playing on the upgraded CS:Source servers, decided the didn’t have to listen. Thus a hardcore group decided to build their own upgrade intended to be CS 1.6 (and ONLY CS 1.6) with better graphics.

Developmental Difficulties

Building an upgrade of 1.6 into the CS: Source engine without access to the code of either is a bit challenging. But internet fans are determined! A small team worked with the Half Life 2: Episode 1 Source Development Kit, painstakingly recreating the original mechanics in whole new engine – including those mechanics which only existed because of glitches in the original engine.

Unfortunately their extremely unprofessional approach causes massive delays, with the first two “head” programmers just deciding they couldn’t be bothered anymore (and disappearing with all the code each time). Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice without me making backups? Shame on me.

The Disastrous First Launch

After two non-starters, third time wasn’t just unlucky – it was an utterly unprepared failure which almost destroyed the project. After years as part of a group dedicated to viciously criticizing things people made, the team were actually surprised to be viciously criticized over the thing they made. That’s irony so intense you could build a bridge-y out of it. When your entire mission statement is “Valve screwed up the details and we hate them,” you can’t release buggy code and say “It’s our first time so be nice guys THX!!!!” Being a small team isn’t an excuse, it’s a reason not to release until you’re ready.

The backlash almost blasted Promod out of existence. Built up as a cross between Jesus returning as a CT and the Counter-Strike Singularity, the first version of Promod couldn’t even handle people running into walls. The team were suddenly as welcome as a travelling troupe of leprous bailiffs, and disappeared.

To work in secret.

Salvation?

The team learned their lesson, disappearing from public view and deciding to work on actual code instead of bathing in forum praise. The result of nineteen months of silent labor is Promod Beta 1.04, the “We’re Sorry About Before” Edition. And it is good.

The trains are gorgeously Sourced and the gun recoils right too!

Beta 1.04

They’re actually beginning to deliver on their promise of tightened terrorist-shooting with 1.6 mechanics but non-comical graphics. It’s explicitly designed to cater to pro-players, with fan-favorite ‘features’ (as in “it’s not a bug, it’s a”) explicitly recreated in the Source code. These include

Boosting
The extra-ordinarily difficult stunt whereby players can perch on each other and, by jumping with better timed than the average Olympic gymnastic routine, boost the upper into otherwise inaccessible regions. Locations taking people into map exploit-level locations have been removed, but tactical trampolining-on-terrorist locations remain.

Wall-spamming
Probably the cheapest 1.6 “feature” to remain, and the one which makes a total mockery of their stated intention of attracting new players to a graphically-improved old-school Counter-Strike. Wall-spamming is where you shoot through a wall where the (old) code accidentally leaves a chink in reality, transporting the bullets across the map to their targets. Line up, rattle off shots at the right time, and you’ll pepper people with absolutely no way of knowing you’re about to do it. Real popular with ‘professional’ players, less so for lightweights.

Even the inconsistency in the exploits they upgrade speaks of the intensity of their passion, if not perfect sanity.

Crouch-bugging
Source‘s ability to peek over obstacles without exposing yourself (by tapping crouch) has been removed. If you want to see them, you’ve got to show yourself and probably get shot in the head.

Jumping Sound
Promod’s passion is visible in the FAQ, where the question “Does jumping make any type of sound in CSPromod?” is answered with “No, and it never will.” Clearly an important subject in their camp.

If it hadn't included this it wouldn't have been CS at all

Conclusion

It’s finally becoming what it was always meant to be – Counter-Strike servers for fans, by fans. There’s still work to be done (from fine-tuning details to installing the eSports-friendly spectator system), but it blows previous Promods out of the water. If you play Counter-Strike servers, you simply have to try it. And it’s free, so you have to try it NOW.