Ahh, the days before games companies hired the casino slot machine UX designers. An elegant game from a more civilised age.
Hello, could I take a minute of your time to talk to you about our lord and savior, de_rats?
Boomers my ass. This is Gen X gaming.
Millennials as well. I get bored with modern games. Grinding all day for a pink weapon skin. Tf, I don't care what color are my skins. Give me a good old challenge
I mean it is a nice extra, if and only if the core gameplay is enjoyable. Porbably most triple AAA titles would be fine with all the secondary stuff, if they whould have just put a little more effort into making a fun game first and foremost and then add the other stuff afterwards.
But of course adding loot boxes to a fun game is a different process than designing a loot box ecosystem and then trying to fit a game into it.
I don’t think this is even Gen-X. Certainly this Gen-Xer grew up on Atari with very obvious 8bit and even text based games. I don’t recognize this one and we had few or no first person shooters
My “complex world” game was the computer texting to me “you have entered a maze of twisty passages, all alike”
I don’t know what the tail end of the Xers played, so maybe.
I had to look it up, but the last of the Xers were born in 1980. This looks like a 2000’s game, so they would have been adults
It’s Counter-Strike 1.6, which is from the late 90s.
We had mods. They're a bit like skins and new content, only free and far more creative. They are what you call microtransactions today but you didn't have to sell your right arm to get them because anyone could make them.
CS mods
Yo dawg, we heard you like mods...
Mods are literally the reason why doom II, skyrim, fallout new vegas and assaultcube are still my most played games, I'm both genuinely surprised and scared at what people can come up with.
CS 1.6 was peak gaming. There were servers with Warcraft 3 mod where you could pick your race and level up to receive additional modded abilities and items, and it would save your progress over months. Not to mention the map customizations.
Also, no paying for season passes or DLC, no paid skinpacks, no censorship or embedded ads or tracking. And custom porn sprays.
EDIT: there were definitely skins, they were just free downloads from modders. And they were client side so you could see them but other players would just have their own skin or default for the same item.
Trollbait, it has to be. "no brand tie ins" is genuinely hilarious to me. I'm picturing a videogame reviewer going like: "The game is an artistic and a technical milestone. The gameplay is also the smoothest we've seen so far. Unfortunately, the game does not feature a Ronald McDonald skin or even a Slurpee coupon, so we have to give it a 7/10".
It was pure gaming.
No advertisments, no marketing, no extra costs.
The only way to get better was to play more.
How can it not be fun?
Good ol' days, thank you VALVE.
CS 1.6 was not made by Valve, it was a mod for Half-Life.
I believe the thank you was regarding the mod-friendly mindset of early valve. A section in the game menu for loading new mods and it shipped with a mod (TFC, which was based off a community mod for Quake)
By...not playing it? No boomers were playing Counterstrike back in the day, lol wtaf?
God I miss those times, it was all about skills. Cheating was also also extremely rare in CS (according to my memories) during the earlier 2000s. Loved that game
Server culture was a bulwark against cheating.
I miss dedicated servers.
There still are community servers for old games like CS 1.6. Personally, I prefer CS:Source which feels less dated, controls feel much better, and the game works properly on widescreen monitors.
The point is that there is still a dedicated player base. You can still play them.
As a gen x, I didn't know any boomers played CS.
I don't even claim free season pass rewards because I couldn't give a fuck less about your cosmetic trash. Gameplay is king in this household.
I used to play LAN Quake at Uni before 3D graphics accelerating boards (and before that things like Pacman and Manic Miner on a ZX Spectrum and before that arcade games) and I ain't a boomer.
Boomer games are more like this
Zoomers genuinely think everyone more than two years older than them are boomers. Same as how actual boomers thought everyone more than two years younger then them were millenials.
Boomer entertainment is more playing the original castle Wolfenstein while smoking meth and beating your meat to tucker Carlson telling you you're degenerate scum who's going to hell.
Are you spying on me right now?
Really speaks to how fast culture is moving that people in their thirties have developed "kids these days" type attitudes.
I don't think it was ever different, just that we are now part of that generation or exposed to it. The people in the 50s to 70s often had kids in the early to mid 20s of their life. So they were in teir thirties by the time the kids were teenagers, bringing all that new culture to clash with.
Well we had mods and custom levels when we got tired of the official stuff.
I heard some weirdos switched de_dust and de_duat2 for de_aztec and cs_office sometimes. Avantgarde as fuck
No skins and no new content? CS had way too many different maps to play on, not to mention the amount of custom skins were crazy.
Skill progression ig
