Counter-Strike: Source

Motorcycle Ride Review #8

Tonight, tossing the 100 throw pillows off the guest bed in my aunt in New Jersey’s house, I lay down to write my final motorcycle ride review. A trip that began as a zen solo experience—a chance to detach from people and responsibilities and just be—inadvertently turned into one about seeing and meeting people. I visited the folks that saved my ass 4 years ago on the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia when I had a flat. I ended up burning a cool hour just talking to those wonderful 70-somethings who still ride motorcycles (fuck yeah!). I listened to an 88 year old man in Tennessee for a half hour talk about a guy he once knew named Johnny Honda who drag raced motorcycles on a US military base in Japan and who had a bodyguard who laid out two guys outside a bar who tried to start shit and casually adjusted his tie afterwards (all I could think was “Fuck that’s so Yakuza!”). I visited my sister and her husband in North Carolina and did nothing for two days but play games and scratch the ears of the various animals in her menagerie. The stars aligned and unexpectedly I was able to meet up with @zark at an arcade and played some BAGS and Silent Scope. And then detoured a bit on the way back to Mass to visit my aunt in New Jersey. Despite being a solo trip I spent the bulk of the days seeing other people and it became a bit of a “people trip.”

Counter-Strike Source was my big “people game”, even more so than World of Warcraft. Here’s what CSS was to me:

• CSS was my homie’s private server he put on his mom’s card and she forgot about so we just had our own private server all of high school.
• CSS was then trying to recruit people to the aforementioned private server then inevitably scaring them all off as we couldn’t resist abusing admin privileges and would just kick or ban people for the dumbest shit for a laff.
• CSS was hopping on Ventrilo as soon as I got home to see who was on.
• CSS was my one homie getting into skins on FPSBanana and bringing in other teenagers from across the country to hang out with.
• CSS was trolling. Trolling with meshes that let you wall hack. Trolling by trying to make adults mad. Trolling by running a script that spammed the server auerying it for datetime info which it HAD to respond to thus DDOS’ing it till it crashed. Trolling by spamming audio clips of absurdly loud redlined audio over the mic and THEN running the script so the server stuttered with only screams playing and crashed. (I was not a good person as a teenager.)
• CSS was surf maps.
• CSS was surf maps, dude! That shit RULED. Oh so you’re telling me through some fucked up glitch of the Source engine physics there’s this weird sport with a high skill ceiling where you slide up and down ramps and fly through the air? All the while trying to kill other people?
• CSS was people. There was always someone on and I really don’t think I played solo much at all.

Most games I play are single player but I do still play CS2 with some of those same people I played Source with all those years ago. We had a LAN at my house a month ago to play it and it was incredible. I guess it always does come back to the people.
???
It’s CSS. Played an unholy amount of this back in the day. Surf maps. Alex’s private server. Winning that tournament back when were in like 7th grade at Techie in Marlboro. Losing the picture of that :(

Honestly prolly formed some of my longest lasting friendships from that game with Alex and Ross. All the internet homies: Jake Strout, shiban, Nima, Justin, Mr Colt (Garret?). Good times