The beta release of Half-life1 and Counter Strike 1.6 are now available for Linux, thanks to Valve. An OS X version is also available for those interested.
For Linux gaming enthusiasts who yearn for the first-person shooter genre, then these two games are just what they have been waiting for. As a matter of fact, Counter-strike is developed from Half-life.
Half-life is a fast-paced sci-fi that includes various opportunities and strategies for first-person shooting. One of the first products developed by Valve Corporation it was released in 1998. The central character of the story is Dr.Gordon, a physicist, who has to overcome challenges of teleportation experiment in the underground gone all wrong. He finds he has to fight his way out of the underground facility.
With path-breaking use of scripted sequences, Half-life soon set the standards for first-person shooter games. Another point is the extensive use of chapters and titles over the more common level-based play.
Counter Strike was originally built by Minh le and Jess Cliffe. However, by the fourth beta version, one of the major contributors was Valve Steam Corporation, who had already successfully debuted Half-life.
Eventually, by 2000, Valve Corporation, bought out the game and offered a Microsoft Windows version immediately following up with an Xbox version.
Only recently, in January 2013, were the Mac OS X and Linux ports released. It is now available as a series release and includes titles such as – Counter-strike and condition Zero; Counter-strike: Source.
In this game it is a team of terrorists and teams of counter-terrorists who fight it out. This game is in won in rounds and completing the objective of the mission or eliminating the opposition.
Perhaps one of the major reasons that this game is successful is in the community of script writers as well as mod creators. The advantage is that mods bring in bots that result in removal features while others introduce variations. ‘Admin plugins’ have encouraged the quick pace development of these games and lead to heavy gameplay.
Native Steam for Half-life1 and Counter Strike 1.6
The native Steam can easily run the Linux beta client of both these games, even though Linux is not yet officially displayed as supporting these games. With Steam Half-life 1 and Counter Strike 1.6 are available for download, installation as well as for play.
Currently, searching in the Linux category will not show up both the games and will be listed only in the windows section.
Considering that both these games are yet in beta, there is loads of fun for gamers as sometimes there could be problems that you could gleefully help in overcoming.
Half-Life and Counter-Strike are a great line-up to play this weekend.
