The Counter-Strike Series

Counter-Strike is a multiplayer first-person shooter game that was first released in 1999 by Valve. The first game in the series was initially a change to “Half-Life” till Valve bought the rights in 2000. It came with interesting gameplay following a storyline of a terrorist team combating an anti-terrorist team. The anti-terrorist team is involved in stopping the malicious acts of the terrorist team, including hostage rescue, bomb defusal, and escort missions.

This line of play remains the same in three main series that followed the original. These include Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, Counter-Strike: Source, and the biggest of them all, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Although the series had spin-offs, none of them surpassed have successfully surpassed the legacy of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was supposedly the perfect installment of the Counter-Strike series after years of reviews and perfecting the game’s mechanics. And this showed in the wide acceptance of the game with over 24 million active users monthly and years of amazing tournaments that have produced CS: GO pro players.

However, CSGO’s number of users is not the only thing have kept it relevant over the years. The developers have also incorporated fantastic updates that have influenced the rise of other games in the gaming industry. These updates and trends have brought about innovations that  are discussed in the following paragraphs.

Top Innovations That CS: GO Has Brought To The Gaming World

Some of the innovations that CS: GO has brought to the gaming industry include game skins, eSports betting, live streaming, better tournaments, and career opportunities. The influence of CS: GO on these innovations is explained in the paragraphs below.

CS: GO Skins

If you’re familiar with in-game skins of weapons, CS: GO was one of the first games to bring about trading and investing in them. There are over a thousand skins in CS: GO, with some rumored to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars with the rarity. Although these skins have no significant use in the game than making your weapon look better, they’ve turned into a rave in the gaming industry.

In today’s scene, game skins are more popular than before and are now being traded in the form of NFTs. In some games, you can’t even start playing without purchasing an NFT skin, and these are advancements brought about by games like CS: GO.

Esports Betting

CS: GO betting remains one of the most popular betting markets in the eSports betting scene. This game paved the way for many other eSports betting markets, and there are betting sites specifically dedicated to betting on CS: GO tournaments and events. 

Some of these sites even start you on CS: GO low betting to grasp the concept of betting on eSports games before you scale to bigger bets. If you want to explore the option of low betting on CS: GO, you can see your options at https://tips.gg/betting/csgo-small-budget/. In today’s eSports betting scene, CS: GO remains the most competitive market and gives its bettors more profits than the others. You can find sites offering great tips on CS: GO events and teams and how to bet on them.

Live Streaming

When the concept of Live Streaming hit the gaming scene, CS: GO was one of the games that paved the way for other eSports disciplines. The thrill and suspense you get from playing a CS: GO match and putting it on for everyone to see remains unmatched. Still, several gamers have tried to beat the standard set by CS: GO in live streaming, which remains undefeated.

Tournaments

CS: GO tournaments changed the tournament scene forever, being one of the most watched events in the eSports scene. When it started in 2013, it had one of the best pool prizes ever to be offered in the eSports industry at $250,000. Its viewership also breaks records yearly, and several eSports tournaments try to achieve this feat today. 

Career Opportunities

CS: GO is so huge a game that it has career opportunities created from the game. You can become a CS: GO skins collector and sell them at high prices on the steam community market. Also, you can become a coach that teaches the game to enthusiasts and also make a living blogging about the game, among other opportunities.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, CS: GO revolutionized the gaming scene greater than anyone could have imagined years ago. It remains a discipline for the fantastic trends it has set, and it shows no sign of stopping with the legacy it’s still building.

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The reasons for Outlast’s resounding success are obvious – it wasn’t created by young indie developers, but by experienced professionals who decided to leave big companies and open their own small studio. They couldn’t bring their revolutionary ideas to life in their previous jobs, but when they moved into the indie world, they immediately created a game with an unusual gameplay and high-quality graphics.

Plot

The game is about a journalist who has been invited to a press conference at a mental hospital in the countryside. Upon arrival, he finds out that no one is expected there, all the doors are closed, but cars are still parked at the entrance. The journalist does not give up so easily, and roundabout ways to get into the building of the psychological hospital. This is where the nightmares and horrors begin.

It turns out that in the mental hospital broke out all the patients, including particularly violent, schizophrenic and maniacs. Staying inside the building is dangerous to both physical and mental health. But, it turns out, getting out of this trap is much harder than getting into it.

Gameplay

In general, there are two main ways to scare people: either to suddenly create unforeseen danger (e.g., a sharp attack from around the corner), or to gradually build up an atmosphere of quiet terror (e.g., showing the types of tortured victims). Outlast does a very good job of both of these. The oppressive atmosphere is felt at once: there is a semi-darkness in all the rooms, only rare lighting lamps, somewhere non-aggressive patients wander and mutter the same phrases under their breath, and somewhere around the corner more dangerous lunatics are lurking, and they can suddenly jump at any moment.

The main feature of Outlast – the hero has no weapon, he can’t defend himself in close combat, so in the case of danger you need to either run away or hide in the dark corners, in the closets or under the beds. The main character is saved only by the fact that he has a video camera with night shooting mode. It helps to see in the pitch black dim silhouettes in shades of green. You just need to change the batteries in time, so you do not have to walk forward by touch.

In the course of the game it turns out that the escaped psychics are just the flowers, there are much more dangers: a ghost of quite earthly origin, a sadistic doctor, a religious sect and the deadly results of secret military experiments. Facing such problems in the narrow prison corridors, alone and unarmed, can frighten the most mentally stable person.

Conclusion

There hasn’t been such a scary horror movie in computer game format in a long time. It has everything to excite your bored mind. Outlast took the honorable place of the scariest horror among computer games overnight, and also took its place in the gaming culture, and now it is mentioned at every opportunity.

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Perhaps Shinji Mikami is making a third installment right now, continuing the story of Ruvik, the original game’s main villain. Or Bethesda has given up on the series because of the low sales of the second installment. Anything is possible. But either way, the universe of The Evil Within deserves a lot of parsing, especially since so much about it remains unclear.

Of course, the whole text consists of spoilers for both the first part and the second one.

The Overall Concept
The events of The Evil Within revolve around STEM – a machine creating a new reality from the scraps of its users’ memories. The users themselves sleep in special capsules. By dying in the world of STEM, a person dies in reality, but leaves a “trace” there – a particle of consciousness, which lives its own life.

The world is built on the basis of the core, the mind that underlies it and has the most power and control. The second part of The Evil Within says that the core can only be a self-centered individual: either a psychopath or a child. The first game just tells us what would happen if the core of STEM were a psychopathic personality. However, in addition to the core, the users connected to the machine play a big role in creating a unified STEM world: they also contribute something of themselves to the created world, some more, some less.

In other words, the STEM world is a kind of collective conscious dream created by its participants. Moreover, various elements from dreamers remain in it, even if they wake up (or die).

STEM was created by trial and error by the aristocrat Ruben Victoriano, who as a child had lost his sister Laura, to whom, judging by scrappy information, he had feelings and a sexual attraction. The peasants, dissatisfied with their situation and jealous of the Victoriano family’s wealth, set fire to the barn in which the children were playing. Ruben survived with burns, but Laura died in agony.

The same barn in the field with the sunflowers. These flowers are often found in the first part – in paintings, for example
It was the death of his beloved sister that motivated Ruben to create STEM, a machine that would make him a god and create a world where he and Laura could live forever together. He experimented with the human mind, and the material was “supplied” to him by the scientist Marcelo Jimenez, who worked in the Beacon Psychiatric Clinic. However, at a certain point, their relationship deteriorated greatly: Jimenez published a scientific article about Ruben’s work under his own name, arguing that Ruben Victoriano had no proper education. The narcissistic creator of the dream machine did not like this, of course.

STEM could be used to save terminally ill people by uploading their consciousness into a collective dream, and other things useful to mankind, but it all fell apart. A company called Mobius, which had its own ideas about the good of humanity, intervened. Reuben was killed and his brain was stuffed into a flask: it became the core of the STEM world. Different people were connected to the machine at different times, but they all died or/and turned into disgusting monsters, syncing their minds with Reuben, who took the pseudonym Ruvik and became a god in this world of collective nightmare.

God has to look stylish.
What would happen if, hypothetically, you put a human brain in a flask and keep it alive artificially? Let the machine create a different world for it, similar to what it is used to – would the mind feel as it did before? According to this mental experiment, yes. Like in “The Matrix.”

Ruvik realizes himself in virtuality and creates a world of pain and nightmare, saturates it with familiar images and locations, possessing powerful psychic power as a core, suppresses the will of other STEM users and turns them into his slaves. To match the image of a god, Ruvik also changes his appearance – he puts on a sinister cape with a hood. If you’ve ever experienced a conscious dream, you can roughly imagine what it’s like to be a god in a world woven from your own memory and processed by your imagination.

Laura in Ruvik’s nightmare world turned into a monster.
“Mobius, realizing the full potential of Ruben Victoriano’s invention, continues to experiment. Catatonic Leslie Weathers, who experienced stress as a child that broke his mind, also joins STEM. Ruvik, figuring that by suppressing Leslie’s mind, he can replace himself and enter the real world, begins hunting for him. Even a core god is not all-powerful in a STEM world created from the scraps of a large number of people’s minds.

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The protagonist Kratos is a Spartan warrior who serves the Olympian gods. As instructed by the goddess Athena, Kratos must destroy the current god of war, Ares, in order to gain forgiveness from the Olympian gods. Kratos agrees, as Ares is implicated in the murder of the protagonist’s family. To stop the powerful god, Kratos embarks on a dangerous journey to get his hands on the legendary Pandora’s Box.

The game begins on a ship attacked by Hydra. As he jumps around the ships in the fleet, Kratos finds an altar of Poseidon and his message to Kratos in one of them. Poseidon tells him that he has been trying for years to catch the Hydra destroying his underwater cities and mansions. To help Kratos kill her, he gives him his power (Poseidon’s wrath). After Hydra’s death, Kratos talks to the statue of Athena, who tells him he has a chance for revenge and redemption – Ares attacked her city, destroying legions, temples and villages. Meanwhile, the Fleet sails toward Athens. Kratos steps off the ship. A new weapon, the head of a gorgon, awaits him at the port. Walking through the city citadel, Kratos encounters the ghost of an oracle. The oracle tells Kratos that she can help him and suggests that he find her in the oracle’s temple. There, too, Kratos meets Ares, who does not notice him, apparently because of the difference in size of the two. On the way to the temple, Kratos meets the oracle, who is immediately grabbed by a harpy and taken somewhere, and a gravedigger. After passing the temple, Kratos sees the oracle being thrown off in flight, but she manages to grab hold of the rope. If Kratos does not get her off it in time, she will break. Rescued by Kratos, the oracle “climbs” into his head to see who he is. She opens the gate that leads to the Desert of Lost Souls. Kratos goes there. On the way, he meets another statue of Athena, who tells him about the lone titan Crone and the Pandora’s Box kept in the temple on his back.

In this temple Kratos awaits many deadly traps, 3 chambers belonging to the three main god brothers – Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades – as well as an iron minotaur waiting to be released and several new abilities – the blade of Artemis, the army of Hades, and Zeus’ lightning bolts.

Finding Pandora’s Box, Kratos carries it to the exit. The fact is that Ares’ henchmen have reported to him that Kratos is looking for Pandora’s Box to kill him. Ares throws a broken column with a sharp end at Kratos across the desert. Before he reaches the exit of the temple, Kratos is struck by the column flying at him, piercing him through and nailing him to the gate. Kratos enters the realm of Hades, where he encounters the soul of the captain he killed in the jaws of the hydra on the ship. He throws the captain into the abyss. The kingdom of Hades also has many traps in it.

While passing through the underworld, a bundle of stones on a rope falls on Kratos. This is the way out. Crawling along it, he climbs out of a tomb near the temple of the oracle in Athens that has been dug by a famous gravedigger. Walking again through the now dilapidated temple, Kratos encounters the oracle lying in a pool of blood and having lost all hope. Walking out to the cliffs of suicide, Kratos meets Ares with Pandora’s Box. Kratos takes the box from Ares and, after opening it, becomes the same size as Ares. Ares suddenly has giant claws with blades growing out of his back, which he uses as a weapon. During the fight, Ares sends Kratos into his greatest nightmare, killing his family. Kratos stands on a piece of land in front of a temple. As he enters he meets Lysandra and Calliope. Suddenly they are attacked by Kratos’ clones, hovering from the floor and walls of the temple. Ares offers to give them back to him if he exterminates his clones. After exterminating them, Ares takes away Kratos’ abilities, and the Blades of Chaos. With them he kills Lysandra and Calliope.

Kratos returns from his nightmare to the real world. Ares is about to kill him, but Kratos catches sight of the Blade of the Gods, which serves as a bridge from the oracle temple to the statue of Athena. Kratos deftly dodges the blow, and plucks the sword from the rock.

After a second sword fight, Kratos pierces Ares with the Blade of the Gods. Ares is killed.

Kratos talks to Athena about getting rid of his memories, to which she answers him: the gods forgive Kratos, but they did not promise him deliverance from his nightmares. Kratos feels deceived and in despair commits suicide. Athena prevents this, explaining that the gods cannot allow a man who has done them such a favor to kill himself. She gives him the blades of Athena, and tells him that the throne of the god of war is now his.

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