The perfect counter strike map

I'm not really a hard-core gamer. I grew up with the Atari and Nintendo, but by the early 90s I had moved out of my gaming phase. Never really had a PC capable of gaming, either, and I when I headed off to college I was pretty much a total noob.

By my sophomore year, however, something had changed. It began with Tekken 2 at the student union, moved onto Civilization II on my friend's PC, and eventually devolved into the sort of hard-core gaming that leads to 1.5 gpa's and tons of missed classes.

The cuprit was a new game that friends of mine - hard-core gamers, all - were beta testing. It was called Counter Strike, it was a first-person shooter, and I was in love with it.

My friends had a great set-up. They were all tech geeks who were in the employ of our college, so they had free run of the central computer lab and all of the school's servers. Since it was a state school, they had overspent and bought four top-of-the-line servers to handle traffic that, at most, used the computing power of 1.5 of those servers.

Which meant that we were free to turn one of them "extras" into a dedicated Counter Strike server. Oh, the glory and good times we had.

We spent hours - usually overnight - moving from one counter strike map to another. We started a guild called "KIR", which stood for "Keepin' it real," a joke at our own expense. We had folks who'd mastered the various weapons that are used in the game, everything from shotguns to sniper rifles to grenades to knifes. We all had our own tags as well, and given the amount of hours we played the typical counter strike map was tagged with KIR spray paint from top to bottom once we were done with it.

My personal favorite weapon was the Colt, which was essentially an M-4 with a silencer and medium-range scope. I didn't have the steady hands or anticipation to be a true sniper, so I was the next best thing. My job was usually to head out in front and cut down the first wave of whoever our opposition was.

Of course, your job can change depending on which counter strike map you use. Everyone's favorite was one called "Dust", which was a small map set in a desert city. Presumably middle-eastern.

Other counter strike map that people loved were "Arena" and "Airport." Unlike "Dust", which was a "plant C4 and destroy" map, "Arena" and "Airport" were hostage maps. In each case if you were the counterterrorists, you'd have to eliminate the terrorists while rescuing hostages. If you played as a terrorist, it was the reverse.