Wild Cards Counter Strike

OK. So you've bought your new game. You're probably very anxious to start playing right. Well have a quick glance through this first if you're not all that familiar with PC's; have a quick glance, or maybe even read through, these steps.

There's two different versions of CS. One is the retail version; the other is the Half Life Mod version.
For the CS initial install is pretty straight forward. Just insert the CD and a screen should pop-up asking you to install. Select this option and follow the on-screen steps.
If you've got the Half Life (HL) Mod you've got to install Half Life first and then the CS Mod.

Ok the initial install is done. Now guess what... you can't play just yet. First you need to install the latest updates. The download sizes are quite high if you're a modem user. You may want to call on the kid around the corner that has broadband and kindly request for him to download the 120 MB patch.
If you're downloading from the official counter-strike page, www.counter-strike.net, you'll be put in a waiting queue for the download. This waiting for the actual download can be quite long (for me it was nearly 2 hours).
For the Retail version of Counter Strike you'll need the cs1005.exe file. As for the HL Mod version; it needs the csv15full.exe file. If you go to the official page for the download you can select the "Not sure which files you need" option that will show you the covers (of the boxes) for the different versions. It would be quite frustrating to wait for hours for the download to complete to find you've downloaded the wrong file. To install the update you only need run the patch and point it to the CS installation directory.

Now you've got an up to date version of Counter Strike. Great isn't it. But if you tried to play now there's 2 more things you'd run into. The first one being that you don't have most of the maps played on all the different servers. The good thing is that there's a "Map Pack" available for download. The map can be downloaded in-game from the server, but as most of the internet bandwidth is being reserved for the actual internet game this will be tediously slow. The map pack that's for download from the official counter-strike web site covers the maps that are on most of the servers. If you're going to go back to a server often and it has custom maps I recommend trying to find the web site for the users of the web site (a lot of server administrators for game servers will put up a web site as well) and downloading any custom maps from there if at all possible.

Now go into the actual game. Don't connect to any servers just yet. First go to the configuration and look at all the setting. See if you like the way everything is setup. Try the training mission and tweak all the settings. The thing that needed changing most in my case was the mouse sensitivity.

Now you could start playing. You're ready for it. There's just one little thing I'd like you to pay attention to. That being that there's a few utilities out on the web that will aid in connecting to servers. I've been using The All Seeing Eye utility which I think is a great program to find on-line game servers (not just for CS but for a whole list of games). The All Seeing Eye can be downloaded here.

There's a few more of these utilities out there on the web and I'm looking into them some time soon. If you know of any please e-mail me and let me know about the program.