CS-Nation

Covering the future of Counter-Strike
why i still suck
article: why i still suck
Why I Still Suck
Or how I learned to stop fragging and plant the bomb

I've been playing CS for a long time. Since the very beginning, actually. I remember there being no limit to the amount of money you could make. The team that lost a round got bupkis. You could hardly tell the terrorists from the counter-terrorists. And I sucked.

A lot has changed since then. Yet there's one indelible constant: I still suck.

Now, there are some very good reasons why I continue to suck after all of these years. The first is that I'm not twelve.

"The age of Counter-Strike"


Well, there was a time when I was good.
Have you noticed that some of the best Counter-Strike players haven't even lost their training wheels yet? You hear them on the voice comm: they sound like elves. Elves with the mouths of sailors. The young ones seem to have an innate understanding of the game, and their reaction times are noticeably quicker than us old fogies. I don't know whether it's the ten hours a day of practice or just the fact that they are too busy thinking about cops and robbers to think about girls, but the force of the adolescent cannot be denied. A child shall lead them, indeed.

"Counter-Strike Apathy"


That time has passed.
The second reason I continue to suck is the gradual disintegration of my previously acquired Counter-Strike skills. There was a time when I was, if not stellar, then certainly respectable. There was also a time when the colt had a zoom. These happened to coincide.

I can't really blame the loss of my skills on the changing of the game, but merely my gradual disillusionment with Counter-Strike itself. Everyone who has played a game for years knows this--the feeling that you have done everything you could and that you're sick and tired of the same old game. I'd say that from Beta 7 to Beta 1.1, this was me. I wouldn't really play the game except for on those odd days when there was absolutely nothing else to do--and even on those days, I'd find myself having more fun literally staring at the ceiling. Especially right after being killed by a 12 year old.

Thankfully, those days are done, and I'm back in a CS-playing groove. Nevertheless, what skills I had did not follow me. It's as if they abandoned me, sucked by some unseen skills sponge.