Flutterby™! : counterstrike

So several of you know I've got two teenage friends with whom I share some of my toys. Their mother has mixed feelings about me, she loves that I'm a strong male influence, but her nerves can't necessarily me bringing over stuff that explodes to play with. Anyway, they whip my butt at video games occasionally. I used to be pretty good at some first-person shooters so I said "sometime we'll go over to the office and get a big multi-player network up and running." So yesterday afternoon Alec brought his friend, another Daniel, over. Daniel was insistent on getting Counterstrike installed, but the latest version had just been released yesterday so the download servers were overrun, we had a couple of copies of Half-Life "Team Fortress Classic" running, and I said "don't worry about it." But he perservered. Oh. My. Now I know why the guys over at Exluna have raved over this so much. Dylan, who's "not a first-person shooter person" was completely hooked. We played 'til 10:30. The concept is simple: The weapons are realistic, a single shot can kill, ammo is limited, and you have to choose weapons appropriate to the sort of tactics you expect to be involved with. You play teams, the scenarios we played were either "keep the terrorists from planting a bomb" or "get this VIP to this point without someone picking him off". It depends on more than 13 year old reflexes and blasting indiscriminately (although those skills can be useful). Highly recommended. And now we've got a couple of ringers to take on the Exluna guys...