 Good evening. Counter-Strike Source is a weird game. It exists solely because Valve wanted to release a multiplayer shooter on the Source engine to complement Half-Life 2's single-player experience. They initially intended to release Team Fortress 2 with Half-Life 2, but by this point they had done like a billion iterations of TF2, and nothing was sticking like they hoped it would. Half-Life 2 ended up in an extreme crunch after multiple missed release dates, and by a certain point, Valve was pouring effectively all of their time and resources into its development. The 2003 beta leak only made this cycle even more hectic and painful for their poor developers. Since this left little to no room for production on other projects, Valve partnered with Turtle Rock Studios, yes, the same Turtle Rock from that disappointment, to make a blow-for-blow remake of Counter-Strike on the Source engine. One incredibly rushed development cycle later, in this strange and quite frankly unfinished game, hit Steam as the first game ever released on the Source engine. A whole two weeks before Half-Life 2 hit shelves. So, what's so weird about Counter-Strike Source? Let's start with the maps. I'm going to skip through the standard talking points about how playing multiplayer maps alone is scary because of Canopsy or whatever, because I know you've heard it a million times in a million other videos, and also because these maps are genuinely strange in their own right. There are essentially remakes of the maps from 1.6, some made by third-party developers, on a brand new engine that hardly anyone knew how to use. Poily-done displacements and primitive blocky geometry plague these maps. All things considered, they're very amateur looking by today's standards. It reminds me of the arcade game Half-Life 2 Survivor, where Valve tasked a third-party Japanese developer called Taito Corporation with making maps very early in the Source engine's life cycle. Their product came out looking similarly sloppy and unpolished. I think Source's increase in graphical fidelity brought a lot of these maps closer to the uncanny valley, and also made some of the less sensibly designed maps stick out more. But even putting that aside, there's plenty of other strange things about these maps. CS Office has elevators in what is pretty clearly a one-story building, which I suppose implies this office has a basement, but what's down there, and why? Note the crunch painting, by the way. This is a reference to the game's rush development. Deep beneath the map CS Assault, there's a single brick room with a boot in the center of it completely detached from the rest of the level. To this day, no one has any idea what if any purpose it serves. Similarly, Piranesi has a secret room with a brushwork giraffe in it. Various maps have doors that, once you approach them, emanate muffled music from the other side. I really don't understand why the developers would go out of the way to implement something like this. It's just weird. Havana is probably the most particularly off-putting map, though. On top of being dim, blocky, confusing, and littered with strange paintings, the map is rigged to randomize doors and windows being open or shut so that it plays differently every single round. Even bots have been known to get confused and stuck on this map, because its nav mesh sometimes tells them to go through doors that are shut. Havana is also one of the many maps from Counter-Strike's source that never saw an adaption in Global Offensive, which adds to its mystique. The last map I want to bring up is the map Test Underscore Speakers, which is apparently a map someone at Valve or Turtle Rock made to help players test surround sound. If you boot it up, you'll hear a voice saying left and right in the respective channels, with a strange top-down view showing the aftermath of some kind of office massacre. I have no idea why they saw it necessary to create this, let alone ship it in the final game. From what I can tell, nothing similar has ever appeared in any other Valve game. With all of that out of the way, let's talk about the player models. The characters have flat textured eyeballs, as opposed to the more advanced rigs Valve used for the characters in Half-Life 2, making it impossible for them to look anywhere but dead on ahead. The only exceptions to this are the hostages, since their faces are recycled assets from Half-Life 2's development. This also means that the hostages are the only character models that have facial flexes. In censored versions of the game, most notably the German copy, players don't ragdoll and bleed when defeated, but rather play a very strange surrender animation. I always found the way bots in a single-player match will communicate with each other a little creepy, and the fact that the game is so dead nowadays doesn't help with that. Recently I've seen some Garry's Mod ARGs that incorporate Counter-Strike Source, so I guess I'm not the only one who gets some odd vibes from this game. But that's all I've got for this video. Thanks for watching, have a good day.