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First person shooters, so the received wisdom of PC gaming goes, simply don't work on consoles. Take away the keyboard and mouse from a PC FPS ninja, shove a joypad into his hands, and you're left with a player who may not be able to stop staring at the ground and walking off cliffs, but could certainly moan about the rubbish controls to Olympic standards. To a certain degree, they have a point. If you're dealing with a "twitch" FPS game where reaction times and accuracy are vital, then the joypad is a cumbersome interface, and those rare FPS games which really work on consoles (GoldenEye, Halo, Metroid Prime) all work so well because they significantly rethink the weapon and interface conventions of the genre.
It's not surprising, then, that we approach Counter-Strike on the Xbox with a certain level of healthy suspicion. For those of you who aren't aware of it, Counter-Strike is the most popular online FPS game of all time, played by hundreds of thousands of people every night - and as hardcore FPS games go, they don't come much more hardcore. It's a far cry from the bouncy rocket-launcher approach of Quake-style games, favouring realistic weapons, fast kills and sneaky tactics - but when it comes down to it, it's the twitchiest of twitch games, requiring incredible accuracy and reaction times to place bullets exactly where they need to go - namely in the heads of your opposition, from about 200 yards away.
Translating that sort of game faithfully to the Xbox is, needless to say, a somewhat fraught proposition. There are other questions in our minds as well - for example, how will the complex purchasing system work on a console? In Counter-Strike, players receive money for their achievements and the achievements of their team - that money can then be used to buy guns, armour, ammunition and accessories such as grenades and bomb defusing kits at the start of the next round. The game is also unusual in that when you die, that's it - you're dead until the round ends (either because one of the teams is completely wiped out, or because an objective is achieved), and can only watch the rest of your teammates play. It works on the PC, but are console gamers so forgiving of tedium?
Let's answer the easy question first - namely, the purchasing system. Money in the game works exactly as it does in the PC version, with cash being allocated for kills, with a fat pot of cash for your team if you win a round, and a smaller pot for losing. You then buy weapons and other kit using a cunning circular menu system - push the analogue stick in the direction of the category of item you want, and press a button, then push towards the exact item you require and click to buy it. To speed matters up (so that you're not standing around forever buying guns at the start of a round), you can buy rifle and pistol ammunition with the triggers. It works very well, and we found that within a few rounds we could navigate to personal favourites like the Desert Eagle, MP5 and AK47 without even thinking about it.
The range of weapons available is broadly similar to the line-up of the PC game, but sports a number of additions. Some of these are weapons which will be seen in version 1.6 of Counter-Strike (coming any day now, honest!), but we're pretty sure there were some entirely new weapons in there as well, which is a nice addition. The balance of the weapons (in terms of firepower and accuracy) seems to be broadly similar to PC Counter-Strike as well - but the joypad control makes a definite difference to the weapons of choice. High-accuracy weapons become infinitely more difficult to score kills with, and we found ourselves switching from the likes of our beloved Colt M4A1s to weapons with a high rate of fire and decent spread such as the P90 or the Steyr Aug.
