Half-Life's most anticipated and unique mod to date, Natural Selection, was released to the public midday Halloween. File hosts such as Fileplanet, Blueyonder, and the Elite Hunters Network have had their bandwidth sucked dry by anxious HL owners tearing through the internet looking for a place to download the acclaimed Natural Selection. As people installed NS onto their box, server numbers sprang up into the hundreds within the next few hours. Thousands of people are playing this mod as this article is being written. However, as the number of online players increase, the amount of flamers and know-it-alls also rockets up. Apparently, when you loose a game in NS, it's time to go flame a forum and bitch in an IRC room. Hell, even ol' John 'l33t h4x0r' Doe, 12 years of age and a current resident of his parents basement, says he could make a better a netcode and fix balancing issues while he's 'F$CKING UR MOM UP HER @$$'. Well, I suppose you really can't blame Johnny. I mean, if it wasn't for his irresponsible parents and Counter-Strike, he wouldn't even own half-life. Maybe there's hope for him yet. In the following paragraphs, I will try to explain a little bit of Half-Life history to you youngn's. Read on and learn.

Believe it or not, there was a time when the only multiplayer HL supported was Half-Life Deathmatch. No, I'm not talking about DM Classic either. It's surprising how many players online today don't even know that HL DM exists. Even though HL Team DM would eventually be added, the release of TFC pretty well demolished the DM community. If you'd ask lil' J. Doe about HL DM, he'd probably say something along the lines of 'WATS DAT FAG SH!T'. Yes, yes, TFC was a huge improvement over HL DM, I admit, but that isn't the point of this article. Keep reading.

Well, TFC came out; it supplied just about all the arcade style teamplay you could ever ask for, but people couldn't hack respawn camping and grenade spammers for forever. They, we, needed something else. Seemingly out of the blue, a mod with realistic guns, nearly believable atmospheres, and a large need for teamplay arrived. It was called Counter-Strike. Yes, Counter-Strike, now the most played game/mod in the world. If you would go jump in a CS server right now, it may not be all that surprising how popular CS is. However, if you had asked CS players a few years ago how popular the mod would be, they'd laugh in your face.

The people ranting about NS's seemingly unbalanced teamplay in the IRC rooms right now probably never played the first public beta of Counter-Strike. Well, allow me to describe the monster. In reality, whoever won the first two rounds controlled the entire game. No money was earned at all by a team if they lost. As you can imagine, it's pretty hard to take them AWP whores out on siege with the ol glock. Oh, and if you could tell the difference between your teammate and a pissed CT with his USP aimed at your noggin, all the more power to you. Also, for all you people, whining about lag with your broadband connections and new Alienware machines that your parents had to put their house on second mortgage for, try playing CS on Half-Life's old netcode with a 26k connection. I think I've described things well enough.

Well, yeah, CS was a little rough around the edges when it started, what does that have to do with Natural Selection you say? Think about it. In comparison, NS would have to be damn near unplayable right now not to out show CS in their respective timelines. Counter-Strike has improved itself through countless versions, and has had its up and downs. Why should we expect Natural Selection, only a few days out of the woodwork, to be somewhere on the same level as the Second Coming of Jesus? Relax people, issues will be resolved, changes will be made, and NS will be the best thing since sliced bread.