Last night (and again tonight), I played Counter-Strike for the first time in a decade. I’m not one of the players that can tell you the ins and outs of how this balance change or that gun or whatever else over the years has ruined the game forever, so all I can say is – it felt really good.

The most striking part of the experience for me is looking at the top-down layouts on each loading screen. They’re so simple – simple as they ever were, but glaringly so when held up against the modern standard of super dense clutter-based shooters or the sprawl of massive multi-modal maps (including my own work on Starhawk’s multiplayer levels). There’s an elegance and intimacy in this era of level design that still has a place today amid higher-resolution graphics and higher detail meshes – maybe more of a place than ever as we get ready to move into a new console hardware generation and the inevitable “ooh, shiny!” effect.

Much like I was able to use lun3dm5 to finally check off the “make a damn Quake III map” bucket list item, I’m hoping to use CS:GO to mark off “make a damn Counter-Strike map.” I’ve had a fun idea for a setting floating around since the Counter-Strike: Source days that I think is due for some blockout ideas…