Counter Strike 2 Made Me Realize I’m Getting Old

Counter Strike 2 isnt built for me anymore, I’m too old, too slow, and dont play enough to make it possible for me to really enjoy the game anymore, but I did want to talk about my nostalgia behind playing CS:GO with my friends and all the years of gameplay we’ve had together. Video essays like this are the new norm on the channel, so I hope you enjoy this new style of content. Thank you for watching, I’ll see you next week.

I remember playing the “first counter strike” Counter Strike: Global Offensive all the way back 2016. I was playing with my brand new friend group consisting of people who went to two different schools, and brought together a single two hour a day class that happened three times a week. Photoshop class. We learned absolutely nothing. Sorry miss W.. You didn’t really try to teach us anything though, so…

Anyway, This game was really hard to get into, super tough mechanics, no real casual game mode that would get you ready for ranking, and an already pretty toxic community… But I saw timthetatman, Jericho, and a ton of other youtubers at the time playing it like it was nothing, So I wanted to learn. Fast forward to 2024, I have close to 1500 hours on the game, and I know what some of you perverts are thinking.. What did you do with the other 68,000 hours you had when you weren’t playing counter strike…

I don’t know… Doing 1000 things way cooler than playing counter strike. What? I promise

Look, I tried really hard for a long time to get better… but that was after like 800 hours of shooting my friends in the back of the heads and getting 7 day bans. Back when youtube gaming was a thing I even got a little popular playing CS:GO. Super impressive I know,and you’ll have to believe me because I’ve long since lost the channel. The point I’m making is I was never the best player alive, I never played pro, I’ve never once thought about winning a major… im american, I wouldn’t be able to get close anyway. Shoutout to Liquid for that one game they lost in like 2019 that absolutely broke my heart… Oh and shoutout to summit 1G for having one of the clips of all time. It’s gotta be rough that this and “Bullying” people on Sea of Thieves is what you’re known for these days.

But I played CS:GO, and I love, not loved, LOVE csgo. I probably have 200 hours playing strictly with the revolver. It got so bad that myself and a friend of mine, Jeff, called ourselves Jesse Mcree, and Cole Cassidy, the same exact character from overwatch. The reactions people STILL have to this day that we’re playing with the revolvers only is hilarious.

I played CSGO for years before it ever went free to play and added that weird ass battle royale mode. Even before they added wingman in. My friend group never lost a guy, we’re all still here, and I don’t know if that’s a testament to our friendship itself, or the fact that we don’t want to go looking for other people to talk to, but we did end up losing people to play with, over time it went from a five stack, to four, three then eventually just Jeff and I, occasionally we’ll get a friend or two to hop on play a game or two with us but they always end up bailing on CS before we’ve ever really warmed up.

The fact that CSGO ever went free to play kills me. You know at least TF2 had decency to give OG players a hat for losing out on the 20ish dollars that they paid back in 2007… which I did by the way, and then some BITCH HACKED INTO MY ACCOUNT AND TOOK THE ONE THING THAT MEANT ANYTHING TO ME…

So the biggest problem I have with CS2 is the fact that it feels like i’m starting from square one, and that I *once again* I don’t know what I’m doing. The guns have all been rebalanced, movement feels weird, there aren’t any skyboxes to bounce grenades off of, the games incredibly buggy, like, remember the michael jackson peek? and dammit why’s it so bright.

I know some general map knowledge, the maps themselves haven’t changed, thank god, but moving to the source two engine has really proved to me that I might be too old to compete with the people who joined up when the game went free to play.

The free to play crowd just straight up doesn’t understand the community that counter strike was. Some people just dont talk, other people are always bitches. We used to get the occasional whiny baby in CS:GO, but that would always be cut out at the knees, or at the very least it would be funny to mess with them until the game was over. Vote kick used to be a bit, but now….

Was it valorant? Did valorant do this? I’m not a bitter old man am I? Why are games first to 13?

I keep going back to what Jeff said when we first started playing CS2. When we were younger, and counter strike dropped, it was more or less made for us. We had hours to kill, and we learned. Now that we’re quickly zooming towards thirty, we don’t have the time, the patience, or the reaction time to be able to play, the games not made for us anymore.

Now im sad.