There is https://play-cs.com now

CS is one of those games where this is actually reasonably possible, because you only need a single headshot with an AK to frag basically anyone.

If you get good enough to reliably point your weapon at their head (before they do it to you), you are basically invincible.

CS has a mechanic that makes you miss the shots if you are moving during shooting. Basically you have an acceleration vector, and this value makes your shots deviate if it's higher than zero. But it can be exploited (move the opposite direction before shooting, to cancel the acceleration vector), which makes it frustrating for players who do not train to exploit this mechanic.

It basically makes the game unplayable, because you have following 2 options: 1) play normally and get killed constantly which is frustrating 2) train to exploit this mechanic, which makes no sense

Strafing is not an exploit, it's a core mechanic of CS. Playing "normally" is playing wrong. I should note I've spent most of my time in Gold in CS so I'm also not great at it LOL.

Every video game played at the highest levels tends to have this kind of weird execution barrier. Coming from CS mechanics to my current favorite of Planetside 2, I had to learn that movement meta wasn't so important, burst and range was. The automatic guns reset their bloom in durations of just a few frames, so if you are doing it right it doesn't actually look like you let go of the trigger, which is absolutely baffling if you are used to CS burst/tap and spread patterns. And all the guns are projectile based with unrealistically slow bullets which adds some unintuitive target leading and situational preferences based on whether you need faster bullets and sprint-to-ADS times or slow but powerful at range.

And when you get to learning those parts of the game, you always end up sitting down and drilling a small part of the technique for hours over the course of a few sessions, because that's the only way to get the right muscle memory.

It's unavoidable wherever games are doing abstract things: mouse/stick/button inputs are meaningful because of the context, not because they are the actual action being performed.

When I want a game that feels fully connected, I play pinball. Virtual games get close(and work great on a phone) but real ones let you nudge the machine finely.

My strategy comes mostly from the 1.6 era, and you are right that at the time it was mostly a matter of stopping to move, crouch and headshot.

I guess you can learn how to anticipate the deviation as long as it's static and dependent on your movement speed (e.g. not random), but that's still good right? It's a skill thing, not a luck one.

stopping and crouching make sense, however the mechanic is exploited in a way that doesn't make sense.

you basically move forward and if you see something you want to shoot, you move backward for a fraction of a second. that will cancel the forward acceleration vector much faster.

also another strategy is to find a place covered by a wall, and move left/right quickly. when moving from left to right, there will be a point when the acceleration vector is 0, and that is the moment to shoot.

That’s essentially what games are. They are man-made programs with their own rules and “exploits”/quirks that one has to master to the fullest if they want to be competitively good. For a while (I don’t play it anymore) I was a top 1%-ranked online player in PES (Pro Evolution Soccer) and once a fellow player laughed at the stupidity of comparing a game in PES to an actual soccer match, which I had to agree with.

I was really ridiculously good with the AK out to sniper range. So you totally called it :P

I have stood behind a friend (let's call him X) watching him play, and like you, he had this almost uncanny ability to one-shot targets. We were in a LAN game and there was no way he was playing with any bots or exploits, since he would sometimes take over from someone else's PC when they went for a break, and suddenly this person's handle would rack up tons of kills (then someone would call out, is that you, X, on Y's PC, darn it, and we'd all start laughing).

Sometimes I would get into a near trance like existence where I just had an uncanny ability to predict the location of my opponents. Sometimes I struggled to tie my shoes.

In high school some of us would play duke nukem 3d after classes were over. I would have to handicap myself with various restrictions to make it fair for the others. At the time I did not have a computer that could handle Duke nukem so the only playtime I got was at school.

Brings back memories. Used to play waaay too much CS/TF with some work mates in the 90s. The 'problem' we had was we often played from the office after hours. And we had a DS-3 connection. 45Mbps, low latency connect at a time when basically everyone else was dialup. We got accused of cheating constantly; I suppose in one sense we were.