CS has always been a great mind clearer. A ranked 5v5 game is high pressure and intense, lasts about 30-45 mins, and has enough human contact to satisfy me. I haven’t found anything to replace it since I quit a few years ago.

DotA is the same thing for me, though I assume you quit for a reason that would probably hold true for DotA as well. I hate how harshly CS punishes acting rashly, it really encourages you to hold angles and play methodically/strategically and I feel like in DotA I'm afforded more leeway to gamble with flashy plays. That all being said they are both brilliant games. There's something particularly appealing about the round model in CS, buy vs save rounds and the way the game gives you an opportunity for a series of rematches where you can learn from the way your opponents played the last round to try and get a better outcome is just a really compelling gameplay loop, even if I don't love it personally. (rather be playing q3dm17)

> I hate how harshly CS punishes acting rashly, it really encourages you to hold angles and play methodically/strategically

It does, but at the same time it doesn’t. If you spend as much time practicing rushing/+w as you do playing methodically/intelligently/holding angles, it works really well. Especially considering most people don’t expect it and don’t have a good counter to it since most people don’t play like that. This is true at all levels of play (except maybe tier 1/2/3 professionals teams). Check out the streamer/youtuber renyan for an example (on de_vertigo in particular). His play style worked well enough to get him to 4400 elo on faceit in csgo, so it can’t be that bad.

TF2 (another Valve game) is an excellent option if you want something more casual/low stress and also flexible when it comes to time (no penalties on leaving since it’s a casual game).

Watch out for 1/2-hour ish capture-point campaign style maps, though... I wasted so many Fridays in my early 2010s doing that.

I also haven’t touched CS 1.6 for 15-16 years, it will be cool to try it. Is it possible to run it on Mac M1 or I need a VM? Also, can you recommend any resources where I can read how to setup and configure bots? TY!

Back in the days on lan parties there was what we called "the russian version" that only had question marks in the installation dialog (Because of unsupported fonts most likely) which had Z-Bot included.

That's probably this one: https://archive.org/details/cs-1_6_z-bot

You had the fonts, but your system was configured for cp1250 or something like that, while the installer used cp1251. So it was a text encoding issue.

Isn’t ported to ARM64. Runs really well in Whisky though.

https://getwhisky.app/

I've been using this to play TF2 Classic on my M3 MBP and it works perfectly. I had some freezing-while-sound-skips-endlessly issues when using the voice chat hotkey, but that was resolved using WineTricks (built in to Whisky UI) to install `dsound`.

Now's a great time to start playing — The TF2C 2.2 “Double Down Update” comes out today!! https://tf2classic.com/double_down/

e: And I also had to disable macOS's default keyboard layout switching shortcuts (which I never use anyway) since I kept triggering it while crouch-jumping lol

e 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42816545

You can try this browser version! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34628386

Recently tried running on Mac M2 and it was relatively easy: https://thatskevinjain.github.io/jekyll/update/2025/01/10/cs...

I have great memories playing kz_ maps for hours in 2005. The amount of skill of some people was mind blowing. Something nostalgic about the feeling of being alone in a kz map at 3am and then hearing someone else hopping around.

Ah, memories flood back of LAN or dial-up sessions with friends on custom maps like de_747 [1]

1: https://gamebanana.com/mods/82979 I still contend it is one of the most atmospheric custom maps ever made - how else do you get to role play as Gary Oldman or Harrison Ford!