For anybody who hasn't tried it yet: Counter-Strike is a free mod for Half-Life that's been in beta since June. You need the full Half-Life to play. You download the mod, it goes in your Half-Life folder, and it shows up as its own game. Every few weeks a new beta comes out and changes a bunch of stuff, so don't get attached to anything.

How it's different from deathmatch

• Two teams, terrorists and counter-terrorists. The game is played in short rounds.
• No weapons lying around. At the start of each round you buy your gun and armor with money. You earn money by winning rounds and getting kills. Lose a few rounds in a row and you're buying a pistol and praying.
• When you die, you're dead until the next round. No respawn. You sit there and watch your teammates through their eyes, and you yell at them. The yelling is a big part of the game on our floor.
• The guns are real-world guns. No Gauss, no gluon gun, no snarks. Two or three hits and you're down, so you actually have to sneak around.
• The maps we've played most are the hostage ones, like cs_siege, where the counter-terrorists have to walk in and get the hostages out and the terrorists have to stop them.

Where the clan stands, in their own words

Tripmine: I like it. I hate that I like it. The first time I died twenty seconds into a round and had to watch Headcrab walk around for three minutes, I nearly quit. Then I won a round with a pistol and eleven health and I haven't slept right since.

Crowbar: There IS a knife. It's not the same. It'll never be the same.

Gluon: Deathmatch is fun for twenty minutes. Counter-Strike I can play until the sun comes up, and I have, twice, and I had a stats exam once.

Hornet: I spent a year learning to gauss jump. You can't gauss jump in Counter-Strike. You can't even jump that well. What was the point of my life.

Headcrab: I like that the round's over when it's over. No more getting fragged the second I spawn.

Barney: It's a beta. Stuff breaks. Last week I fell through the floor. Still fun.

Snark and Houndeye declined to comment because they were playing it.

The vote (floor meeting, Thursday the 16th, pizza provided by the losers of the last scrim)

A tie, which in a dorm means nobody's happy. So here's the deal we shook on:

• Sundays are deathmatch. Same as always. Scrims, crossfire, the button, the yelling.
• Thursdays are Counter-Strike. We're putting together a five-man CS squad and we'll start taking on other clans once there's a beta that stays the same for more than two weeks.
• Crowbar gets to use only the knife in CS. He insisted. He's going to lose every round. We support him.
• Nobody who plays CS is allowed to call deathmatch "old" in the hallway. Nobody who plays deathmatch is allowed to call CS "camper simulator". Five dollar fine for either one, goes to the pizza fund.

If you run a CS clan and want a friendly match against some deathmatch guys who are still learning to walk slowly, e-mail me. We will probably lose. We'll be good sports about it. Mostly.

And yes, we'll be getting Opposing Force when it comes out. Some of us have already said we're going to be sick that week.