British 90s nostalgia and shite

At school, someone asked me, "Who hit you?"

No one, I said.

"But you have two black eyes."

It was my eye bags. They were so dark from lack of sleep that it looked like someone had punched me. That's how tired I was.

And the reason I was tired was because I'd spent all night playing Counter-Strike.

My favourite game as a teenager was Counter-Strike. I'd sneak downstairs at night, when everyone else in my family was asleep, and play it for hours. Sometimes I'd play until dawn.

If you don't know what a Counter-Strike is, then basically it's a game where you run around and shoot people. But the good part is you're killing real people. Because everyone in the game is a real person.

Back then, it blew my mind to be playing with real people. There weren't all that many games with online multiplayer. Runescape, okay, that was one. And Neopets. But Counter-Strike is better because it has guns.

Counter-Strike made me cool

There have been only two times in my life when I've been called cool.

The first was when I cut a line out of my eyebrow to copy Spike on Buffy the Vampier Slayer. My siblings noticed it one day. "Paul's so cool!" they said.

You might be wondering where Counter-Strike comes into this, but I'm getting to that.

The other time someone called me cool was during a game of Counter-Strike. (See? I told you I was getting to it.) I was the last survivor on my team, against three enemies who were scouring the map to find me. I was hiding behind a crate when I heard two of the guys approaching.

I JUMPED OUT and opened fire. I could see the terror and confusion on their static pixelated faces. BANG BANG BANG the first guy died in a gore of blood and metal! The second guy was running backwards, panicking, all the while firing his gun at me. He had an AWP, a sniper rifle that kills with one bullet. It's terrible at close range though, so he couldn't hit me. I chased him into a corner. He ducked down and I JUMPED ON TOP OF HIM. In that instant, our eyes locked. "Please", he pleaded silently, "I have a wife and three children. I don't want to die. I don't want to die!" Those were the last thoughts that son of a bitch had because I then shot ten hot rounds of AK47 into his body. I felt like fucking Rambo, full of testosterone and adrenaline.

I picked up his AWP, the weapon of legend. With it, I began to hunt down the last guy. If I could kill him, then probably I would fall into legend too. Homer was already preparing to write an epic poem about me, I believe. But I DIED - the last guy killed me.

But even though I died, someone on my team had been sufficiently impressed to type "greyshark is cool". A tear formed in my eye. Counter-Strike made me cool.

Quadruple kill

My other enduring memory of the game is of once killing four people in one round. Four people may not sound like a lot, but it's a lot for me.

The memory of that one glorious round is forever etched in my brain. I had already killed two people and was feeling like Jack Bauer when the third guy ran into me. He was probably preoccupied with thinking about how he could save up to buy an AWP. I was like, OH NO YOU DON'T, SISTER! Instead of panicking, I carefully shot a few measured rounds into him. BANG BANG BANG BANG. When he died, I couldn't believe it. THREE KILLS IN A ROW!

Out of the corner of my eye I saw another guy crouching on a roof. He was like, "Hey, how's it going?" He was looking down at me, presumably smoking a cigarette, watching without much interest. His demeanour suggested, "Yeah, you can kill me. Go ahead".

In a split second, I turned and pointed my gun at him. I fired a few rounds into him, careful and measured. Half a second later he was dead.

My brain was spinning from the exhilaration. I spend the next minute breathlessly sprinting around the map trying to find the last enemy to kill, while my teammates did the same. The clock was ticking down in a race to find where he hiding, like a murderous version of hide and seek. A five-kill streak probably would have been a Guinness world record, but SOMEONE BEAT ME TO THE LAST GUY.

AWP-master

Years later, I read about someone else who had had a similar experience. He was at one side of the map while his teammates were at the other. He was alone. But his gun was none other than the mythical one-shot-kill awp.

Of course, the entire enemy team decided to rush the side he was on. He was the brave lone defender, about to die horribly. The enemies were about to come through a set of double doors, slightly ajar. He aimed his rifle down the gap and held his breath. And the next few seconds went like this:

BANG. He'd killed an enemy! Then someone else came into view. BANG! Another glorious kill! And what's this? BANG! Another kill! BANG! To his teammates, it looked something like this:

• ImprobableHero kills clumsymoron93
• ImprobableHero kills DeadManWalking
• ImprobableHero kills human_pincushion
• ImprobableHero kills StunnedTerrorist

And for the entire next month, his clan bought him the awp every round and threw it down at his feet, as if appeasing an Aztec god.

Songs

I discovered I could intensify my Counter-Strike experience by playing music at the same time, like how a drug addict learns to intensify his experience by taking two drugs at the same time.

I only listened to two bands while playing Counter-Strike:

• The Red Hot Chilli Peppers
• Coldplay

The reason I only listened to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Coldplay was because that's all the music I had downloaded on my computer.

Still though. There's nothing like By The Way by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers to get you into the mood for killing terrorists. SWAT teams should use it as part of their training. Steak knife! BANG. Card shark! BANG.

For a completely different experience, try Clocks or The Scientist by Coldplay. It's really mellow and it makes you feel emotions and stuff. It's a really good contrast when you're shooting people to death.