Half-Life Deathmatch is the 1998 multiplayer game Counter-Strike grew out of. No teams, no rounds, no buy menu: everyone against everyone, weapons lie around the map, frags are the score and a map lasts twenty minutes. On PLAY-CS it runs right in the browser, on the same engine as CS 1.6, with nothing to download or install.
In Counter-Strike a round is about position, economy and one life. Deathmatch is the opposite: you die, and a second later you are back in, while weapons and medkits have to be picked up around the map. The winner is not the one who holds a corner best, but the one who knows where the gauss spawns and when the armor comes back. The pace is higher, movement matters more than aim, and bunny hopping is not a trick here but a basic skill.
The arsenal is the original Half-Life one: crowbar and pistol at spawn, shotgun, MP5 with a grenade launcher, crossbow, revolver, hand grenades and tripmines. The experimental Black Mesa gear is a league of its own: the tau cannon, whose charged shot punches through walls and launches the shooter, the gluon gun that disassembles an opponent in a second, hornets that hunt their target themselves, and snarks, a box of biting critters you throw into a crowd.
Twelve classic maps are available: the tight crossfire with its bunker and airstrike, the vertical stalkyard, the datacore lab, bounce with its jump pads, boot_camp, frenzy, gasworks, lambda_bunker, rapidcore, snark_pit, subtransit and undertow. The map changes every twenty minutes, with no rounds and no frag limit.
Half-Life has its own rating, separate from CS and the zombie mode: kills, deaths, favourite weapon and Skill by the same formula as in Counter-Strike. Every kill earns HL Cash, a currency that stays on your account. Tracking starts once there are at least four people on the server; bots are never counted.
By default everyone runs as Gordon Freeman. The shop has a separate section for HL Cash with nine characters from the universe: Barney, Gina, G-Man, the scientist, HECU grunts, the robot and more. The model is visible to everyone on the server.
Half-Life Deathmatch servers on PLAY-CS are servers rented by players. Any rental switches to Half-Life with one button in my servers: the server restarts with the new game, the map list and settings change to HLDM, and it goes back to Counter-Strike or zombie mode just as easily. A visible server shows up in the general server list under the Half-Life Deathmatch filter, and anyone can join it.
Premium works here too: a reserved slot on a full server, a yellow nickname with glow in the scoreboard and chat, and sprays on the walls.
Open the server list, pick Half-Life Deathmatch, and remember that a charging gauss can be heard across the whole map.
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