Valve Continues its GoldSrc Roll-out for Linux and Mac with Counter-Strike 1.6

We reported on Valve's roll-out of the original Half-Life for Linux and Mac yesterday, but it doesn't look like the fun was meant to stop there. Today, Valve followed-up with a release of the original Counter-Strike, or "1.6" as it's commonly known. That puts the total number of games based on the GoldSrc engine available for Linux and Mac at two, and one for Source (Team Fortress 2).

Like Half-Life, Counter-Strike is currently being called a beta, and it's for good reason. While the games themselves are very old, this is the first time they've been properly ported to Linux - so there's bound to be issues. I experienced some the other day with Half-Life, but the bugs with Counter-Strike at the current time are even harder to ignore. Currently, it's nearly impossible to join a server with any map at all - and for a multi-player game, that's a problem. Any attempt to join a cs_office server, for example, would tell me there was a map mismatch, and if I tried to connect to a custom map server, I'd get a message about the server enforcing sprite values.

Counter-Strike 1.6 Under Linux

We'd imagine that these issues are going to be tackled very quickly - perhaps as early as this weekend. I managed to play Half-Life online the other evening without issue, so it's a little bizarre that Counter-Strike suffers one.

Nonetheless, it can be assumed that Valve is interested in rolling-out as many GoldSrc-based games as possible before moving onto Source, though I'd presume the company will skip over certain games that are not exactly attention-getters. Other Valve GoldSrc games are:

• Day of Defeat
• Deathmatch Classic
• Half-Life: Opposing Force (Gearbox)
• Half-Life: Blue Shift (Gearbox)
• Ricochet
• Team Fortress Classic

There exist other GoldSrc games, but from other publishers. One example is Gunman Chronicles, a game produced by Sierra in 2000 before Valve became a publisher itself. To date, that game is not available even through Steam on Windows.

With Valve's roll-out of two GoldSrc games in rapid succession though, it might mean great things are en route for both Linux and Mac OS X users. I'm having a hard time not getting a little excited at the prospect of playing Half-Life 2 and Portal 1 and 2 under Linux. With Team Fortress 2 already available, there's little doubt they'll make the trek on over soon enough.

X3: Reunion Under Linux

On a side note, Valve also just released X3: Reunion to at least its Linux client (I can't verify Mac).