You Want To Be US
Europeans are better than their American counterparts at Counter-Strike but there are always some things you can't help but be envious of.
Let’s not get too excited about what’s happening. Yes, the Europeans are finally coming to American shores but let us not forget that it was the kind of thing that was routine in 1.6 just not so much in CS:S. For those who missed the CGS – you didn’t miss much, a mish mash of third person camera views of “terrorists” that were given basketball jerseys in a bid to sanitise the key elements of the game for a sensitive American audience. The “t-word” was VERBOTEN – well here’s a summary. Europeans came over in Season 1, got schooled and then second season the Brits from Birmingham managed to play the game well enough to get some notable results and win. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway because they were part of a franchise that had players who could prop them up in other titles.
Yet despite Birmingham Salvo being the ones showered in confetti what are the enduring memories of CGS for all the Source fans? Can you recall one play or moment they did en route to that glittering prize of cash, minus a mysterious ten percent that no-one had talked about? Me either. Only thing I remember from a European perspective was watching Marcus “zet” Sundstrom getting paid to WASDA around spraying like he had just wandered onto his first pub server and embarrassing the whole of Europe in the process. Still, his team, compLexity, had enough American talent, especially in the form of the then best AWPer in the world, Danny “froD” Montaner, to bail them out.
All of your mental highlight reels are American. Devour’s 1v2 with an AWP no scope through the truck, Nick “nickn0it” Nowakowski’s got-to-be-cheating-somehow prefire against Chicago Chimera, Brawrski’s flick deagle to win a 1v1 clutch for Dallas Venom… The list would probably be endless and even if you thought I was being bias we both know our highlight reels are the same. This tells us something.
It’s been no different in any version of Counter-Strike. Before Source, back when the Americans actually had a scene, every European player wanted to Kyle “ksharp” Miller or Mikey "Method" So. When CPL was switched over to CS:S, over in Europe they were watching frag movies of players like Yazan “clowN” Ammari. They were so desperate for all things American even fundamentally bad players with a movie were idolised – something that became known as the Hyper! Effect – the proof of that being the fact that we actually know who Joe "Jd" Dawson actually is.
It’s understandable and you can be forgiven for it because there’s definitely more to admire about American players than there is about their European counterparts. Individually they are more skilled, possessing better aim and reactions. The only thing that has held back American teams is the fact they have to have five players who are all individually focused. There’s no “support player” in the American scene, everyone wants to be the hero.
It is in the heart of our culture. We don’t respect working as part of a team because there is something inherently weak about that. It’s the kind of thing immigrants need to do, not all Americans. We do for self, like the cowboys who go maverick and pick up that tin star to clean up a no good town, an 80s action movie hero that kills the bad guys against innumerable odds or a president that will happily rig an election in front of the whole world just to make absolutely sure that he can have another four years of serving up fat contracts to his cronies. We get shit done and we get it done alone. While you Europeans are forming a bunch of committees we go out and meet the problem head on. That’s the American way – rely on yourself. It’s why we have the gun laws we do, something Euro liberals will never get. In a bind we know we have to bail ourselves out.
So how could that not translate to American gamers when it is so ingrained in our psyches? The contrasting styles have often been talked about but the factors behind why there is a difference have never been discussed. Nor has it ever really been debated why American teams in all versions of the game produced individuals worthy of inclusion in any European team, yet could rarely beat them five on five. People would always fall back to talk about sponsors, salaries, stronger scenes… It was never looked at as a cultural phenomenon and no European ever uttered the words that every American knew – that for all the brilliant teams produced down the years most players still wanted to have that American play style, so they didn’t have to rely on four other guys or share the glory.
If you need further proof go and study demos or playbacks from the matches. Look how many flashbangs an American team throws. They don’t even really think to do it and when they do it’s more of a perfunctory “follow this in and start hitting heads”. You’ll never see an American player look at their feet, look at a map reference point, slowly move their mouse to the left and then throw a perfectly angled flash that hits the one pixel guaranteed to blind everybody under it. Where’s the competition in killing someone who can’t see? Why waste that sort of time when you can be actually shooting things?
I’d even go so far as to say that had Counter-Strike been more influenced by traditional FPS games, that if you took out all of the grenades, the whole history of the game would have been brutally different. European players work with limitations and find in game exploits to stack the deck in their favour. Americans, like Brazilian soccer players, want to win a certain kind of way and that way has to be about aim and beating down an opponent into submission not through tactics but through brute force and simply being the better man.
America will win the All Star match for these reasons. Strip away the European team work, the constant need to find the perfect jigsaw in order to dominate rather than just raising their own skill levels, and you will see why Americans will always win head to head, even against the likes of players who play so well, like f0rest and GeT_RiGhT, they could actually be American. Once that happens the European teams will have to accept that they might just be up against more than they bargained for.
While I still see NiP winning the tournament for all the reasons why an American team won’t, they will be the only European representatives to do anything at this event on Texan soil. I expect Quantic to beat ESC Gaming, Dynamic to beat VeryGames and of course those hilarious German guys who are here for a holiday – they didn’t pick a great time – to lose to Curse. And they’ll lose not because we outbrained them or because we’ve been beavering away practicing non-stop. We’ll beat them because if they were good enough to do the things that Europeans have to do to win, NiP wouldn’t have had that outrageous streak that they did.
The Swedes cannot be beaten by an American team because to do the things required would be distinctly un-American. We’ll be playing them in the finals though and maybe, just maybe, someone will get to echo another American great, Griffin “shaGuar” Benger – now earning millions as a professional poker player, a sport built on self-reliance if ever there was one – and shriek “what up now Swedes”. Either way, this tournament will confirm what we all know deep down. For all the things America does wrong there’s some things we do you just can’t help envy.