Day of Defeat: Great 3D shooter - Pop Tech

Over wanted to see what it was like to storm the beaches of Normandy with bullets whizzing by your head, or liberate the town of Anzio with grenades exploding left and right? Well now you can, with Day of Defeat, a Counter-Strike like Half-Life World War II modification. Day of Defeat (DoD) puts you right in the center of the action, and it so realistic you can practically feel the mortars exploding all around you on the beach. Best of all, DoD is a completely free download, as long as you own Half-Life.

Half-Life is one of the best and most famous computer games ever made. It is a first-person shooter, meaning that as you play, your perspective is looking through the eyes of your character. Movements are controlled with the keyboard and aiming is accomplished with the mouse. The program also generates a completely three-dimensional world for you to move around in, allowing players to go anywhere they wish on the map. Using the mouse to aim gives PC games a distinct advantage over Playstation and X-Box games because it requires players to actually aim right at their opponents, as opposed to console-based games which lack the fine control provided by the mouse and hence help the player to aim.

When initially released, Half-Life was very popular, not only because it had an excellent single-player game, but also because it allowed people to play against each other either on a LAN or over the Internet. Playing against real people, rather then just computer controlled monsters made the game much more interesting and fun.

Aside from its multiplayer capabilities Half-Life offers cutting edge 3D graphics that look so real it is sometimes hard to tell they are computer generated. The sound in the game is also very well made, and has an original music score.

What really set Half-Life above all other 3D shooters was the modifications that were later made by fans of the game. A modification, or mod for short, is a program that uses the basic framework of the Half-Life game engine, (which generates the 3D world in which people play) and makes many small changes to create an entirely different kind of game.

Counter-Strike was one of the most successful mods for Half-Life. Counter-Strike lets you play as either a terrorist or a counter-terrorist agent. Each map has a different objective for the terrorists and counter-terrorists.

On some maps the terrorists must plant a bomb at a certain location and defend it against the counter-terrorists who are trying to disarm it. In other maps the terrorists have hostages, which they must prevent the counter-terrorists from rescuing. Counter-Strike is an entirely multiplayer game, and there are thousands of servers online that you can join.

Counter-Strike made several other crucial modification to Half-Life, including making it take much less bullets to kill someone. In Half-Life you would shoot someone a hundred times before they died, in fact you could hit them with several grenades and a rocket launcher and they might still be running. Counter-Strike made the game much more realistic by reducing this to one or two shots. This slowed down the game a lot by discouraging people to run in blindly holding down the trigger. It also allowed for more strategy and teamwork.

DoD is another modification of Half-Life set in WWII, that allow you to play as either the Allies or the Axis. The goals of both teams are to capture and defend several flags that are spread throughout the map. For example, in the Anzio map, the Allies begin at a beach landing covered with barbed wire. They must make their way into the town and fight up the streets.

The Axis try to defend the town and repel the Allied invasion. The levels are well designed, so that opponents could be hiding in any of the buildings, or sniping from the church bell tower.

You can also storm the beaches of Omaha amidst exploding shells and a rain of machine gun fire from the Axis who are defending the beach in large cement bunkers. When entering the game you get to choose to be either a rifleman, assault infantry, machine gunner, support infantry or sniper. Each character class uses a different weapon and has unique advantages and disadvantages. Only a well-balanced team with people playing as all the classes will be successful.

The one downside to Half-Life and DoD is that they require a fairly fast computer to be able to play online. The game is very 3D graphics intensive and thus requires a fast 3D accelerator graphics card, which can be quite expensive. However, there are several good graphics cards on the market for $50-$100 so you don't have to break the bank.

If you have a computer and Internet connection, and you like 3D shooters then I would definitely recommend buying Half-Life and downloading these two mods. It only costs around $20 and you get three great games in one, Half-Life, Counter-Strike and DoD. It's the best $20 you will ever spend on a computer game!

Counter-Strike can be downloaded totally free at http://www.counter-strike.net and DoD can be found at http://www.dayofdefeatmod.com/