Counter-Strike 1.6, With Multiplayer, Gets Unofficial Android Port

We've seen a couple of classic PC games ported to mobile, including some on Android, but most of them either involved point-and-touch gameplay or not so much twitch action. Porting an FPS title, especially an iconic one like Counter-Strike, has probably far from the dreams of game studios and publishers. And so a lone developer by the name of Alibek Omarov, or a1batross on GitHub, took it upon himself to do what no one has done before: to make Counter-Strike 1.6 work on Android in all its glory, including multiplayer support.

Just as DOTA was born out of a mod of WarCraft 3: Frozen Throne, so too did Counter-Strike start life as a Half-Life mod before it got acquired by Valve itself. The title would then become synonymous with cooperative and competitive FPS games before the genre fully took off. CS 1.6 specifically was significant as it was the last version to be released before Valve ported the game to its shiny new Source game engine, the same engine that would power its other titles Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, and Left 4 Dead.

Porting an FPS game from PC to mobile isn't just a matter making it run well on a smartphone. Particularly, the issue of mapping keyboard and mouse controls to touchscreen is a very thorny one. Omarov practically had to litter the screen with translucent virtual buttons to make up for the lack of physical ones. That said, given this is Android, it is probably possible to hook up a controller and map those to real buttons for a better gaming experience.

Even with that out of the way, installing Counter-Strike 1.6 on your Android device might not be a walk in the park. Unsurprisingly, it isn't something you can conveniently install from Google Play Store. To be specific, you'll need to download some APK's and install them manually. Also, you'll need to actually own the original CS 1.6 game in order to copy game files from your computer to your phone.

CS 1.6 on Android isn't going to be your ideal FPS game, but it might be fun to relive the memories, especially with friends as you can even do multiplayer matches with this port. If you are in any way interested, you should probably try it out before Valve gets whiff of it and decides to pull the plug for one reason or another.

VIA: DroidGamers