Bored of match three puzzlers on your phone? Good news, then: you can now play Counter-Strike on your Android handset – if you jump through some hoops, that is.
Unfortunately, Valve itself hasn't released an official version of its eternally popular shooter for the mobile gaming crowd. Instead, Kazakh modder Alibek Omarov has come up with a way to get Counter-Strike 1.6 running on your phone. The 'port' is made possible by the more open nature of Android as an operating system, so don't expect to see a similar project bring it to non-jailbroken iPhones.
Once running, the game uses touchscreen controls for a surprisingly competent adaptation of the shooter's control scheme. Movement and strafing seem fairly smooth, and weapons can be changed and fired with a tap. the downside is that the screen looks fairly cluttered with the control icons ghosting over the gameplay. If you require the finesse of a mouse and keyboard in your team-based shooters, Omarov's build supports physical peripherals if use a USB on-the-go adaptor (though at that point, it surely defeats the purpose of having Counter-Strike on your phone).
Performance appears to be variable though. Footage of the game running has a few moments of lag, and that's aside from Counter-Strike otherwise suffering the visual purgatory of being a 16-year old game. It's still an impressive achievement to get the much-loved game running on a platform it was never intended for though.
The 1.6 version of the game was released in 2013, the final (to date) update to a game first released in 2000. The game still has a dedicated fanbase, even though the franchise as a whole has evolved, with the most recent core release, 2014's Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, being a fixture of esports leagues.
Omarov's mod can be found on GitHub. You'll need to own the legal game in your Steam account, and a reasonably powerful Android handset. It also requires Xash3D.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
