Counter-Strike 1.6

A wildly successful online first person shooter that I'm sure most 15-25 year old men are familiar with . I myself have been playing this game for about 8 years now and still have not outgrown it . I really hope I do one day .... But the point of this little tale is my roommate Bogdan, or as we like to call him, Dodo . In our first year of college I introduced him to the addictive Counter-Strike . At first he was very amusing and scary at the same time whilst playing the game . Counter-Strike is the type of game in which, if you have made the mistake of becoming determined to be good at it, you'll surely start becoming "slightly annoyed" each time you die. In the first couple of months this is bound to happen almost all of the time . I remember being in Dodo's dorm room, each of us playing CS at a different PC ... and around each 5 to 10 minutes I would be scared out of my wits due to one of his outbursts of rage. It was funny really but my pulse thought otherwise . The years have passed since then and undoubtedly Dodo has become a master of the game ... sometimes even better than me. Every now and then Dodo looks at me and proposes a "friendly 1 on 1 match". I've learned my lesson by now and have become very skeptic of the term "friendly". Let me describe the scenario a little for you . We create the match, choose the map and begin. After approximately 2 minutes sweat starts to gush out of our palms, our pupils widen and we enter what we like to call "maximum concentration mode" . We often joke that if we could divert even 20% of this focus towards learning for exams we would have been much better off during these three magical years of college . Each round of CS played between my best friend and I usually ends in one or the other cursing and hitting the other . The matter of the fact is that when you are good enough at the game it really doesn't take much for a "frag" to occur . Our "friendliness" quickly disappears and the game turns into a fight to the death ! For those intense 30 minutes the outside world becomes oblivious to us and a simply PC game connects us entirely . Fun is no longer the appropriate term . Determination and ambition takes over like never before . At the end of each match we either continue to be best friends .... or realize that one or more PC components need to be replaced .... crimeless victims of a bloodshed .