Did we mention Counter-Strike was a global online phenomenon?

That isn't just in terms of play; there are something like 10,000 different websites out there that have CS-oriented content. From art, to modeling, to strategy, to forum flaming, to "hacking" (coding cheats - it's a major problem), to "counter-hacking" (coding cheat-fixes; it's kind of like an "arm's race") - the CS online world is pretty much right at the cutting edge of anything online.

The discussion forums in the Counter-Strike community are incredible. On the official CS forum alone something like half a million posts have been made in the past two years. The posters run the gamut of the CS world - from techno-dweebs, to old-school military aficionados, to hyper-kinetic teenage boys.

(The world-map above was posted on the top of the "Off-Topic Forum" of the official CS forums. The regular "OTF'ers" post their names, and the moderators are slowly adding them to this map. The OTF'ers seem mostly teenage boys - wailing on about everything from rice-rocket cars, to movies, to muzik, to bikini babes, to what the most "secksey" computers are; posting pictures [pardon me, "picTORs"] of all these wild things in their brains...)

(CS forums are at: http://forums.counter-strike.net)