RunningWithBulls.com - The curse of Sanfermin

I recently bought a copy of CounterStrike1, (yes the old one)  for my IBM Thinkpad T40, mainly for when I am stuck in a hotel or travelling somewhere.

I was happy that I would be able to play it without Internet connection as, on the back of the box it said in plain English

The official Counter-Strike Bot allows you to simulate multiplayer games - offline or online - with any combination of bots plus human players.

All seemed good.

Those hardcore gamers out there will possibly be laughing at the age of the game, but I am not a big gamer, but it still rocks in my opinion. (And at a price of eur14.95 in a games shop in Helsinki, you couldn’t go wrong!)

I remember from along time ago, you used to be able to crack the game, so as you didn’t need to have the CD in your machine if you wanted to play.

For me this was not a problem, as a) it was a legal copy, and b) it would only be me playing.

The first time I installed it I had to connect to the Internet to get updates and verify the game serial number.

Fair enough. (I had read that since I had played it last, Valve and Steam had required online verification of your serial number to prove it wasn’t copied.)

I connected, got all my updates (all 500MB or so of them). I fired up Counter Strike: Condition Zero, and straight away it tried to connect to Steam networks. It connected and I was able to fire up a local server game, and play with bots.

Later on in the evening, after I had disconnected from the Internet (eur6 per hour of Ethernet Internet access-rip off Holiday Inn!) I tried to start a new local server and straight away, again, the Steam client tried to connect to the Internet again.

Surely I had done my verification, and updates?

I have not been able to find any information on this apparently stupid requirment of this copy of Counter Strike.

Has anyone else ever seen this?

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