well i liked bleeding.. just about everything else was better too..blending etc..i felt the same way about cs 1.6 but it was mostly that those games were way better with DX7 before graphics card cpu's became a factor, and everything was powered by processor...they both have pretty close to the same feel if you have a separate partition to run some win98se and dx7, and use the same resolution you used to use; especially if you have a half decent processor.
ps. you're right though, strafe shooting with a BAR or gerand/m1 was wayyyy sweet before retail.
