That out of the way, my honest opinion: PC UT is a great single-player and team game, with an amazing suite of stock levels to fight in, the best team gameplay modes around (Assault and Domination are still a kick), smart bot AI, and a flat-out gorgeous graphics engine. I'll admit, furthermore, that if I had my druthers I'd still play Quake III, if only because I haven't got enough friends around here to organize a decent team game.

And since it's in the nature of FPS fans to violently slag any games they might not like, I've said some unkind things about Unreal Tournament in the past. I'll digress for a moment to make something clear - yes, I've played a lot of UT on the PC, and in point of fact, I can probably wipe the floor with anyone in IGN editorial (yeah, that's right, Boulding, I'm always ready to go). But of course, at the same time, we wondered how much of what we liked about the original games would make the transition home - since we'd played so much of these games on the PC, could we really enjoy a console version? Unreal in particular, since it was one of the earliest PC migrants to PlayStation 2. So until just recently, it's been the PC or nothing at all if we've really wanted to shoot things, which is why we so welcomed the arrival on consoles of games like Quake III and Unreal Tournament, the absolute pinnacle to date in pure shooting games. PlayStation gamers were getting Quake II at about the same time as Quake III hit the PC, and Perfect Dark, acclaimed by many as the best console FPS around, was a sub-20fps crawler with textures so blurry it seemed as if Joanna was perpetually under the influence.

But as of late, console gamers have rather gotten the shaft in this area, as the very best shooters have become the exclusive province of stupid-powerful personal computers. We've been shooting things since Space Invaders (or was it Asteroids?), and you could tell most of the story of advancement in game technology just by running down all the new developments in the art of virtually shooting things. I don't think I need to remind you what sat at the top of both of those. To quash that one, I direct you to the console game software sales figures for 19. And while we're at it, spare me from the evidently all-too-common belief that first-person shooters are the province of PC fans. That's from an album released close to eight years ago, so don't give me any lip about dead fads.

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