Senior Hardware Editor James Yu still believes four-on-four deathmatch in Quake DM3 to be the purest form of multiplayer first-person shooter. Email him if you know of any good West Coast Quake 1 servers.

　　With very few exceptions, the real dilemma that fighting game development faces is the apparent choice between providing players with games that either recycle assets heavily (or are simple ports of older versions), or providing no fighting games at all. Is this because most fighting game developers can't spare the resources to remake existing series or create all-new ones, or is it because fighting game developers don't feel they need to bother, given the precedent of fighting game series that have reused existing art assets and game engines for so many years? Is it that fans are too used to playing these old, old games, or that their choices are so limited for any fighting games at all to play that they'll latch onto whatever's good and still widely available? I don't know. I do know that I have a lot of trouble seeing myself going back to playing the same old game yet again in another 14 years.

　　Will these graphics get you fragged online?

　　I can't fault fighting game developers too much for reusing character assets and existing game engines. At heart, fighting games should be about pure player-versus-player competition. You don't want to change much once you get the basic rules and mechanics right. You don't drastically change games like basketball, baseball, or football. Sure, you can try to improve how things look with better graphics, new uniforms, and shinier sneakers, but you don't do anything that will mess with the gameplay. If a player has to choose between a fantastic-looking sneaker or a regular one that grips better and weighs half as much, the decision is obvious.

　　I'm actually really curious to see how Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting does with online multiplayer and graphics that will apparently be adapted for HD video. It'll be interesting to see if the Street Fighter II gameplay formula is timeless enough to draw a significant audience--that is, if these updates, and network latency, don't get in the way of the actual gameplay.

　　In fact, I wish first-person shooter developers would take a page out of fighting game developers' playbook and work on distilling the essence of the multiplayer game rather than throwing more graphics and elaborate design at the single-player experience. Most people consider Half-Life to be a great game, but I personally didn't enjoy playing it. (I vaguely remember being trapped in a twenty-minute train ride, using a crowbar to kill crab-like creatures, and escorting a scientist that didn't seem to exhibit much of that vaunted Half-Life AI.)

　　Yet I tolerate all the praise heaped onto Half-Life only because the game gave rise to Counter-Strike, which I believe offers the best multiplayer first-person shooter experience since the original Quake. Counter-Strike is almost seven years old now, but it's still incredibly popular online. How many people can say that they still load up the single-player Half-Life game and play for two or three hours a couple times a week?

　　I'm not sure if it's a problem with heavier graphics, a general feeling of increased higher latency, or if it's just a fundamental difference in the game engines, but Counter-Strike: Source just doesn't feel as crisp as the original, making the game less fun to play--kind of like what Quake II did to Quake. The CS: Source release and the 1.6 release fractured the CS player base. Faced with a choice between migrating to CS: Source or playing on an old CS server with fewer and fewer familiar names, I did what anyone would do. I walked away and picked up World of Warcraft.

　　A rocket launcher would come in handy during times like this.

　　Even though I'm having a great time in Azeroth, I'm still on the lookout for the next great multiplayer shooter. I'm convinced that the Counter-Strike killer will have to be a massively multiplayer online shooter. A well-done massively multiplayer world would be novel enough to intrigue longtime shooter fans and pull them away from the current games like CS, Call of Duty 2, and Battlefield 2. PlanetSide was a decent first attempt, but we need a World of Warcraft-quality game to break open the massively multiplayer shooter genre. The game would also need to have the tight controls of Counter-Strike to keep those hardcore players happy.

　　Webzen's Huxley looks to be the only massively multiplayer shooter on the horizon, but the Unreal Engine 3 scares me because I've seen responsiveness in too many games dragged down by pretty graphics. When I see new game engines like Unreal Engine 3, my first reaction, unlike most people, isn't "Wow, that looks awesome!" My first reaction is apprehension. How much will all those graphics going to add to my draw time? Is the latency going to make multiplayer so slow and plagued with lag as to be unplayable? High-resolution graphics and advanced shaders look great, but please, give us an option to turn everything off so we can enjoy the multiplayer.