It's almost a year since Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 arrived on the scene to the sounds of fierce arguments over which was better. If you still haven't tried either of these great multiplayer games yet then chances are you never will, but rest assured that by avoiding one or the other or even both, you're missing out. With the imminent release of Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year edition (a special re-release with new content including a number of mods) and Quake 3 Arena: Team Arena (an add on made by id themselves), you'll be getting even more game styles to spend the wee hours of the morning playing.
However, despite their great success, both these games have been dominated for much of this year by, amazingly, a mod. That mod is the phenomenally successful Counter Strike, and the recently released non-beta 1.0 version of that game will very shortly be making its way onto store shelves. Now, if you can download it, it must seem a little pointless to actually pay for Counter Strike, however personally I'll be picking this up as soon as I spot it at my local game store. Why? Well, for one it means I can finally save a few hundred megs worth of hard drive space by installing Counter Strike retail and in the process removing the need to keep Half Life and its many large data files on my hard drive, as Counter Strike retail works without them. There is also the obvious fact that the incredibly hard work of these mod authors deserves rewarding after the countless hours I and thousands of other gamers have spent with this mod. And finally, although you might not know it yet, in the box you also get a number of other excellent mods such as the sadly overshadowed Firearms mod and Action Half Life, the Half Life version of one of the most popular mods for Quake 2, Action Quake.
And now for those bad FPS games. You guessed it, in this section Daikatana and Mortyr are still showing their ugly mugs, and it's going to take something pretty poor to replace either of them, although I'm almost hoping for a new game to add to this section just to keep things interesting. Needless to say, both these games should come with health risk warnings on the box rather than parental warnings, they're that bad.