My "first shooter" was wolfenstien, and I don't remember getting goosebumps from it. Doom was nothing special graphically, but cool anyway. Duke looked pretty sweet...all the colors. When the Quake 1 beta (Qtest) came out, I remember thinking it was cool but I wasn't impressed (with the graphics) until we were able to use Voodoos for graphics...then the world truly seemed 3D and amazing. I about shit myself when id released the "transparent water" patch and you could see people under the water. Unreal was the first game that was awe inspiring for me as far as looks go.

I don't think getting that feeling back will be a problem. STALKER will be all-around mind blowing I believe, as will DOOM3 (at least graphically), and DX2. The sheer scale and persistent world of Planetside will be something to behold.

I'm even gonna try my first MMORPG this year.(past ones bored me to death) "Star Wars Galaxies" which will have a game world depth unlike anything we have ever seen. For those of you who haven't checked out that game, you can spend hours reading about it on their official site, and it should blow you away. For the shooters like me, you can choose to get involved with battle. For pacifists, you can open a shop and make/sell shit if you want or do any of a zillion other things. Get this...if you decide to be a droid builder, they even built in a scripting language so you can give your droids custom scripts.....anyway....check it out. www.station.com Like I said, I've always been a shooter player, but this one looks damn sweet. I can't do it justice here, you have to spend a couple hours on their site to even begin to get an idea how deep this game is. The attention to detail and continuity in the "Star Wars world" is insane. I'm not even a huge Star Wars fan. It's almost in Beta 3, so it won't be in dev much longer.

I think the 3rd and 4th quarters of this year will be the long awaited (like 4 years worth of waiting) gaming renaissance. We will see some truly next-gen games.

Maybe that is why I am so hard on U2. It’s like one of the last of the old school shooters (at least for me). It seems retarded in the face of what’s to come this year, and certainly didn’t live up to the publishers hype, or the foundation the original Unreal built.

This comment was edited on Feb 20, 11:51.