It's a convenient feature because it lets you rearm yourself with a stronger weapon almost immediately instead of having to press a key or spin the mouse wheel to select it. For instance, as in most shooters, there is an auto-switch weapons option that lets you automatically switch to the new weapon when you pick it up. However, a few things stick out as having been overly simplified. The game has been stripped down to its first-person shooter essence, and any extraneous weapons or power-ups that might have gotten in the way of great deathmatch gameplay have been omitted. The game feels slightly simplified as compared to other recent shooters, but for the most part its simplicity is a good thing. Quake III Arena moves very quickly, and it has a real pick-up-and-play design to it.

The single-player mode is fun up to a point, but the multiplayer mode is where the real action is. In team games, you can order bots around, or even let a bot take control of your team and tell you what to do. The bots are downright chatty - when you get a group of them together, they'll hold small conversations with each other, which are displayed in text onscreen. At the end of each tier is a one-on-one showdown these fights take place in smaller, tournament-style arenas. You'll move through several different competitive tiers, each with different arenas and bots. The single-player mode is a lot like the kind in an arcade-fighting game, such as Mortal Kombat.

Xaero, a Zen master and the final boss of the single-player mode, is also master of the railgun. The portly biker chick Lucy tends to duck a lot. Each bot has different characteristics that govern the way it fights. The bots do their best to act like human players, and on the higher difficulty settings, they put up an excellent fight. When playing alone, you can go up against artificial intelligence-controlled bots. While Quake III Arena's focus may be its multiplayer deathmatch component, it does have a single-player mode. The resulting game is not only worthy of its lineage, but it may very well be the best Quake yet. But id's purpose became increasingly clear when it released a succession of Quake III Arena technology demos for public scrutiny. So when id revealed that the next game in the series, Quake III Arena, would be specifically designed as a multiplayer game, fans weren't quite sure what to think. Quake spawned a rabid fan base on the Internet that still watches id's every move. The small Texas-based company has been involved in almost all of the first-person shooters that are considered classics. When most people think of first-person shooters, id Software immediately springs to mind.

Quake 3 uber arena