"And lo, for the word of the Lord came down from the Heavens. Angels heralded the announcement as it was expected. So has come a new age, a new dawning. Embrace this new era, young gamers, and let loose with the battle cries of realism and quick demise.

"And thus it hath been chronicled."

You better believe it's been foretold!!! What have I been preaching up on my soap-box in the Game.plan room? Realism. One-shot kills. Smart AI (okay, I'll let that one slide). Rainbow Six is a game that gets the heart racing.

First, you hear all the stats about the next mission. Who you're after, why yer gonna git'em, and where. Then, you set up your teams with whatever equipment you want. Righteous. Then, you plan the assault on a floor plan of the building/ship/dam/wherever. You choose your team and it's go time. You move to position, tell another squad to go ("Delta team, go!") and follow plan. Here's the shit-kicker of it all. Point a gun at someone, pull the trigger and (if yer aim is true) BLAM! They're a corpse!!!! Of course, that works in reverse. If a bad guy hears a gunshot, he'll turn around and peg ya quick as can be... One shot, no more.

Single-player is good, but multiplayer is where it's at. Meet up with some people at the Zone and you're talking about a festive game of hide'n'snipe, run'n'gun and shoot'n'scoot. (Apologies for that last one... I was in a rhyming trend.)

So, what's wrong with it?

Well, here's the problem. It's good, but damn if that single player game didn't bore me soon. All the planning got to be so tedious. The game comes with default plans but even those stop coming after mission five. And, as much as I love realism, bullets get so damn boring. Let's see, you can get a gun that does full auto, zooms good, or is silenced. Granted, there are something like 12 different main guns (plus about 8 sidearms), but I've pretty much grouped them into those three categories. Give me a bazooka! Give me a grenade launcher! Lasers would rock! I love the one-shot kill idea, but here's where they killed it. When you die, you lie there on the ground waiting for the game to end ("There can be only one"). Now, you can go into observation mode (RULES RULES RULES!!!), which is great compared to lying there watching a skewered view of the ground. However, there is no option for.... Whatever the term is for it (brain fart, sorry). When you die, you rematerialize somewhere else... That word... Anyway, you can't rematerialize after you die. You just wait till the end of the fight. That wouldn't be so bad, except after the game ends it has to unload the whole first person gaming engine, load the chat/scoring/game-setup modules, and reorganize new players. Then the host restarts the game and you have to wait for the process to reverse. After 5 rounds of combat and hour has passed by and you've only played a total of 9 minutes. The option to just keep rematerializing and keeping track of who's racked the most kills would be great.

In my opinion, Rainbow Six is a great fantastic game, but only a starter. It's a modern day Wolfenstein... Both in the gaming world, and in plot (ha!). Seriously, this game is opening doors. One shot kills, realistic maps, squad level tactics (both in single and multiplayer). I'm imagining a game like this, but with greater range of weapons. Take the bazooka for example. In Quake it was good to do lots of damage to an enemy. Hear that? A bazooka to damage AN enemy. "An." As in ONE. Bunk!!! A bazooka in R6 would be used to flush out opponents from hangers (affectively known as hanger monkeys). It would have a wide range of damage. In a game where the weakest weapon (a pistol) can kill, bazookas become long range squad killers. They become obstacle clearing devices. They no longer become a weapon that "is good cause one or two shots kill a person, but sucks compared to the chain-lightning gun."

\BraggingMode On

I guess it's pretty easy for me to imagine a game like that. Probably because I'm been preaching about one like that for two years. Check out the Game.plan pages for details!

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Rainbow Six is a breath of fresh air. The first-person perspective games are an unexploited market. Just a bunch of rehashed ideas, no real improvements. Now, if you'll pardon me, I've got to email LucasArts with my new game idea Rainbow Knight, or is it Mysteries of the Six.