I am huge fan of first person shooters, and specially online multiplayer action.

Years ago, my friends and I would lug our ancient Macs to my studio apartment just to spend the day and night playing Doom 2, Marathon and Quake.

Later, I purchased a dual channel ISDN line just to get the competitive advantage over 28k and 56k competitors during nightly frag-fests.

When it came to consoles, it wasn’t until the Sega Dreamcast was released that consoles caught my eye.

Quake 3 Arena worked well, but the Dreamcast was mostly limited to modem connectivity, and using a console controller just plain sucked for FPS games.

Next came the original Xbox. Which only came into its own toward the end of its life. Gone was the crippling modem latency, and the controller issue was partly tackled by smart aiming assistance.

This week I tried to find playable games of Ghost Recon and Call of Duty 2, on my spanking new Xbox 360.

To my dismay, it is a difficult and time consuming process.

Today’s console games lack the basic feature which have been a staple for years on PCs.

The ability to find a game quickly!

After growing frustrated, I decided to install the latest Universal Binary version of Quake 3 on my MacBook Pro.

Within minutes I was fragging away with silky smooth performance.

Quake 3 Arena is still the gold standard in my book.

The game browser is fast and easy to understand, players come and go as they wish and one players lag does not bring down the entire game.

Hopefully future console games will take a step back and relearn the lessons from 7 years ago.