I've been playing an awful lot of Rocket Arena just lately.

It's a mod for Quake III Arena which basically puts you in a smallish map with your opponent, gives you both full armour and weapons, and lets you fight it out one on one.

People wait to fight in a winner-stays-on system (although there are team variations too, as well as the Red Rover variation - when you die, you join the opposing team. The winner is the one left on his own).

I've noticed that the crowd who play this game are substantially more friendly and helpful than the CS audience. Reasoning below...

I think CS has attracted a primarily young (say, 12-13) audience because of a couple of factors. Firstly, CS doesn't need a particularly powerful machine, mainly because it's based on the Quake 1 (yep, not Q2, despite what you may have heard) engine. You can get going perfectly well with a 300MHz PC with a shonky old Voodoo 3 graphics card and 64MB of RAM. The kind of PC people like us are likely to hand down to the young uns, basically.

Secondly, CS is easy to cheat at. There are aimbots (which shoot for you), wall hacks (which let you see through walls - some weapons in CS can penetrate walls so this is very effective), spiky models (so that you can see people coming round corners), brightly coloured models for that neon enemy effect, speed hacks so you can run fast, etc etc.

Cheating is lame, and only sad fuckers do it. Unfortunately there are a lot of sad 13 to 18-year-old boys. (After that age they tend to discover varying combinations of drink, drugs, sex, work and music).

So why doesn't the above apply to Rocket Arena?

Well, it needs a monstah PC to run properly - I have a 256MB PIII800 with a 32MB TNT2Ultra (64MB Geforce 2 GTS Ultra in the works), scads of disk space (say 500MB for your full installation of Q3A, 90MB for the RA patch and, oh, a couple of gigs for a phat MP3 collection) and a broadband connection. The aforementioned 64MB 300MHz box is not going to do you much good. The maps have huge, rich textures, lots of detail. Sound in Q3A is particularly good - I've mentioned the doppler sound effects before, but RA adds something that all games should have - an MP3 jukebox, so you can frag to your favourite tunes. All this sucks up CPU cycles.

Secondly, the Quake III engine is hardened against cheating of all kinds. Models are locked, maps are locked, there's security in the OpenGL pathway (CS wallhacks work by subverting opengl32.dll) and that pretty much covers it.

With cheating gone, and the playing field absolutely level, there's only one thing left to use.

Skill.

If you're crap at first person shooters, RA is the game that finds you out.

These things mean that RA seems to attract a crowd of people that is older (working, can afford monstah PC), has no interest in cheating, and would rather develop and show off their skills in a friendly way.

That's not to say it doesn't get serious - I was involved in a gripping Clan Arena game last night where each side traded rounds (it's best of 9 rounds) and there wasn't much chitchat at all - but the venom, immaturity, and "let's see whose game I can ruin tonight" attitude that you find on public CS servers just isn't there.

If you're looking for me (I play on UK servers mostly) keep an eye out for EthicsGradient or MunkeeShines (the latter is my clan nick).