Tribes: Vengeance

Over The Five years that I've been at PC, the game treated most abysmally by the world in general is Irrational's Tribes: Vengeance. How can anyone hold ire against an FPS that features a doomed romance conducted within 3in of primary-coloured metal armour? Or that stars a sports star princess? Or that has jetpacks?

Replaying Tribes hammers home just how satisfying its silky skiing, leaping and precision blasting is, and how bizarre a game in which all the characters are strapped to jetpacks can possibly be. Metal globes float above the landscape, inverted metal pyramids sit in the bottom of valleys, chasms lie so deep you can barely see the bottom... Vertically is a real buzzword in gaming at the moment, but girlfriend - Tribes went there and did that four years ago. It also makes me pine for the days of Unreal Engine 2, before everything looked oil-slicked and dreary.

This game has everything: charmingly bouncy physics, ragdolls spluttering red smoke as tribesmen career through zero-G, a decent llth-hour twist, and cool whistling bomb noises. Shame on the world for not loving it like I do.