For the past eight months or so, every software developer in the world has had one phrase on their minds: "first-person shooter." This is very closely related to (and more often than not synonymous with) the phrase "Doom clone." (And while we're on the subject, why isn't it "Wolfenstein clone?" After all, that's the game that got the ball rolling in the first place.) I've noticed that public relations and marketing people don't really care for the term "Doom clone." For some strange reason, they feel the term "first-person shooter" implies a little more originality. Fine. Play your silly word games. I know what you're selling.

	Lately I've been seeing a lot of letters written to gaming magazines that say basically the same thing: "What's the big deal about Doom clones? I've been seeing them everywhere I look, and it's really pissing me off. Why can't these people just make more adventure games and flight sims; God knows we don't have enough of them! What's the big deal?" Okay, I'll explain this to you, and I'll even keep it nice and simple. Call up the boys at id Software and ask them what kind of cars they drive. That's the big deal. Software publishing houses exist for one reason and one reason only: to make lots and lots of money. (This is not why game designers exist; I don't want anyone to think I'm implying that.) Doom clones sell, and as long as they do, software companies will keep pumping them onto the shelves. Get used to 'em, wimps, they're here to stay.

	I've played a lot of Doom clones in the past several months. (Why? Because they're there. Also, it's my job.) The vast majority of them are bad. Pointless knock-offs that do nothing to advance the genre and exist only to drain the pockets of ill-informed gamers don't really do much for me. Call me fussy. I have nothing against Doom clones; in fact, I think they're a good idea. I just don't like bad Doom clones, and unfortunately that wipes out about 90% of them.

	CyClones, a Raven project being published by SSI, is a good Doom clone. Excuse me, first-person shooter. It offers basically the same play mechanic as Doom ("That's moving. Kill it!!!"), but it re-creates a lot of the excitement found in the big D, and adds a couple of nice new features as well. It's not a cheap rip-off of a popular game. The designers have taken the time to do this one right, and it shows.

	Every game has to have a premise. Even if the whole point of a game is just to shoot everything you see, it's gotta have a premise. I used to wonder why, but then it dawned on me. Game companies make the writers dream up a premise so they'll have something to print on the back of the box. Some twisted logic I don't pretend to understand makes them think that a game description that simply reads, "look forward and kill a lot of things" would not have a positive impact on to sales. So CyClones has a premise. An alien race has taken a look at earth and decided that it would make a nice place to go to after work, hang out with friends, and maybe toss back a couple piņa coladas. The trouble is, there's all these ugly, smelly, stupid humans ruining the party for everyone. Okay, that's it, it's time for 'em to go. To accomplish this geo-facelift they have taken to the practice of abducting humans and turning them into cybernetic killing machines. Quick thinkers that we are, the rest of us humans saw this and said, "Hey, that's bad. We have to stop them. If these creepy aliens abduct me, kill me, or in any other way cause me to miss the Billy Ray Cyrus concert on Friday night, I will be very unhappy." We asked the aliens politely not to do this anymore, but for some reason they didn't take us seriously. Now we have no other choice but to do basically the same thing to voluntary subjects, most of whom are in the armed services anyway, so it's not that much of a change for them. Of course, you play the role of one of these cy-clones, and it is your all-American duty to cause grievous bodily harm to all aliens, friends of aliens and anyone suspected of being an alien. Yes, you may be a big brute using large-caliber weapons on other living organisms, but now you have a CAUSE, so it's okay to feel good about yourself again.

	If you like to look in a forwardly direction and kill things, CyClones should keep you entertained for quite a while. I like to kill things; in fact, it's one of my favorite activities (and certainly the only printable one). In real life I keep this tendency pretty well confined to the insect family ("Look at that beautiful deer, Marge. Pass me the rocket launcher, would ya hon?"), but put a bunch of pixels together to represent a human form, and my first reaction (all in the cause of science, mind you) is to see just how many bullets it takes to knock out those eight pints of blood. I'm a hard-core Doom veteran, probably a little more jaded than most, and I think CyClones is mounds of fun. It's nice and fast, responding well to your controls, which is a lot more than I can say for most of the quasi-Doom drek floating around out there. Probably the best thing about it is that it has that same edginess that Doom has. You don't sit down with a cold beer, throw Barry Manilow on the 8-track and enjoy a nice soothing game of Cyclones. Your jaw clenches, you sit with your eyes inches from your monitor, dreading what's around the corner. Frequently, you hurl unprintable expletives at no one in particular as a shower of lasers sends you running for cover.

	Yeah, CyClones is gonna be good. If you don't believe me, wait a few months and see for yourself. And if you're wondering what those nifty new features I almost mentioned are, watch the full preview. Did you actually plunk down ten bucks for this CD Mag just to go blind looking at plain text on a high-radiation monitor?