Why should we believe? Why should we take the red pill? Why should we do what Monolith Productions and Warner Bros. want us to do and jack into the Matrix once again? Didn't we already suffer through one mediocre PC game? Weren't the second and third movies, despite making hundreds of millions of dollars, major disappointments that turned lots of people off of the franchise? And don't we already have too many cool online games to play anyway?

These are just some of the tough questions facing the developers of The Matrix Online, a massively multiplayer online RPG set in the Matrix universe, now due to launch on January 18. And while no one knows how it's ultimately going to pan out, we can tell you this after spending some time with the game: It's a crazy, ambitious, and potentially groundbreaking project.