Around half way through my first single-player campaign of Champions of Norrath I realized I had a new favorite genre. For years if anyone asked me what kind of game I liked best, I would say shoot-em-ups — games like the R-type series and Radiant Silvergun. But when I think back on the past three or four years, many of the games that I enjoyed the most were updates on the Rogue-style dungeon-crawling experience —Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, Hunter: the Reckoning, Diablo 2, Guantlet Legends (if only for the multi-player). Now comes Snowblind's Champions of Norrath, a game from the same design team that put together the excellent Dark Alliance, and Champions of Norrath is so good and so deep as to put the previous games in the genre to shame. After a couple of single-player play-throughs and a good deal of time spent with the offline and online multi-player, I have no problem saying Champions of Norrath is my favorite dungeon crawler ever and maybe the best ever designed. I can hear the Diablo 2 fans cringing and gathering their flaming torches as I type this, but no game of this genre has ever been as deep and detailed as Champions of Norrath, nor has one ever offered as many compelling reasons to keep playing once the game has been beaten.