This year could easily go down as the year of the First Person Shooter (FPS). In March, Atari released Unreal Tournament 2004 and one week later Ubisoft launched Far Cry. With those two games released, the buzz around fast twitch gaming enthusiasts was underway.

Back to back titles started the year off right for FPS games.

Then in August, Id Software released Doom 3. On November 16, just before the Christmas sales season, Half-Life 2 hit the scene. All of these titles went gold before their launch dates with sales over 200,000 copies each. This truly is one of the most exciting years for FPS gamers.

These huge titles raised the bar with their amazing developments in graphics, sounds, physics, and gameplay. These enhancements help to draw the gamer into the game. The goal is to leave the user with an exhilarating experience from each session of play. This new level of gaming has also changed what people demand from their games and their gaming hardware.

Old favorites with new engines came later in the year, but they were well worth the wait.

To get the most out of their games, players can upgrade their systems with faster processors, bleeding edge graphics cards, tons of memory and blazing fast hard drives. However, what is the sense of playing with such killer hardware if you can't hit your target with your first shot or get your character out of the way of incoming enemy fire? This is where a new breed of input devices aimed at the gaming market has surfaced like the MonsterGecko PistolMouse FPS.

A companion for your first person shooter is here.