Champions of Norrath: Realms of Everquest.(evaluation of video game)(Product/Service Evaluation)

JOE: We took our pointy wizards' hats off to the excellent Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance for bringing Gauntlet-style hack-n-slash thrills back to consoles, and now, Alliance's original developers return with a fantastic action-RPG set in Sony's EverQuest universe. (The big difference? Um...well, the orcs look a little different, we guess.) Champions mimicks everything that we loved about Alliance but actually takes it all a step further, with extensive item customization, enhanced graphics, more variety to its straightforward all-monsters-must-die missions, a ton of levels, and up to four-player simultaneous play, both online and off.

The best part, though, is that the …