Just as co-op is all the rage now, deathmatch and its ilk (read: competitive action) dominated online gaming in the mid- 1990s. Along with Unreal Tournament, Quake III: Arena was the pinnacle of the Deathmatch era, delivering razor-sharp gameplay balance, tight-as-a-drum control, and then-unprecedented ’bot support so you could hone your hair-trigger skills against A.I. opponents.

In fact, the so-called single-player campaign was just ’bot play — practice for when you’d go online to face actual humans — and so it remains in Quake Arena Arcade, the refocused port of the first-person-shooter classic. With around three dozen maps — some old favorites, some new ones — to frag around on, you’ll go from one battleground to the next with a different task. Sometimes you’ll be asked to simply get to 10 kills first; other rounds will challenge you to score the most frags in three minutes.

We dabbled in a few levels — okay, it was more like half the game, since we were warped right back to 1996 and unable to put it down — and we found the action to be as fast and intense as ever. The weapons, including the legendary railgun, felt as powerful as we remembered, although we hope the automatic weapon-switching can be disabled in the final release. Oh, wait, there’s CTF, too? Back in a few hours…