It's a top-selling action game but that doesn't guarantee top-flight experience.

While Diablo II from Blizzard Entertainment sold a record one million copies in two weeks, the more inventive Ion Storm's Daikatana has yet to crack the top 10 list.

The original Diablo is mistakenly credited with reviving interest in role-playing games – it was anything but an RPG. It had the dungeon setting with magic and monsters, but it had all the play and depth of Quake.

Three years later, very little has changed. Diablo II, the long-delayed sequel to Blizzard's 1997 release, sells for a steep $60 and is still a third-person version of Quake. Combat is still point-click-click-click-click with a few spells thrown in.

The maps are bigger, and there's an interesting story line told through some beautifully edited scenes. But it's really the same game.

Once again, you proceed in a very linear fashion through a number of dungeons killing everything in your path, fulfilling quests as you go. The game is split into acts, with different graphics and monsters.

The game isn't very challenging, either. I breezed through the entire first act without a single threat to my character, mowing down monsters with one or two hits.

There are a few new ideas, such as new character classes and socketed armor and weapons, where you can add gems to your arsenal to enhance items. There are also nonplayer characters (NPCs) you can hire to assist you. But they aren't much more than cannon fodder.

Also new for Diablo II, combat skills are branched and some can be learned only at higher levels.

Diablo II has its technical problems as well.

For starters, you cannot save and continue playing in Diablo II, even though this is standard practice in most games. You can only save and exit. But if you save and exit while in a dungeon, you wind up in the town when you restart.

Where Blizzard made few innovations in Diablo II, Ion Storm tried too hard. John "PT Barnum" Romero promised a revolution in gaming when he left legendary gaming company id Software in 1996.

Unfortunately, it was his employees who revolted. While creating Daikatana, Ion Storm went through enough people to staff an entire company. Although he kept updating his staff, he didn't update the game from its original design.

Daikatana would have been a mind-blowing game in 1998. But with the release of Valve's Half-Life, the bar was raised to a level no one has reached yet, including Daikatana.

The game overflows with content: monsters, cool graphics, and weapons. But saturating a game with art doesn't constitute an adventure title, which seems to be what Romero wanted.

Daikatana's still very much the first-person shooter it used to be: You make your way through a maze and find buttons to open doors.

There are four regions of the world in four time periods, each with their own art and monsters, making it more like four minigames than one big game. You have a total of 25 weapons alone; I don't dare count the number of monsters. There is no interaction with NPCs. Every other being you see is a target, with two exceptions: your sidekicks Superfly Johnson (wasn't that the name of a blaxploitation film from the 1970s?) and Mikiko Ebihara.

The clumsy assistants are supposed to help you, and sometime they do, but more often they do inane things like stand in a doorway while the door slams them to death or run in front of you during combat, taking fire from you and your enemy.

And if they die, it's game over. Doing without sidekicks altogether would have made for a much better game (an opinion shared by many Net posters).

Daikatana does have one Romero hallmark that I heartily enjoy: surprises. When I asked him about Quake II a few years ago, he said he missed the surprise element of booby traps, or being jumped from behind by creatures. Daikatana has plenty of that. You have to pay attention to everything in this game, because you never know when something is going to be dropped on your head or the floor disappear underneath you.

Blizzard tried to do too little, and Ion Storm was too ambitious, and neither produced a memorable game. But I prefer Daikatana for its surprises and rich visuals.