There appears to be an increase in the incidence of the portrayal of spiders - giant ones at that - in many games nowadays, especially role-playing games. It's certainly bad news for arachnophobes such as myself - I may as well admit that *I* was the one who posted on the System Shock 2 board years ago now about the annelid arachnid incident which forced me to stop playing that fine game and leave it for the foreseeable future, even though I wanted to use the game as therapy to cure myself of the recognised disorder of "spider phobia". I can tolerate the spiders in the aptly-named Spiderweb Software's "Exile" trilogy of shareware RPGs, as they are portrayed as funny to the point of silly, and are not huge and scary (they're only icon-sized and seen from side-on). I was also able to tolerate (just) the giant scorpions of "Fallout" having never seen a live scorpion ever.

The trouble is that there are many newer role-playing games I want to try, such as Arcanum, Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind, but I don't want to be scared whitless by seeing a HUGE eight-legged freak of a beast coming at me. Are there any new games that don't feature giant spiders, scorpions, or other multi-legged beasts that scarper around? Either in RPGs, or even first-person shooters? (Rumour has it that Unreal [Episode] 2 will feature tons of the bar-stewards.)