[kupoartist]

In terms of shooters (because lets no forget - aside from shooters, everything is really 3rd Person 99% of the time) 1st Person is better IMO, but an awful lot of 1st Person games are not 1st Person enough! I'm not really fond of the "out of body experience" way of telling stories that games like Halo represent - I prefer to stay permanently in the character's shoes, but I can name a whole total of... 2 game series that take that approach. No coincidence that the Half-Life and System Shock series are actually my favorite .

First Person games are usually far more easy to control than Third Person games, this especially comes into play on the PC, because the mouse and keyboard are so precise. Most importantly, it seems to me that 3rd Person has fallen out of favour because of the increasing need to fix a decent camera into the game - so long as you have a player character onscreen, you have to find a way to get the camera at a point where your view isn't obstructed by the person you're playing - Developers are simply not bothering with 3rd person, because the ammount of critical drumming they get when they put out a bad camera (and virtually all 3rd Person games get accused of having a bad camera). 1st person eliminates that obstacle, just giving you a gun and a hand (unless you're playing Thief or Tribes or something) to remind you that you're supposed to be person, not just a floating camera.