So much has been said about Resistance: Fall of Man over the course of the last twelve months that your opinion has likely already been influenced one way or another. That's the folly of journalism - you're just one voice amongst the masses. What make IGN a little different is that we can take different angles within the site; each region can cover any game and apply any mark - within reason of course. For Resistance, the US clearly loved the title, giving it a very generous 9.1. The UK were a little less convinced by the experience (a respectable 8.0), and having logged a lot of hours into both the single and multiplayer components of the game, we tend to side with them.
Resistance is a good game; really good in fact. We enjoyed the story - an alternate, early 1950s encounter with aliens who are spreading outwards from Russia, slowly infecting the population and wreaking havoc as they move. We enjoyed the typically brilliant weapons - a trademark of Insomniac Games' other series, Ratchet & Clank. We savoured the 40-player multiplayer games, where chaos reigned and bullets rained. But the whole of Resistance, the overall experience of playing the final game, just doesn't blow our collective skirts up the way we hoped it would.

Are private servers for currently-running massive multiplayer games illegal? It depends a lot on your interpretation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Blizzard has won battles in court against "emulated servers", but it seems that other publishers have no problem with fans running their own private servers as long as they are for free.

The game that has one of the larger followings of private servers is Lineage II. It has had decent success here in the US, but it's much more popular in the developers' native country of South Korea and in other countries in Asia. With an anime style and a brutal levelling curve (where months of play, even at eight hours per day, won't even put you close to the maximum attainable level), it satisfies both the tastes and need for challenge that Korean players have. But in the US, many players found the game's incredibly long "grind" just way too much to swallow - and those who love PvP aren't happy with the fact that even PvP deaths in Lineage II result in a considerable XP loss (even if someone much higher level than you kills you in a single hit).