XBLA, XNA and PSN Rescue us from First Person Shooters. Time for something new.

After yet another onslaught of ‘Shooters’ in 2007, including Halo 3, Crysis, Unreal Tournament III, Quake Wars, Call of Duty 4, Mass Effect… OK there was Portal (bundled with Half Life 2 – but essentially wasn’t it just reiterating what Prey had innovated, albeit in a much slicker, more puzzlesque way.

I for one am getting tired of seeing one after another of these male-teen-targeted games pouring into an overflowing ultra-stereotypical genre. It’s like movie-makers only made action and horror films. It’s patronising to the average gamer, we’re not all stupid.

But, alas, no, they just keep on coming, like an infinite loop. It’s almost as if one team produced a game engine (and called it Unreal Engine), then a bunch of different artists created ever-so-slightly different textures and packaged these into similar-looking boxes with similar-looking advertising campaigns. Oh, how creative, how imaginative.

I find it frustrating because this kind of publishing continues to confirm the bad image that people like Fox news try to emphasise (see below video).

It does no credit to the gaming industry as a whole, if it wants to cast away that geeky, alpha male, killer image that the masses have been accustomed for a long while.

Well, finally, it appears that the revolution is slowly but surely happening (cue applause for Nintendo Wii).

Largely through the success of Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) over the last couple of years, coupled with the worldwide phenomenon which is the Wii , along with Sony following suit with their PlayStation Network (PSN), developers seize the chance to have more creative freedom with game design and style.

These infrastructures enable much smaller-scale development with teams as small as just one person, as the titles are published in an electronic format and downloaded directly onto the console, thus massively decreasing or pretty much cutting out the production cost.

Therefore, purely for financial reasons, publishers are not forced to stick with the relatively risk-free and predictable business models of the tried-and-tested genres rolled out year on year. Yes, they are gradually funding more innovative game ideas. This in turn is helping to open their eyes to the fact that (revelation…) there is not only one gender and age range that will buy and play video games.

The Game Developers Conference 2008, gave us an appetising taste of what’s to come, especially with XNA Community games like Jelly Car (see article on experimental art games).

Ladies and gentlemen, we have some creative originality on the horizon.