Shooters are dominant
The equation is pretty simple - if a game is successful, make another one like it. We're cool with that. But why is it that every successful game is a shooter? Are we really that shallow? Yes. Of course we are.
The party piece of both Sony and Microsoft's E3 presence revolved around two first party sci-fi shooters:Halo 3 andKillzone 2. Both for good reasons. For Microsoft, Halo 3 represents the biggest game launch in their history, touted as the first $1 billion game and rightly or wrongly placed onequal footingwith Star Wars. Whatever they say, we know it'll sell through the roof.
For Sony, Killzone 2 was the game they could stand and fall by after its initial showing in 2005 - supposed to represent what PS3 was capable of - was exposed as a computer-generated fraud. A real-time walkthrough shown first at an exclusive press view and then at the E3 press briefing proved that the developer, Guerrilla,is on the way to matching the graphics glimpsed two years ago, but did little to show the core gameplay had moved on since the PS2 original - an argument that could beused onHalo 3 too.
It didn't stop there. GR's second game of the show (in this writer's mind at least) after Resident Evil 5wasCall of Duty 4, a graphically hiked and timeshifted upgrade of COD 3. And then there was HazeandOrange Box andCrysis and... it got to the point where GR writers were suffering from shooter fatigue, struggling to find other words to describe what it feels like to shoot a pretend gun. This list of E3 07 showcased shooters should make the point:
Clive Barker's Jericho
Frontlines: Fuel Of War
Unreal Tournament 3
Blacksite: Area 51
Call Of Duty 4
Quake Wars
The Club
Condemned 2
Legendary: The Box
Bioshock
Brothers In Arms
Haze
Hellgate London
F.E.A.R sequel [working title]
Crysis
Medal Of Honor: Airborne
The Orange Box
Army Of Two
And that's just the ones we can remember...
