E3 09: Too Many Shooters?

Have Gun, Will make game about it?

There are probably two things immediately wrong with this article (yup, that's how I real 'em in).  First, the cry "there are too many shooters in the video game market" is not a novel one, nor by any stretch of the imagination, a new one.  Secondly, I love shooters.  So why dig up and beat a horse which has long since been given an earthy home six feet under "it sells" and "who cares?"  I don't quite know what it is, but despite this year being undeniably a great E3, it all at once seem to dawn on me that this oh-so-insistent sense of enthuse-less-ness might not be directed to quality of the the titles shown this year, but maybe this simple fact: there were too many shooters.  

I'll say it again just to clear up any doubt by my previous statement.  I LOVE SHOOTERS.  I always have and probably always will.  My game library to date probably consists of mostly shooters.  I've even shoot real guns and poor, defenseless paper targets who never done no harm to no one.  It's just that when games like Little Big Planet were announced, everyone in the gaming world (not just me) freaked out because it was a new IP and it contained no semblance of propelling projectiles at opponents with intent to harm.  And while there were so many exciting games at E3 this year (Modern Warfare 2, Splinter Cell Conviction, Uncharted 2, etc...) I didn't get that same sense of "oh snap" from anything, even if they were an insanely inventive new shooter (like Splinter Cell Conviction).  In fact, maybe despite a few notable titles (which I will talk about more later), the show seemed up to its LA Convention Center-neck in shell casings from all the shooters.

To name a few: Alan Wake (shooting light counts as shooting), Modern Warfare 2, Halo 3: ODST, Halo Reach, Crackdown 2, APB, Mass Effect 2 (now really a shooter), MAG, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Left 4 Dead 2, Saboteur, Battlefield Bad Company 2, Battlefield 1943, Singularity, Red Steel 2, Borderlands, Wet, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Dead Space Extraction, and on and on it goes.

To top that off, if you look at the list of other games at E3, they almost all fall into the category of "Sports" or "Racer" or "3rd Person Action Platformer" where guns simply don't exist because they either haven't been invented yet, or wouldn't go with well with plumber outfit and mustache.  So maybe my general malaise is not exactly targeted at the over-abundance of one particular genre, but the under-abundance of truly innovative titles, the few of which were present, like Scribblenauts, Heavy Rain, and the ironically titled PixelJunk Shooter (I know, I know...), I imagine will get most of the love from the various interweb pundits' E3 09 Game of Show awards.

So maybe this year isn't going to set the bar for innovation outside the bullet ridden box, but that doesn't mean we don't have a barrage of incoming titles certain to entertain and lay waste to our shell-shocked free time.  And having seen the kinds of things that small developers are doing in the independent gaming community, all I can say to the big guns out there is next year, take a little advice from Little Big Planet developers Media Molecule: go to the IGF and steal as much as you can.