The Video Game Revue

The Fall Gaming... Lull?

A wild realisation has been growing in my mind since the glorious day of the Wii launch: it's been fully a month now and, for the most part, I've been playing the same handfull of great games this whole time. In fact, if you reach as far back as September, I've really only been given over to a select few games since then. Relatively speaking, at least.

Switching games too often is a personal problem for me. For one thing, it leads to not giving the great games as much time and attention as they really deserve; when one gets caught up in a cycle of starting a new game every other week, that generally means that no game gets more than a couple of week's worth of attention at the most. For a good long while, the problem was so extreme for me that even a game requiring only 10 hours to finish typically took me months to complete.

That's not how my gaming habits always were, and I've been trying to return to a habit of having only a few "core" games that I'm playing at any given time and really sticking to them before getting swept up in something new. But it's hard not to start switching up frequently because my willpower is not strong at all. New releases make me go weak in the knees, particularly if they're featured on Penny Arcade and/or get good reviews from the critics. I'm also interested in so many different genres and platforms that it's unreasonable for me to expect myself to keep up, yet somehow I still dread falling behind.

The remarkable thing is that lately there hasn't been as much of a problem in keeping up. Not only have I been able to hang on to the same core games (Zelda: Twilight Princess, Guitar Hero, Final Fantasy XII, and Trauma Center included) for more than a few weeks now, but even among the new releases that I haven't been able to get into, the same handful of titles keeps coming up: Gears of War, Guitar Hero II, Call of Duty 3, Rainbow Six: Vegas, and WoW: The Burning Crusade. These are the headliners on the EB Games web site right now, and it seems to me that there hasn't been a lot of change in the past month.

Okay, so the gaming industry is in a bit of a lull right now. That certainly happens--usually as a result of development teams recovering from the stress of putting together E3 demos, or in the wake of the over-commercialized holiday season. But aren't we smack in the middle of the holiday season? October and November in particular are often the time of year when new "must have" releases fall upon each other so rapidly that I get a little angry at the industry for hoarding all of the good stuff for this one particular season. How is it that right now I'm able to look back on the fall months and think that I was actually able to keep up for a change?

The release of the PS3 and the Wii are most likely to blame. I suppose that there are probably fewer game titles out because everyone is scrambling to get their PS3 and Wii game projects completed. Even given that, I'm surprised because the situation had gotten so out of control the past few years. It barely seemed possible to me that the game industry could get bogged down and overlook the Fall season. And I suppose that for some gamers, this December is no different from Decembers past: whereas I only have the Wii and only Wii Sports and Zelda to worry about, there are undoubtedly those who have a Wii and a PS3, or those who bought six or more Wii games and are frantically trying to get their money's worth out of those (even though there are only two or three good Wii titles available at the moment.)

It's also possible that my perception is simply skewed because I have been better about only focusing on games that matter lately. Of course, it's a little tricky for me to tell whether I've been smarter about my gaming purchases or whether there's simply just been fewer great titles around to tempt me. I tend to think the latter, but it's possible that the former has come into play. Or is that just wishful thinking on my part?

Whatever the cause, I've found myself jonesing for new releases once or twice in the past month and scouting around only to find that there's been nothing new and notable since the PS3 and Wii launched. I'm definitely not complaining, especially since I've been planning to cut back on game consumption and focus more on just playing games that I already have. However, I do wonder how long it will take for the next gen console releases to start to ramp up. Historically, as much as the first year of a console's lifespan has been slow, which means that 2007 could be a slow year for console gaming in general. That sure would be a change.

posted by Parappa @ 10:46 AM