Playing San Andreas and Midtown Madness 3 over the weekend got me thinking about the gradual homogenisation of videogame design. The driving game is merging with the action adventure, the first-person shooter with the combat strategy simulation. Of course, the cyclical nature of the videogame industry has always meant that genres have risen, briefly prospered and then fallen away, but could that process be accelerating toward some sort of apocalyptic culmination as the increased power of the latest games machines leads to a new era of super genres? Could more specialised game types simply shut down like those defunct genes in the human genome? Here's a list of coffin-dodging genres that may well be on the verge of succumbing...
The beat 'em up In the mid-nineties, fighting games were massively successful in both the arcade and home console markets, with titles like Tekken and Virtua Fighter acting as million-selling showcases for the 3D graphics revolution. Where are they now? Gamers have fallen out of love with spatially limited combat, and with learning hundreds of button combinations (only to be made a fool of by some clueless newbie who beats you by randomly smacking the buttons like an angry chimp). The forthcoming SNK vs Capcom title might revive our interest. But I doubt it.
The flight shooter This genre hit its peak of popularity with Afterburner in the mid-eighties and has been in a spiralling nosedive ever since. Namco has attempted to keep the jets burning with the Ace Combat series, and last year's very decent Secret Weapons Over Normandy tried its best to revive the scene, but the masses aren't interested. Strangely, in multiplayer games like Battlefield 1942, you get kids hanging around on landing strips slaughtering their team-mates like dogs in order to secure a recently spawned bomber. However, this has more to do with being able to kill many more people from the air than you can from the ground, thus securing better rankings. The same kids would probably run a mile if they were asked to play Ace Combat 5.
Perhaps, however accessible these games are, they're just too close to the phrase 'flight sim' for most peoples' comfort. Perhaps we have an inherent fear of anything that requires us to understand the concept of 'yaw control'.
The real-time strategy In the wake of Total Annihilation, almost every PC title was an RTS. It was as though developers believed they had at last found a 100% guaranteed cash cow. There are still some excellent examples - Rome: Total War, Lord of the Rings: Battle For Middle Earth, etc - but the frantic, thinking-persons' shoot out is a shadow of its former self. The squad-based shooter is the new RTS. I read that in Vogue.
The F1 sim It was the annual grind that killed this one. Every year, the same cars, same tracks, same drivers - just a few graphical tweaks and some nonsensical tech claims ("new quantum downforce physics!"). The decline of the sport itself as a exciting spectator event hasn't helped much, of course. It's just a parade nowadays, isn't it?
In fact, rally games are losing much of their appeal too - again because the latest iterations are just slightly better looking versions of what came before. Or perhaps it's because racing is no longer entertaining enough as a standalone gaming pursuit. We want Petter Solberg to get out of his car, smack Carlos Sainz, steal a Mitsubishi Lancer and then drive it into the back of a hot dog van.
The god game Populous, Civilization, Sim City: gaming gods, now reduced to mere mortal status. Having boundless power over the fate of an entire people seems intimidating and impersonal to today's more emotionally focused gamer. Instead, we like to micro-manage, playing with everyday lives (The Sims), or lone capitalist endeavours (Roller Coaster Tycoon 3). With Fable, even Peter Molyneux has dropped the omniscience and gone personal. Can Black and White 2 revive our interest in deity simulation?
The arena-based vehicle combat game This bizarre sub-genre, championed by the likes of Twisted Metal and Vigilante 8 in the mid-nineties, is still grimly hanging on in there, but only as a minority pursuit for the sort of people who banged their heads against things as children. The more sophisticated driving adventure now fulfils the auto-destructive desires of most gamers.
The graphical adventure Everyone of a certain age claims to have loved the Lucas Arts point and click adventures. The likes of Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion and Full Throttle brought us humour, brilliant story-telling and cunning lateral puzzles. But recent attempts to revive the pure adventure genre have ended in disappointment: Broken Sword Sleeping Dragon failed to make much of an impression on the sales charts, while Lucas Arts has canned proposed sequels to Full Throttle and Sam and Max Hit The Road. We just didn't love them enough, it seems.
However, perhaps the genre is about to be re-born on mobile. German developer Elkware has a range of simple graphical adventure titles similar to the likes of The Hobbit and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Go to the website and click on Secret of the Lost Link in the bottom right-hand corner...
The 2D shooter Of course, this genre - once the undisputed king of gaming - has been a minority interest for years. Japan still produces a mystifying array of scrolling blasters for its domestic market, and some of these, including the latest Metal Slug and Gradius titles are still getting European releases. But relentlessly demanding twitch gameplay is never going to pull in the crowds as it once did, because the average age of the gamer has risen. Few people over 14 retain the hyper-spasmodic reflexes necessary to achieve success in something like Ikaruga. Those that do are usually receiving medical treatment for it.
The puzzle game When we buy a PS2 or Xbox title these days, we have been conditioned to expect an epic experience, a real-time 3D world five times the size of Texas. Despite the undeniable brilliance of Tetris and Puzzle Bobble, we no longer want to see little shapes falling down the screen, or cute dragons firing bubbles. Our understanding of immersive interactive entertainment has mutated to such an extent that we are now only capable of accepting close approximations of our own environment.
However, it could be argued that the natural home of the puzzle game is the handheld device as puzzling is more of a time wasting than an objective-based pursuit, and we're more likely to want to waste time when we're on the move. Also, we'll accept simple, non-realistic graphics on a tiny screen. Puzzle games are, after all, still reasonably common on the GBA, and they're doing extremely well on mobile.
But then, the launch of the super-powered PSP and DS devices could kill them off once and for all...
The cute character-based adventure Crash, Spyro, Ratchet and Clank, Jak and Daxter - are their kind long for this world? Does the Miyamoto school of character design still charm us as it once did? This isn't really another 'modern gamers demand realism' argument; non-naturalistic characters still have a place in gaming. But these days, it seems they must have an 'edge'. The design ethic behind Viewtiful Joe is a world away from the boggle-eyed baby style of Spyro and his ilk. He's darker, his world is darker, the objectives are darker. Maybe, in a world currently obsessed with war and terror, the infantilism of a cartoon bandicoot seems out of place. Or maybe gamers are just waiting for the next cartoon gaming hero. Just one last cute little animal to make everything alright.
