It's always zombie season here...

A few months ago I got a new computer.

This means that I can now play all the new games that came out 2 years ago. Don't be silly. The games that come out this year require far too much computing power.

It makes for an interesting insight into what must be very hard to program, moderately hard to program, and so forth. For instance, mirrors must be very difficult. You're more likely to find a mirror in the house of a self-conscious acne-plagued vampire than in a first person shooter. Bullet holes are moderate. Given how much shooting goes on in shooters, you might have thought this would have been solved already. But either they don't make holes, or the holes disappear after a while (which looks really weird when you see it happening).

But what must be virtually impossible to do is deviate at all from the script of the stupid FPS genre. Every damn one of them, since the start of the genre, uses the same elements. Start off by fighting "soldiers." Put a couple of cosmetic touches on them (insect soldiers in Halo, for instance), but they all do the same thing. Run around, hide, and shoot at you. After you get tired of slaughtering them for a while, add in zombies. Put a couple of cosmetic touches on them. (mutants in Far Cry, demons in Doom, etc.), but they all do the same thing. Run up and try to bite you. Then, do combos (soldiers and zombies together! zombies busting out of a closet! soldiers fighting zombies!) Finally, you'll need a boss fight. Of course, if you don't want to use zombies, you can always use Nazis. Ain't nobody like no Nazis.

You'd think that if the companies could spend $1 million getting their engine to push polygons 3% faster and shade their pixels 3% better, they could spend 100 bucks to come up with a new form. But the best anyone has come up with (aside from Thief, which is now probably so old that only net Gomers like myself remember it) is to make cosmetic changes to what is essentially the same game.

Is it the Hollywood problem? People are now sinking so much into these games, that they'd rather make an uninspired but profitable sequel? Is it an open contempt for the consumers (who, granted, are usually profane 10 year olds playing in an internet cafe and screaming obscenities at each other). Is it just what consumers really want?

--- supplemental rant follows ---

Oh, good, another jumping puzzle. That's just what I want in my shooters. Give me a character who can jump one, and only one distance; force me to jump on a series of improbably placed objects over a deadly chasm. They lack the kinetic joy of movement and balance, and they are generally frustrating as hell because the controls for jumping are usually an afterthought in a game that is, let's face, all about firearmy carnage. But they ALL have them. They're e-syphilis.