Shoot Shoot Shoot-em-up

I thought I’d diverge from the usual sports rant about some player or team, and instead make a little posty post about videogames for once. After all, it does say this blog includes videogames in the description, and the last thing I would ever want to do would be to mislead my readers….. Anyways, today I saw an ad for the videogame Homefront. This game is a first person shooter (the human player plays as if they saw through the eyes of the virtual character, and holds a gun as if you would in real life) and the story is based around the North Koreans invading the United States in the year 2027. The game was written by the author of Red Dawn- go figure. I realize that many people who do not play videogames are not used to these drastic plots that revolve around superpowers invading superpowers, etc. I will have you know however that this is kind of like the 9^th land before time movie- we’ve had enough already. Every shooter since the Halo series emerged in 2001 has been centered around some sort of peace-keeping mission where the main character must stop an invasion/nuclear holocaust/world war III. Examples include Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, where Russia invades the United States, Battlefield 2142, where the European Union faces off against a fictional Middle East coalition, and every Medal of Honor game (World War 2)

Interestingly enough, these plots continue to horrify adults, while they continue to incessantly bore gamers worldwide. Personally, I can only storm Washington D.C. and blow up terrorists that had taken over the White House so many times. I am in dire need of something new. Who knows how long it will be until we see the motion sensor gaming devices like the Kinect stage a virtual takeover of the industry. I would love to see a game that used devices like this to totally rewrite the rules that all shooters follow. Playstation has a plastic gun with a sensor in the gun barrel called the “MOVE gun” and I see this as a forward step. I am worried that my Xbox shooters could turn into Time Crisis 4 that we all play at video arcades, with a gun and a screen. The huge think-tanks at Microsoft and Sony need to develop something bigger and better.

On a positive note, there are rumors of a new Xbox system in the works, as Microsoft lists job openings on its website for “graphic and hardware architect” and a “hardware verification engineer”. I can only see this as a possibility that a new system is on its way. YAY!