In other areas, more imaginative bandwagon jumpers are at least trying to inject new life into familiar game genres. It was a while ago now but the excellent multiplayer romp, Half-Life: Team Fortress, gave each participant a specific role - be it spy, sniper, heavy gun expert or engineer - which added structure and tactical depth to the whole first-person LAN/online experience. Rare's forthcoming follow-up to GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, also has some new ideas for the first-person gene pool, including a powerful gun with an ultraviolet scope, enabling players to shoot through walls at unsuspecting snipers.

Elsewhere, on the realtime military strategy front, HomeWorld could single-handedly rejuvenate the whole genre, simply by using a true 3D system: ie. you can place your units anywhere in three-dimensional space. Whether or not this affects the gameplay that much remains to be seen, but it's a lurch in a new direction all the same.

Even the achingly dull driving game has been re-interpreted by a few brave souls recently. Reflections' Driver has you chasing other cars through city streets in groovy '70s muscle cars, while Sega's Crazy Taxi, currently taking Japanese arcades by storm, has you ferrying passengers around a crowded city as fast as your mad little yellow cab will carry you. Both of these are fresh, non-linear spins on an overdone theme - they're not exactly groundbreaking, but at least they're making dents in the pavement.

Amazingly, though, some developers are looking beyond past videogames for their inspiration. Religion, for example, is proving a rich source of new and interesting concepts at the moment with Messiah, Omikron and Soul Reaver all toying with ideas of re-incarnation and spirituality to great effect. In the latter, players never die - they are simply sent to the spirit realm whenever they run out of energy, while in both Shiny's long-awaited Messiah and Quantic Dream's Omikron, it's possible to inhabit the bodies of other characters, changing from a muscle-bound man one minute to a buxom gal the next. Not only is it innovative, it's also vaguely kinky - and kinkiness is something that has been shamefully missing from the videogame cannon of late.

Science is another area full of possibilities. Computer Artworks, possibly the only videogame company run by an artist (William Latham), explore genetics in their forthcoming title, Evolva. Here you control a creature which absorbs the DNA of anything it kills, gaining new powers and abilities along the way. Yes, this is just a new take on the old power-up system, but at least it tries to deviate from the norm, and manages to be culturally relevant at the same time, another rare achievement for a videogame.