Dear Future Gamer

Lack of innovation? God, it makes my blood boil, all these people whinging on about no new ideas in the games industry. What the hell was Driver? Yes, I know it turned out to be a bugged, badly designed heap of poo, but it wasn't exactly run-of-the-mill, was it? Cue some nerd going on about the fact that pursuit games are hardly new, why it reminded me of such and such a game on the Spectrum but with better graphics, blah blah, wibble wibble. Every game out there is either Frogger, Pong or Space Invaders by another name if you're going to start that one.

These are usually the very same people waiting desperately for Team Fortress 2 or some other improvement on an idea they like. Here's a shock idea for you: all games are essentially improvements on an existing theme but with more tweaks. Even Tetris is only a high-speed interactive jigsaw puzzle when all is said and done. Occasionally a game comes along that fuses two or three ideas, or tacks a new twist onto an old format, and suddenly you have a game that's sufficiently different to be hailed as the second coming. Tomb Raider is a good example. Up until the advent of 32bit consoles, such a thing would have been impossible, graphically, so it's seen as innovative. Strip away the gloss and you have a ladders and levels puzzle game similar to Flashback and Manic Miner. So does this mean Tomb Raider didn't push the envelope and spawn a new genre? It depends on your perspective, that's all.

If we sit and analyse games forever in this vein, we strip all the enjoyment from them. I'm not defending derivative crap at all, just saying we should all be real about just how much innovation to expect. I recently reviewed a truly innovative game that was absolutely rubbish because it tried to do too many things at once and fell on its arse. I know there are far too many clones and cash cow sequels out there, but nobody's forcing you to buy them, and somebody must be or they wouldn't be made. Sadly, most innovative games don't sell terribly well or turn out to be rubbish - ask any developer how many promising ideas he's had to throw in the bin because they didn't work when they passed the concept stage.

As an interesting exercise, come up with a new game without making a pastiche of bits of other games. Every time you say, "It'll have the suspense of Resident Evil," or similar, rip it up and start again. If you come up with an idea that can't then be compared to any other game at all, you have a right to moan about this. If not, as long as you enjoy the game, who cares if it's a sequel or not?

Michael Foster

FG: It's said that all novels stem from just seven basic ideas and the same can be applied to computer games. As you say, it's when a new game manages to fuse a couple of ideas in a new way that it gets described as innovative. The original moan was that we haven't seen enough developers doing this of late, but we've seen too many follow-ups to games they know are good sellers.