QUOTE
	"It used to be simple -- think of a game, then turn it into a video game."

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Is there a kind of gaming we haven't thought of yet?

I'm not talking about playing a game while standing on your head, or with a corncob pipe in your mouth. What I mean here is: Is there a style of game we haven't come up with? The answer to that seems to be, "almost certainly," but I'm finding myself quite perplexed when I try to come up with new ideas.

It used to be simple -- think of a game, then turn it into a video game. Sports were an easy transfer, and other things like combat also seemed to translate well. But now that the possibilities of what we can do with software seem to be less limited than ever, I'm not seeing a whole lot of new genres showing up.

The Wii controller showed us a whole new way to play games, but, for the most part, I'm not playing all new kinds of games. I'm playing the same kinds of games that I already played, but with new controls. That's not to say that these are bad games -- well, some are, but those aren't the ones that I buy.

When I try to figure out the most innovative, groundbreaking Wii game, I'm coming up with Wii Fit. That's a game that plays in a whole new way, and doesn't quite match up to any previous offering, even its spiritual predecessor, World Class Track Meet. What else is there? Well, we have World of Goo, which for all its intricacies, is a puzzle game, and New Super Mario Bros, which is a fantastic game but could have technically been done on the GameCube. And then there are sublime, cerebral games like Maboshi's Arcade, which, since it only uses one button, isn't really enough to build a franchise upon.

This sounds like I'm Wii-bashing, but I'm not. It's not like the other two consoles have a whole lot of truly innovative software to stand on. Instead, I'm starting to wonder what direction new software will take in the next console generation. Nintendo obviously is on the right track with the notion that playing the same or similar games in a different way is what people want, especially with the DS, so I'm cautiously optimistic about the 3DS despite my total lack of interest in 3D as a general rule.

You know what else the Wii as a console has brought us? A triumphant return to two-dimensional gameplay. With stuff like Muramasa, A Boy and His Blob, and the aforementioned New Super Mario Bros, its obvious that Wii is the place to be for 2D, which is doubly sure when including all the retro software available on the console.

What kind of games am I talking about, here? Games that really change the landscape, ones that everyone else apes after they've been successful. Games like Super Mario Bros, Grand Theft Auto III, Wolfenstein 3D, Dragon Warrior, Mario 64, Herzog Zwei, WarioWare: Mega Microgame$, and Tetris. Stuff that, once it comes along, everything changes. I haven't seen a whole lot of that kind of stuff for a long time.

Who knows, maybe Nintendo's next console will pioneer a smell sensor or something and we'll spend the next decade smelling Wario's feet. Then again, I'm not sure that's such a great achievement...

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