God; is this a one track record or what?

O.K, I'm sorry and all but it's time for my first real complaint since I started writing this column. Well, I have had a couple of minor ones but this is the first big one. Let me pose you a question. How would you, as a discerning reader, feel if you bought a newspaper and whilst reading it noticed that all the columns were the same? Some bits, like the TV guide and the new movie releases were different from issue-to-issue, but overall the key articles, the ones you would normally enjoy reading, were all the same. You would probably feel angry and more than a bit disappointed. You would probably consider changing to a different newspaper altogether. But what if all of the newspapers were repeating incredibly similar articles about the same topic, week in week out?

This is how I, and I hope some of you too, feel about the computer gaming press at the moment. Make no mistake, this is not a blanket criticism by a blinkered and/or badly read writer. I read up to three different games magazines a week, and many internet-based, gaming-related news publications - and there are some notable exceptions to this criticism. If you want to read what I regard as balanced journalism, try PC Gamer in the UK or US, or www.gamespot.com on the internet. But otherwise, all the publications I read seem to have gone a bit one-track recently, about the subject of originality in games.

In summary, all of these articles read the same: "Games have lost all originality" leads to "Look, all 3D shooters come from Wolfenstein 3D, all RTS games from Dune, etc. Everyone has lost their sense of reality" leads to "We hope that the game industry finds a way to be more inventive". Look, I like really good imaginative games. They are more fun than playing a game that is brand new but that you seem to have played different incarnations of before. But cut the designers a little slack, guys. You all seem to have gone into "back in my day, things were better" mode.

Instead, in my opinion we should be thankful for small mercies. Everything goes in cycles. For a period of time, there seem to be no truly ground-breaking games. Sure, occasionally a neat little feature is added that does make some small difference. But you just have to wait - what goes around comes around. A game will then arrive that incorporates all of these cool little features and it seems to shake everyone. As an example, take Half-Life. This took Quakes game engine, aliens from any number of horror movies or fantasy novels and a half-decent storyline. "Revolutionary", "Superbly inventive", said everyone. Then two weeks later the stock "god, everything is boring" stories appeared again.

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