i posted a nice lengthy comment in someone's blog, then i realized that the post was 2 years old. i was pretty satisfied with what i said so i'm putting it here. It's basically me talking about the death of shooters

of course the genre will always be adored by the hardcore fans and a company will always cater to them. I think that the introduction of save systems in certain shooters will help revive the genre because casual gamers just don't sit down to finish a game in one sitting anymore. especially in the ADD generation, more shooters need this feature.

shooters are hard, no question, people don't want that anymore, which is a shame. the time of high scores is dead, which is a shame, 2D is dead, which is a shame.. however that is the way our industry has moved. maybe we should just throw up our hands and let it happen. like movies, video games are rapidly becoming the marketing giants of hollow intention. shleco mentioned RPG's and it's a good thing that they're still popular today, even among the casual gamers because without them, I'd declare the video game community a rotten world. Even nintendo is stabbing video games in the back with their relentless nostalgia and "innovation" which in my opinion is destroying the video game community. Shigeru Miyamoto forsook the image of a child sitting in front of a television in a dark room playing games. To me that is video games. We are in for a big shift in video games, and those in charge are ready to alienate and starve those who have always been faithful.

Even the handheld market is turning to crap. The psp is an abomination. Sony is telling their consumer base that they want to play lame ports of their console games, fighting the impossible fight of approximating the console experience. There is no "on-the-go" console gamer, that is a myth. Handheld games have existed to provide a different type of gameplay experience, which we're seeing happen on the DS. However nintendo's current cash cow is also ready to help explode the genre, by force feeding us more innovation and assimilating the kind of hopeless console emulation at times

Tthere was a time that everyone played video games, like pre nintendo arcade era. then video games went to sleep for a while, and shooters thrived with the hardcore. now that home consoles have grown to the point where everyone is playing again, it's harder for companies to notice the niche markets. maybe the only way to truly revive the genre is to kill the market again. if that's true, look forward to hunting down a copy of radiant silvergun and a saturn and accepting that we will never see another great shooter