I fell to one of my numerous weaknesses while up the coast this weekend and popped into a computer games store. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed this before (seeing as it’s not as if I don’t drop into one or other game store fairly frequently) but every second title seemed to be a bloody movie franchise game, and by and large seemed, when actually inspected, to be quite devoid of intelligent independent game development thought or originality (not that the gaming industry can exactly be commended for it’s recent diversity, given the veritable hoard of first person shooters which have flooded the marked in the last year or two, seemingly at the developmental expense of every other genre apart from RPGs).
I got so excited a while back when I thought that they were going to release Sam and Max 2 (which with any luck might have precipitated the release of a few more adventure games in the same vein as the good old Day of the Tentacle or Grim Fandango) and have been hoping against hope that someone might release a new and improved version of Alpha Centauri, or even a completely new game in the Civilisation style (although with the introduction of a few gameplay innovations and additions – unlike Civ 2 and 3, which are basically a 1Mb game turned into a 700Mb game by simply making the graphics flashier, but not substantaially changing (read: improving) the game in itself at all…),