The evolution of the shooter genre

 A trend has occurred in gaming. Genres are being blurred, and stealth and action are now fairly commonly appearing in the same game. Rpg elements are in games like Cod 4 and Bioshock. This is is the evolution of the genre.

 Take Crysis for example. It has shooting, driving, stealth, open world gameplay, rpg elements (weapon customization), and a rudimentary class-like system which is all about using the right suit power when, with some highly scripted and fun gameplay at the end. Crysis is really a next gen fps. 

 So what is next gen? It's certainly not graphics, though amazing graphics do help with immersion. It's not downloadable content, even though thats quite amazing. Next gen is,simply put, freedom and options. It all started with Oblivion. This was, in my opinion, the first next gen game. You could be the character you wanted to be, not something shoehorned into a class. The quests were the same for each adventurer, and you could decide important things in the quest's, and these would have real impacts on the game world. Should you  kill the corrupt baron or let him face justice in court? It was decisions like these that made Oblivion something special.

 And freedom is not necessarily open world. Gears was free in that you could snipe or get up close and personal with a chainsaw. You could make choices about which path to go down, and the overall experience is amazing. You can order your squad to cover you, or you can cover them as they advance.

 Even though you have a set of objectives, there are many ways to go about them. This is really a next gen philosophy. Bioshock, Assassins Creed ( in a different way the most though), and Cal of Duty 4's multiplayer are all great examples of this. 

 Another next gen thing is immersion. This is where the Wii succeeds with its motion sensing. While the Wii's motion sensing is ineffective at best, the potential is still there. A few motion sensing gimmicks thrown in here and there greatly help with immersion. Bear in mind that "shaking the wii mote upwards" is the same thing as shaking it downwards. Motion sensing control schemes lose allot of precision, to the points where only one or two of these should be used.

 And this takes me back to the evolution of the fps genre. Rpg customization and more community tools are an inevitable thing. The basics are in place with forge (Halo 3) and the perks system (Cod 4). 

Brawl: Competitive or Casual?

 One of the most surprising things about Melee was it's competitive following. Without online play, the community had to band together and help teach newer players the tricks of the trade personally. Then tournaments came in, and the whole thing took off. One of the remarkable things about Melee was how it catered to the competitive player and the casual one. There were competitive maps like Final Destination, and then there were casual maps like Icicle Mountain.

 But rather then embracing the competitive community as they did in Melee, Sakurai shot it in the face. While Melee was precise, Brawl is floaty and unbalanced. Many characters have been unnecessarily nerfed(Captain Falcon) and the majority of items make the game to random, too unskillful. Many of the new maps are simply uncompetitive, whether they be easily too easy to throw someone off or simply kill players, and many have stupid gimmicks like Wario's map. No map has succeeded in coming close to Final Destination, and even some characters are broken. Take DeDeDe, for example. He can grab people and grab them again before they leave his grab range, but this only works on some heavy characters. The rest he can grab 4 to 5 times giving them an extremely small window where they can control their character.

 The online has banded the community together in a new way: Against Nintendo. Awful lag in every game, a matchmaking service thats more like an A.I upgrade then playing against humans, no choice whatsoever  for what game type you want to play. With Anyone ( the aforementioned  online matchmaking service) is a joke. The only way to get a playable game is through your friends list and this is limited to 64 people. There is no way to communicate outside of a sentence long message for each taunt. 

 Nintendo has tested the patience of the competitive community, and without reason. There's not even any leader-boards!