It's Official...

...The people who run the games industry have no balls.

Six Days in Fallujah was a game that intrigued me from the getgo. Every time I read the previews section for a game magazine I have to avoid tripping over the eight or ten shooters that claim to be grim and gritty and hard-edged and depressing. So it was intensely refreshing in this games-industry equivalent of the comic book dark age of the 90s to see a game that seemed to actually be gritty and depressing (FYI, it was based on some military operation in Fallujah that went down the crapper when a bunch of meth-addled insurgents started crawling from the woodwork). It walked the walk, without the need to talk the talk.

Until Konami remembered that they're a bunch of spineless, dickless backs of crap who spend their spare time wallowing around in their own cowardice.

So I remained hopeful that maybe the developers would be able to find a different publisher willing to release something that didn't star a shaved-head space marine fighting bugpeople. And my optimism is rewarded, as always, by being informed by some gaming news site that, sorry Glorb, you'll have to go back to gunning down bugpeople as Flynn Taggart for the next while.

Look, video game people. It's obvious we're in the Dark Age of FPSes what with all the grim-n-gritty urban combat and the depressing endings and gravelly voiced dudes. So what's with the halfway copout? Start making games that are hard-hitting, that have a purpose behind the gore and guns.

Have us play, I don't know, an ordinary inner-city cop trying to clean up one drug-addled block. Make us an ordinary foot soldier in Iraq, with all the baggage that comes with it. Make us an ordinary single mom trying to eke by long enough to pay the rent on her apartment. Make us a hobo, a doctor, a garbage man, a tornado, a Rottweiler. Just have us play something besides some skinheaded bullet-timing gravelly-voiced supersoldier, please.