Shooting and scoring

It's that time of the year again; summer's all but over, the kids are back at school, my drive to work takes ten minutes longer than it did last week. It can only mean one thing – the annual football game sequels are on the way. I say sequels, when of course I mean thinly veiled title updates with a handful of extra features, up to date rosters and slightly less deformed looking players. We've been in the current “gen” of consoles for a good long while now, and will more than likely remain in it for another few years, which does begin to beg the question; can EA and Konami keep shovelling out the same game every twelve months, or are they going to have to find a new way to claw the hard earned cash out of millions of pockets, wallets and purses?

It's not just sports games though, take a look at the release list for October and November, you'll find plenty of sequels, including the annual update for Call Of Duty, and, in a new move for Valve, Left 4 Dead 2, landing only a year after the original. The rush for the Christmas cash is already on, and it would certainly seem that familiarity is what gets gamers and their parents chucking money at retailers. But if a game is just a refinement, a few tweaks to the engine and a bit of polish, something that can easily be accomplished with DLC, then why should we be expected to shell out another forty quid, or in the case of Modern Warfare, sixty?

I know that it's not quite as simple as I'm making out, but it could be. Incremental changes to games have been commonplace since the advent of the internet, with bugs fixed and maps added on the fly, surely we can't be that far away from whole new campaigns, characters and experiences being made available. Steam, Xbox Live, PSN and a vast number of other download services have proved that the appetite for digital distribution exists, and seeing shelf room in game shops taken up by new I.Ps and original thinking, rather than Football 26 and War Game 18 is something we all should be striving towards.