Nine things we learned from E3 07

Familiarity breeds lots of great games, but not much originality
It's been a common complaint ever since gaming went "big time" and this year's E3 didn't indicate that there would be a change anytime soon in the continuing chart domination by big name franchises that we're all familiar with.

Here's a list to illustrate:Halo 3,Metal Gear Solid 4,Resident Evil 5,Killzone 2,Guitar Hero III,Call of Duty 4,Medal of Honor: Airborne,Silent Hill V,Burnout Paradise,Unreal Tournament 3... and on and on.

Of course, there were also some new, sure-to-be-sequelised games present also:Fracture,Mass Effect,BioShock,Heavenly Sword,Assassin's Creed,Crysis,Rock Band,Uncharted: Drake's FortuneandStrangleholdall caught the eye- again- for one reason or another.

All of these titles have the potential to be absolute killers - and we're thankful for that, really we are - but we're alarmed by the lack of genuine originality, sparkling new ideas and the overall unwillingness by anyone to take a risk on something that's a bit out there. We're talking about games like Katamari, Okami, LocoRoco, Killer 7... Have all the ideas really been thought up? Should we resign ourselves to playing the same types of game in the same safely established genres for the rest of our days? Or will we just have to wait for Tokyo Games Show?

We would love to utter the words "unlike anything we've ever played before" sometime before the end of the year. And we're not talking about bloodyWii Fit here.