The relentless trundle of commercially successful gaming is a pretty Darwinian process. In the quest for games that make more and more money, they're laser-targeted at players' apparent interests. This is why we get annualised franchises, the weirdo "Ubisoft" genre and Dance Central.
It's also why we see loved, if not much-loved, game types simply disappearing. Popular franchises that occupy a niche littler than "open world shooter" don't hit the money quotas and are left behind in the corporate dust kicked up by the profit machine. I say no longer. I say we demand these mini-genres return to our machines at this year's E3 - in particular, these nine:
Gimmick Shooters
This was kind of the B-List bedrock of Xbox 360. Singularity gave you time warping, Fuse had its co-op focused weapons, Inversion let you manipulate gravity. It's a more than mixed bag as a genre, for sure, but there was a playful inventiveness to these games' creation that we're simply not seeing right now.
Shooters have started to tend towards ambience - the idea that you could stumble across something amazing, or create it with enough hard work - but that means tight, twisty games built around a single-mechanic core have disappeared. Come on, I want to see at least one game where I can summon spikes, or turn shadows into black holes, or punch guys so hard they turn into my ammo.
Snowboarding Games
OK, so we might be seeing the first, tentative steps back for skating games with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 (although that won't be fully true until Skate. 4 exists and I can die happy) - but its sister genre is still lost in the wilderness. Snowboarding games have traditionally been the hardcore equivalent of their tarmac-set counterpart. You can miss a line in Tony Hawk's and just turn around - here, you'll probably fall down a ravine or something.
They're also far more concerned with beauty - Far Cry 4 proved that the mountain range's home is on new-gen, but we sure as shit didn't get to carve down one and slam into a yak. MAKE THIS HAPPEN, DEVELOPERS.
Crossover Fighters
For those of us without lightning thumbs and a wellspring of purest rage, fighting games become more of a character piece. I can't pull off strings of combos from memory, so I spend my time getting to know the guys I'm watching get haplessly face-trounced. There's no better place for this than the crossover fighter.
It's genre built almost entirely around the idea of saying "what would happen if these two sets of people met (besides kicking the crap out of each other)?" Watching characters greet each other in Marvel vs. Capcom practically became a hobby for me - I'll take as many unlikely meetings as developers can come up with.
Resi Rip-offs
Back in the old days, Resident Evil ruled all. Something about its mix of rationed combat, high tension and puzzle solving resonated with everyone - not least people looking to make a quick buck. Take that formula, transplant it to another place, throw in different enemy types and you have yourself a winner.
The likes of Onimusha and Dino Crisis didn't have to worry too much about their game's mechanics, which made their strange settings ("demon Samurai" and "Jurassic Park with more weaponry", respectively) all the more pronounced. The only series ripping off Resi these days is Resident Evil itself - I want that fixed.
Mech Nonsense
Mech games traditionally straddle the seemingly impossible line between dumb shooter and brain-scrapingly complex engineering sim. It's not so hard to see why they've taken a dip in recent years, but a world without media celebrating the very idea of walking tanks is one I refuse to live in.
Dark Souls creator, FROM Software is our great white hope here. It's been slowly coughing up Armored Core games for years as its competition died out around it - I have my breath bated for its new-gen debut. Frankly, I'd take (prefer?) an HD remake of never-localised original Xbox madness, Metal Wolf Chaos, in which the President of the United States single-handedly reclaims his country from inside a weaponised robot exo-skeleton.
Aerial Combat
In its heyday, this was probably the least miniature of the genres on show. Plane combat, space dogfighting and fantasy nutcasery like Panzer Dragoon all fall into this open-air assault. And now it's all gone (I'm refusing to acknowledge the existence of Crimson Dragon, shut up).
We haven't even seen a hint of perennial plane-popper, Ace Combat on Xbox One yet, but Elite: Dangerous' cosmic dogfights might satisfy us a tad. That said, new consoles won't soar until I can fly again.
Surreal Rhythm Games
This is a serious weak spot for Xbox. Rhythm games have most recently been dance game nightmares or endless plastic guitar entries, but other consoles have had rapping dogs, prancing secret service agents and... whatever Gitaroo Man was.
There's something about taking any semblance of reality away from why you're throwing music into a game that makes it that much more special for me - at the very least, Rock Band 4 could introduce a pair of sentient, screaming Converse All-Stars that act as your tutorial or something. Do me a solid, guys.
First-person Punching
OK, I'll extend that to melee in general. The likes of Condemned made living inside your character's head that much more exciting - getting punched between the eyes is more effective when you're looking out of them. Equally, seeing an enemy and having to do more than pull a trigger to make them fall over is an unusually deep-seated thrill - you're always in range of each other, it's just a mater of who swings first.
We've had two recent examples of just how effective a well-realised punch can be in Destiny (using a Titan to smack things so hard there's an explosion is mad satisfying) and Grand Theft Auto (wince-inducing beatdowns made me actually feel bad) - now build a game around it.
