As I write this column, it is the season of goodwill to all men, and to celebrate it there are few better pastimes than to dust off the GunCons and spend a few hours shooting men on the TV. (It’s okay, they’re terrorists: I like to feel I’m doing my bit for the Coalition of the Willing, the Special Relationship and various other bogus rhetorical abstractions.) This is a discipline I take seriously. Few things in videogaming are as satisfying to me as getting into the Zone in a Time Crisis game: taking out nine men with the nine bullets of my handgun magazine, reloading and doing it again. The challenge of doing this, and the immense pleasure it affords, is to me the essence of the game.

Now, to play Time Crisis 3 as I believe she should be played, you have to adjust slightly. The new switchable weapons, with the crude splash of shotgun or grenade and the firehose machine gun, may slightly offend the fastidious shooter, but they can afford some muscular relief to the trigger finger, and you are still free to impose your own discipline, saving the power weapons until the odds are overwhelming, then letting out a cathartic roar as you spurt through your machine-gun clips (don’t try this at home if you have thin walls).

But what worried me most to begin with was the presence of super-soldiers throughout the levels who have health bars that need to be worn down: no one-shot kills for these babies. A slight tweak of attitude, though, and all is fine: deftly switching to a grenade, taking them out, and back again to the handgun to kill their friends in one smooth sequence, or just shooting them to death with normal bullets while dropping their most dangerous cronies with alternate shots; either is most gratifying.

So Time Crisis 3 is good. Very good. In fact, if you have a yen for pointing a plastic replica firearm at the television and shooting imaginary men, it’s about the best that can currently be hoped for. And this is my point: though it may be rather sniffily regarded as a merely “generic” lightgun game in some quarters, it has afforded me more pleasure than almost any other supposedly more “innovative” game in ages. Sure, there is the odd game that makes me want to sit back, light up a cheroot and stroke my beard. But if I am scoring for fun, then Time Crisis 3 is up there with Wario Ware and Soul Calibur 2 among my favourite games of 2003.

Maybe this is a sign of some level of structural maturity that the videogame industry has attained. One often hears the complaint that most games are “generic”, working within well-defined parameters and just adding higher-poly models and prettier textures. But perhaps this is just a problem about mediocre games, not the fact that most games fit into genres. Consider the common sense inherent in the opposite point of view: you don’t actually have to reinvent the wheel every time.

John Carmack took this stance recently. Some perspicacious journalist put to him the theory that Doom 3 was, after all, pretty much the same as Doom: you wander around using a first-person viewpoint and shoot monsters. Sure, said Carmack, it’s the same. Why reinvent the wheel? “You don’t have people inventing hundreds of new types of basketball,” he pointed out, quite reasonably. It makes sense. The first-person shooter is such a primally appealing game-type that Carmack’s team has chosen to concentrate on boiling it down to its essentials and making it as viscerally and sensuously satisfying as can be. This is where aesthetics matter, where graphics whores triumph: make the environments more real, and the monsters more scary, et voilà - it’s the same kind of game, only better.

Of course, I do not mean to argue that there should be no more gameplay innovations. If iD is trying to create the most terrifying, elemental arcade shooter, then it is also good that Warren Spector and co are trying to push the first-person viewpoint into new areas of interaction. But it is also good that Infinity Ward can take some standard FPS gameplay off a nearby shelf and marry it to a breathtaking sense of dramatic scenario to produce the brilliant Call of Duty.

The fact is that, in all artforms, genres become genres because they *work*. And the standardisation of a particular game style can often allow designers to concentrate on improving the experience in other ways, secure in the knowledge that the tried-and-tested core mechanics are a reliable vehicle. The advantage of the fact that a good FPS engine has been commoditised is that it levels the playing field for creative work within that structure. Even the mighty Halo was not inherently very innovative: sure, it messed around on the periphery with things like the two-weapon limit, but it was the AI and the environment design that really made the game.

Innovation for innovation’s sake, in other words, is not necessarily the be-all and end-all of game design, as it is not in other artforms. Not every film has to invent a new cinematic grammar like The Matrix. Not every novel has to do funky new things with page layout like House of Leaves. And similarly in videogames. Sometimes it is enough to do a familiar gamestyle, but just do it with more vigour, style and aesthetic élan than anyone else.

There is still, however, some risk to acknowledging this truth, which is the risk of stagnation, the risk of lessening ambition. If genres get too perfectly engineered, might they die? After all, how could Time Crisis 3 be any better? People have tried the odd new thing with lightguns - as in Impossible Mission’s occasional puzzle-shooting elements, or the wandering-around bits in Resident Evil: Gun Survivor - but for me, Time Crisis’s central shoot-duck’n'reload-shoot mechanic is unimprovable. If the screen was an entire wall, that would be great. But beyond that, what incentive is there to buy another lightgun game in the future?

Well, simply the incentive of new levels, new enemies in new combinations. And the same idea, more richly executed, is true in other genres: a commodity first-person mechanic can offer us the opportunity to explore an infinity of interesting new worlds. Formal innovation is still a fertile field, but more innovation in content, using standard forms, will be no less interesting.

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