So there I was, playing Far Cry, scampering around the tropical undergrowth like some sort of oversized beetle, albeit a beetle who can drive boats and use a sniper rifle. “Look at the water!” I told myself. “Look at the trees! Look at the ragdoll physics! This is great, isn’t it?” Yes, it is. Ummm… “Next!”

And so, having determined that Far Cry was indeed a very impressive game, I began idly daydreaming about just how good Half-Life 2 was going to be. Verdant isles were all very well, but imagine how much cooler it would be in a grimy city, with enormous tripedal aliens. Then of course there were Doom 3 and Halo 2 to consider. The future seemed to be just around the corner. Suddenly Far Cry seemed to be an impressive game not so much for its own virtues as for its status as a kind of staging post, a lovingly polished tech demo in the accelerated evolution of PC game technology.

It was at about this point that I realised that I had unwittingly been infected by a disease that apparently affects the entire videogame industry. Neophilia. I don’t mean an unhealthy sexual obsession with Keanu in The Matrix, but a constant, insatiable desire for the next big thing.

How, you may ask, is this different from anything else? Of course there is a certain level of neophilia in all entertainment media. We can look forward to the next film by Takeshi Kitano, or the next novel by Viktor Pelevin, without being accused of being slavering future-obsessed geeks. But in the videogame industry, for one thing, the PR assault is a remarkably extended campaign, with gamers being drip-fed information about upcoming blockbusters over a period of years, until anticipation is at boiling point and the orthographically challenged hordes on internet forums are arguing the toss about games they still won’t play for another year.

Contrarily, a new novel by your favourite author will generally be announced only about six months before publication, and it is not the usual practice to release “demos” in the form of prose extracts or to give away key plot details. And, at the time I am writing this column, it is only a few weeks since I learned that a new album by Prince will come out after the weekend, the shock of this news being enough to convince me to wait and suspend judgement, even though the first single is evidently the kind of tedious pseudo-James Brownish funk “jam” that the Purple One has been absentmindedly tooling for more than a decade since his legendary “return to form” was first promised by optimistic PRs.

So the videogame industry positively encourages a fever level of neophilia through its long-term machinery of feature announcements, screenshots and ropey demos. (Let us quietly pass over the compelling conspiracy theory that the demos are, in fact, deliberately engineered to be ropey so as to convince people to buy new graphics cards.) This is only compounded by the multiple-vehicle pile-up that is its release timetable. Of course there are certain times of the year that are more busy than others in other media - September for the big-gun novelists hoping to get shortlisted for the Booker Prize; June and July for the latest blockbuster Hollywood confections - but the games industry takes this to absurd extremes. I review one game a week for a newspaper, but during December 2003 the schedules were so stuffed with good games, as well as the usual tsunami of seasonal moneyspinning tat, that several worthy contenders fell by the wayside.

Is it any wonder, then, that by this combination of frenzied long-term hype and release bunching, the videogame industry is not so much shooting itself in the foot as using a rocket-launcher to blow off both its legs, and then complaining when it falls over? By the time a game comes out, gamers are already mainlining hype for the Next Big Thing, and so what is actually in front of our eyes and under our fingers inevitably seems already a bit old. And who can blame gamers if they fixate on technical details such as bump-mapping, lighting and physics, when that is what we are being told is exciting about New First-Person Shooter 37: The Dark Conspiracy, which in all other respects is just a crappy rip-off of Halo and Deus Ex? Great games are not given space to breathe (witness the near-drowning of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time in the pre-Christmas crush), and the incessant churn of mediocrity rumbles on in something that we are expected to regard as evolution.

And, of course, some of it is. Indeed, a large part of the aetiology of the disease called neophilia is the fact that videogame technology is still developing, and technology is the enabling force for gameplay. (You can’t code Halo on a Spectrum.) This state of affairs is certainly good for ATi and nVidia, but is it good for consumers? I have a fantasy in which all technology development becomes illegal for a number of years, so that anything that is “new” in a game will be a genuinely creative new gameplay idea, rather than a prettier way of drawing plants. Something like that fantasy is already in place in the console product cycle, and one has to ask: how many real gameplay innovations have there been in the last five years on the PC, and how many on consoles?

I don’t mean to blame the PC for all the world’s ills, however. Many console developers, too, take the neophiliac route and concentrate on squeezing more polygons out of the same hardware rather than designing truly innovative games; and on the other hand, the PC is a cheaper platform on which inventive developers may prove their talents.

So maybe there is no cure for neophilia, until that perhaps-mythical day when the technology will have matured, hardware can do anything you want, and developers are thrown back on their creative juices. In the meantime, however, my own personal treatment for the disease has been to play through Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes. Instead of stamping on my memories of one of my favourite games ever, this souped-up “director’s cut” caresses them, plays with them, and shows just how far ahead of his time Kojima really was. TTS doesn’t need to be the next big thing, because it already was six years ago, and it can now be enjoyed for what it is, in a nearly hype-free zone. Because of this, it has been one of my most pleasurable recent gaming experiences. Mind you, just imagine how good MGS3 will be…

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