Breathing room

Game Informer's cautious realism is vindicated once again with news that Sam Fisher has, in fact, snuck past his fall release. The list of games not coming out this fall is an impressive one. Besides Splinter Cell: Conviction, you can look forward to not playing Bioshock 2, Heavy Rain, Singularity, Red Steel II, Bayonetta, MAG, Starcraft 2, Red Dead Redemption, and almost certainly many more. The fall 2010 release window is starting to look like Omaha Beach.

This is the best news I could imagine.

In recent years, the holiday videogame season has turned into a form of ironic punishment. If you like one AAA action title, the reasoning goes, you're going to love several of them every week! So we flail to keep up with the rising tide of must-have games, using each new release as a handhold on the way to the next one, because, dude, I'm pretty sure the one that comes out next week is GOTY material. It's like your mom catching you with a cigarette and forcing you to chain-smoke a whole pack, just to teach you a lesson.

In the meantime, nobody can stop to sink their teeth into games that deserve thoughtful consideration. Some games get overlooked completely amid the hubbub, games that at other times of the year would rightfully earn the spotlight. Sometimes it seems like being a gamer today is more about catching 'em all than about playing them once you've got them, in the same way that Facebook is more about collecting people like baseball cards than about friendship.

I say we should enjoy the chance to go deeper with fewer games this year. And it's not as though we'll be wanting for anything new: Batman: Arkham Asylum, Uncharted 2, Modern Warfare 2, Beatles Rock Band, Brutal Legend, Halo 3: ODST, Borderlands, Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time, Assassin's Creed 2, Left 4 Dead 2, and freaking dozens of other games are still on the schedule.

Geez, look at that list. It would be nice if a couple more of them got pushed back, actually. We'll never have time to play all that.