Shovelware. It's a new term that, even if you haven't heard it before, you know what it is. It's the term hardcore gamers are using to describe the ever-flowing stream of softcore games that are being dumped on us like the manure they are. You know the games I'm talking about. You've heard of the Imagine series, right? Imagine: Babysitter, Imagine: Fashion Designer, etc. With over 35 titles, and still growing fast, the Imagine series is a perfect example of the terrible, yet somehow popular, games that continue to dominate the casual gamer market like a tsunami.

But these games can't hurt you if you don't buy them, right? Wrong. Shovelware is taking over our gaming platforms because they're cheap and fast to produce, and they sell like hotcakes to 12-year-old girls who, even though they own a gaming platform, know nothing about gaming. Sad, isn't it? You can't really blame these poor little children; these are people who probably would have never wanted to play video games at all if it weren't for Hannah Montana, but can they really be called "gamers" when they know nothing of the epic struggle between Link and Ganondorf, have never heard of the Masamune sword, and think the Master Chief is a robot? I say no, they are NOT gamers.



I think handheld platforms are evolving in unusual ways that we, as gamers, are having a hard time figuring out. In a large part that's due to the exponential growth of the casual gamer niche. The extremely softcore handhelds, like the iPhone or the Zune HD, are most successful as gaming platforms when used for very light play: games that you can pick up and put down over 5 minutes without missing anything. As hardcore gamers we'd like to see hardcore games on the iPhone and the Zune HD, like "Dungeon Hunter," but these games take much longer to produce and don't bring in as much profit as "Sudoku X3 Platinum Super Puzzle Three-Thousand Pack Plus."

Unfortunately this flood of super-casual games is spilling over onto every other gaming platform, especially the DS and Wii. I've got some great DS games, but such games can be hard to find amidst the sea of shovelware being heaved around. So how does this hurt us as hardcore gamers? Back in the day of the Super Nintendo, you could walk down an aisle, pick up a game that looked cool, go home, and it was typically a lot of fun. Nowadays even if the game looks fun you have to look up reviews and talk to your friends, and you're still unsure of whether you'll like it or not. Why? It's because the sheer ratio of awful games is so high these days.

On Metacritic, a site which averages video game review scores across a ton of different sites, about 64% of N64 games scored a 75 or higher (64% on the N64… coincidence? I think not). The DS and the Wii tie with a miserable count of only 23% scoring 75 or higher. The PSP isn't far off at 29%. The 360 isn't quite so bad at 38%, and the PS3 is the leader of the current generation at 44%, but that's still a far cry from the glory of the N64 days.

What this all boils down to is that games are progressively getting worse and worse, especially on more casual gaming platforms. When 3 out of every 4 games aren't even worth playing, how can we hardcore gamers be expected to take a chance on a game we don't know much about? We can't, and game developers realize this. Why do you think Microsoft is squeezing every last drop out of the Halo series before letting Bungie develop anything else? It's because, even if a game is incredible, if it isn't part of an already well established series it's not going to sell as well. Thus, we as gamers end up with very little variety in our games, and even if something truly unique and incredible comes out, we're more likely to pass it off as shovelware than actually give it the fighting chance it deserves. Oh well, maybe that 12 year-old girl will buy that diamond in the rough because she also thinks it's shovelware, and then she might actually experience a GOOD game. Maybe.