This year's San Diego Comic-Con was both exhilarating and disappointing: The sheer number of high end games that I was able to take a look at was great; the quality of said games, not so much.

Let's start with the good news:

Metroid: The Other M looks good; As a member of the "combo-beat'em up" genre it is extremely difficult to tell if it is fun per-se just from looking at it, but the graphics were excellent, and the person playing the game seemed to be having fun. I am a video-gamer and writer, not an empath; I am bad at telling if someone is having fun just by looking at the back of their head.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood's multiplayer looks absolutely refreshing. What could have easily become a sordid affair of lousy balancing has become an extremely refreshing cat-and-mouse game (at least, that was the theme of the game mode on display.) named "Wanted". Effectively, there are several players; each is assigned a target, and the object is to kill your target as stealthily as possible while avoiding the person who is sent after you. Did I mention that this mode is played in a crowded city right out of the single-player and that the player models look just like the people walking around in the streets? As a fan of LARP games like "Assassin", I am now extremely excited for this game.

Spider Man: Shattered Dimensions actually looked good. As a game that I had barely heard of, I was immensely interested in the game's refreshing, comic-booky, look. Again, like Metroid: The Other M, it is hard to attest to the "fun" of the game (especially since it was not a demo but a gameplay video that was on display), but with some innovations, like first-person fisticuffs in boss battles, I am not going to strike this one off of the noteworthy list just yet.

Gears of War 3 also looks good; the graphics are nice and crisp, and the new Beast mode seems fun. In a nutshell, the players play as Locust soldiers that need to batter down the defenses of a COG hideout and slaughter all inside in a given time-period. What I would be interested in would be if this could be done with players controlling both sides of the battle; a team of COGs defending against a wave of Locusts.

Now for the bad news:

Medal of Honor looks just like Battlefield: Bad Company 2. I really cannot justify a reason for this game to exist, except for the hope that its single-player campaign is better than the Bad Company one (which is not that tall of an order, seeing as Bad Company 2 had a really bad storyline). It seems as if EA is following a new production path: "Same game, now even less funny".

Halo: Reach looks just like every other Halo game in existence. While I may still buy it, seeing as I am the only 360 owner without a Halo game to my name, I cannot justify this purchase for anyone that owns Halo 3.

Playstation Move looks awful. Two games were on display: SOCOM, and a swordfighting game. The SOCOM game looked like a Wii shooter, but even less fun. Remember how I said that I cannot tell if someone is having fun just by looking at them. I take that back. THE BOY PLAYING THE GAME WAS NOT HAVING FUN. On the other side, the boy playing th swordfighting game was looking visibly tired (not to mention frustrated) whilst playing the game. Who wants that? The only time I want to be tired after playing a video-game is if its name is Wii fit. If I wanted to become tired playing a game, I would go outside, and play a sport. Video-games are for when I am too tired (read: too lazy) to do that.

Red Faction: Armageddon's graphics were bad. While some of the gameplay innovations looked fun, such as being able to create your own cover, and the integral destruction that is now synonymous with the words "Red Faction", the graphics were abysmal. To put it in perspective, Metroid: The Other M looked better than Red Faction: Armageddon (though to be fair, that is as much a credit to Metroid as a demerit to Red Faction). Add to this a trite storyline pulled out of the dark abyss of cliche, and I cannot say that I am excited for this game any longer (which is a shame).

Playstation's 3D was disappointing. While it is hard to judge the graphics as the game on display was a mere remake of an older game, a cartoony aerial dogfight simulator featuring Sly, the 3D itself was annoying: if I moved my head even slightly from a perfect center with the TV, the 3D would break. I cannot attest to headaches and motion-sickness induced by it as I only played it for about two minutes before becoming bored, so I can only say this: Ye of small attention spans, fear no headaches here.

In short, my visit to Comic-Con has completely re-written my expectations for this year and the next, though I am noticing a trend: Companies like Activision and EA are just trying to sledgehammer their way through games development: Their philosophy is that the next game has to be BIGGER, BETTER GRAPHICS, and WITH MORE EXPLOSIONS, and THE SAME FRICKIN GAMEPLAY AS THE PREDECESSOR WE GOT BORED WITH, where the real answer is to come up with something original, like the Assassin's Creed multiplayer, or Spider-Man's graphics. We have reached the point where graphics have become so good, there is almost no point in improving them; work should instead be spent doing more interesting things with them. New ideas must be explored, not discarded.