Written by NoA_Steven. The DS may not have gallons of blood but at least they're innovating. If you recall that flash that Cadaceus posted with the old classic consoles battling the psp...well, Nintendo is fighting to preserve games, and just games. They've said that several times. Anyways

Don't get me wrong. I adore me the violence. Really good, extraordinarily well done videogame violence is a thing of great beauty. But as ya walk the floor of E3 this year, originality across all systems definitely seems to be going the way of the dinosaur.

Everywhere you turn, another gritty street brawler. Another first-person splatterfest. Another zombie-hacker. More bullets to the head. More bone-crunching brutality. And more elbows to the gut … or was that just me taking out a line of people to witness Pac-Man getting his 25th birthday celebration from a lap's worth of booth babes?

But I digress.

Though it's very possible that I've drunk the Kool Aid, I think it's more possible that there IS way way way too much testosterone in this year's E3. Everyone wants to make a buck off of urban violence, suburban violence and even undead violence. Like I said, I love playing a few of these a year, then switching gears and playing something silly, or stoopid, or fantastic, or transporting, or imaginative, or whatever.

But the only place where I've seen the kind of range and originality that I NEED in a year's worth of gaming is among DS titles: Viewtiful Joe DS is adding in touch-based VFX powers, Black & White Creatures is bringing the PC smash to the touch screen (my dreams have been answered), and turn-based games are getting their due via Advance Wars DS and Age of Empires.

Dual-screen gameplay is coming into its own with the Mario & Luigi sequel and the New Super Mario Bros., WiFi gaming is taking Animal Crossing and Mario Kart online (more dreams come true), and then there are my DS super-favorites from the show: Electroplankton and Nintendogs. The former will be an instant cult hit at the least (and cult hits DO rank among my top 10 all-time games) but could be as much of a megasmash as Nintendogs, which is probably one of THE big success stories of the show. I knew that Nintendogs would turn out to be a worldwide phenomenon a year ago when I first saw game footage; now all of E3 knows it, since you CAN'T get on the demo units to play with the pups unless you wait a good half hour.

The over-over-overdone bloodshed really risked making this my least favorite E3 in quite some time; but the breakthroughs we're seeing on Nintendo platforms (I'll need to talk GBA and GCN some other time … though that Odama is definitely on my most wanted GCN list now) has really made this an important E3 for me.

I could be wrong, but I feel like there's a sea change at work in gaming: Innovation doesn't always get respect; but in Nintendo's booth, where E3's densest concentration of DS gaming is on hand, gamers and non-gamers are swarming the games.