Sometimes I envy non-gamers. Why? For them September and October bring NFL football, leaves changing colors and Halloween but not a savage assault on their available time and fluid income. For gamers these next two months represent a veritable blitzkrieg of quality titles all coming out weeks and sometimes days apart. And thanks to the opening-weekend mindset the game publishers have fostered in us, we have to get them all as soon as they hit stores lest our GAMER cards get revoked. There won't be time to play them all and the economic reality of the situation is that gamers will have to make some hard choices soon about what to buy and what to let slide.

Everyone knows that game release dates are something of a joke but anything within about two months starts to look pretty firm. With that in mind let's look at September. Next week is the release of Will Wright's Spore, a title PC gamers have been looking forward to since it was revealed at the 2005 Game Developer's Conference. Spore is an enormous game that threatens to insatiably consume time, and it will definitely take more than week to experience all of it.

Unfortunately the week following the release of Spore is a merciless gauntlet of AAA titles including music-game giant Rock Band 2, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, the not-quite-a-sequel-but-more-than-an-expansion Crysis: Warhead and last but certainly not least the launch of another fantasy-based MMO Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. With all those titles jostling for attention the release of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. expansion Clear Skies that same week could go largely missed.

Even if you're gaming for 10 to 12 hours a day, which I don't recommend, there isn't time to experience the content of all those games in a month. Thankfully the attack subsides a bit with only LEGO Batman and Legendary in late September and Fracture in early October. But just when you think you can look out the window to see what the outside world has been up to for the past 30 days, it starts all over again.

Bethesda's Fallout 3 hits in late October.

Saints Row 2 and Rise of the Argonauts come out the same day in mid-October. The following week Dead Space, Fable 2, Far Cry 2, Spider-Man: Web of Shadows, LittleBigPlanet and maybe Ghostbusters are released. All in the same week! One week later Guitar Hero World Tour and Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 come out. Then after all the money is spent, all the vacation days used and all the good will of your significant other is dried up... it happens. It's the coup de grâce of the entire campaign against gamers' wallets. Fallout 3 - the post-apocalyptic, single-player, role-playing, super sequel with over 100 hours of gameplay and over 200 endings - finally sees the light of day.

Sometimes the games industry looks to the movie industry for inspiration. This is why we have cinematic trailers, one-sheet posters and big release days for games now. Looking at this colossal list of gaming must-haves all coming out at the same time, I'd like to encourage the games industry to adopt another film industry strategy: counterprogramming. Counterprogramming in film is when you plan against movie A, something almost guaranteed to be a success, by aiming to attract members of the audience who don't fall into the primary demographic of movie A. A perfect example was the decision to release the female-friendly, light-hearted musical "Mamma Mia!" the same weekend as its polar opposite, "The Dark Knight."

Counterprogramming is difficult for games for a number of reasons: primarily because the release dates do change so often but also because there is a great deal of overlap in game audiences across genres. Still, I'd like to think the publishers can do better than releasing two heavies like Fallout 3 and Red Alert 3 days apart. Publishers need to be aware of the titles that are "tracking" well (to borrow another movie industry term) with gamers and try to plan their releases around them. By shifting a release a few weeks or more you're saying to gamers, "Hey, we're aware of Fallout 3 and we want to play it, too. We'll see you in a month for Red Alert 3." That isn't a sign of weakness in an aggressive marketplace; it's catering to your audience. There's plenty of room in the calendar year to spread these games around a little.

Then again maybe I'm looking at this all wrong. Perhaps now is not the time for despair and submission but rather celebration and jubilation. Maybe the game industry isn't attacking us. Maybe they're providing us with a feast of awesome titles across multiple platforms from which to choose. Maybe we should feel like Viking conquerors sitting at the head of a long banquet table full of exotic dishes picking from one here and another there; full nonetheless but never completely enjoying a single plate. I'll try to keep that image in mind as my bank balance falls into the red and my hands cramp into useless claws from too much gaming.

Previous Columns:

• The Retro-Gaming Surge
• DRM and Piracy: The Vicious Circle
• Who Is to Blame for the State of Game Scores?
• Expectations and Predictions for E3 2008
• The Legacy of Diablo
• Parrying Premature Attacks on Indy 4
• Why Movie Tie-In Games Suck
• A Perfect Score: Is Any Game Worthy?
• Massively Multiplayer: Fantasy vs. Sci-Fi

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