I think that Modern Warfare 3 was the final straw for me. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was a fantastic game, but I have little desire to play little clones of it every year. I'm not saying these are bad games, but their lack of imagination is so deeply frustrating that I feel myself getting angry at my television with each additional turret sequence and quick-time door breach.

I've thought about this a lot over the past few years. We all look back at our gaming youth with rose-tinted glasses, but were games really better back then? While I remember a lot of complaining about the amount of World War 2 games, I also remember the incredible variety and creativity of a genre coming of age.

Without getting into too much detail on any one game, this is a brief history of the most consistently popular genre in video gaming--one that has provided us with some of the best games ever created. We've already covered Deus Ex, Counter-Strike, Half-Life, Halo, Call of Duty and Battlefield on previous episodes of EFMS, but if you've got an old favourite that you think we should cover next season, please stick it in the comments.

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