Video Games

Nintendo is making a mint off casual gamers who delight in brief, ephemeral sports and puzzle minigames, while Sony and Microsoft have cornered the market on hard-core gamers who revel in epic action extravaganzas.

But almost no one seems to be catering to the demographic that I've somehow found myself in: the time-pressed gamer who still loves gory firefights.

As the father of two kids (and with a full-time job that doesn't involve gaming), my controller time has basically been squeezed into the midnight to 2 a.m. slot a few times a week.

Now, I do enjoy the occasional puzzle title, Wii Sports outing or three-minute go-cart race. But I love surveying post-apocalyptic battlefields teeming with toothy aliens and then hoisting a rocket launcher and making extraterrestrial limbs fly.

Superhero wish fulfillment, I guess.

But when I hear game makers brag about how it will take the average gamer 20 or 30 or 40 hours to slog through their first-person shooter opus, I often find myself mentally crossing that game off my playlist. I don't feel compelled to complete every game I play, but I do want to see a sizable portion of what the game has to offer.

So what I need are two- or three-hour episodic games that are every bit as fierce and complex and graphically detailed as Gears of War or Metal Gear Solid 4, but as easy to put down and finish as a few rounds of Wii Sports.

A handful of game makers are thinking along these lines. Valve Software has released episodic sequels to Half-Life 2, and the company's ingenious Portal required no more than three or four hours to solve.

But episodic gaming seems to be viewed as the province of wimpy gamers who won't man up to a real game.

I've never heard Sony or Microsoft even brainstorm about releasing Resistance 2 or Halo 3 or any other flagship games as short, episodic titles with equally slim price tags.

Digital distribution may end up being the catalyst for episodic games. Valve's online store, dubbed Steam, has become one of the few successful venues for buying and downloading big-budget games, with the Half-Life episodic titles at the top of the list.

Microsoft and Sony each have online stores on their consoles, but they've been content to either sell classic games or short indie games.

Those platforms could be ideal for selling weekly game installments.

Just as you tune in each week for your favorite hourlong television show, the game makers could release one new hour of their hit game each week for, say, $2 or $3. You'd download the game to your hard drive and then delete it when you were done to make room for the next episode.

Until that happens, though, I'll be inching through mammoth, 100-hour-plus behemoths like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion a few minutes at a time. With any luck, I should be halfway through the game sometime in 2009.