Wired has up a great article full of thought provoking quotes from various Japanese game design luminaries.

"Walking on the E3 show floor today," Sakurai said, "how many shots did you hear
fired? It seems like America is mired in the shooting-game genre. You can’t just
bring that to Japan and tell consumers, ‘This is a shooting game. Enjoy it.’"

He has a point. I wonder what proportion of chart-topping games have guns in them? Not that it’s aways a bad thing (see Half-Life 2) but a little more variety wouldn’t hurt.