I was chatting to Johann, the person who converted me to console gaming, and he mentioned two upcoming games that I thought looked quite neat, since I was lamenting the state of play of gaming at the moment after doing a 90s game retrospective over the weekend.
The earlier-to-release game is Senko no Ronde for the XBox 360. It's a shoot-em-up/fighter combo, which looks even more mad than Ikaruga (which itself is supposed to be coming to the XBox 360 via Live Arcade).
(More screenshots at Ubi.com and Gamespy (and I'm sure all the other places too).
The next is LittleBigPlanet (which got me thinking of Little Big Adventure, which was part of my weekend 90s games retrospective). LittleBigPlanet looks like a combination of Lemmings and The Incredible Machine, but on steroids - you control characters who can manipulate the environment in various ways - you gain new skills and tools to manipulate the environment as you go on.
The bad news is that LittleBigPlanet is only expected next year (and is for the PS3, so at least you'll have time to put together enough money to buy one), but that's quite good for a game which was only conceived of in early 2006. More screenshots on Joystiq.
Senko no Ronde is the type of thing which makes me a console gamer in the first place. G-Darius, the last game written by the G.rev crew while they worked for Taito, remains one of my all-time favourite shmups.
As to LittleBigPlanet, one can only really appreciate it in motion, and the best place to see it - if you have the bandwidth for it - is the full 18 minute video [gamevideos.com] of the GDC presentation.
And here's one I forgot about: Project Sylpheed [xbox.com]. Square's last two shooters were both classics: Internal Section and the inimitable Einhander. I wish they'd spend all their time making shmups instead of those silly RPGs. ;-)