It's funny how insanely relevant this now five year old post still is. The only thing I would add to it now is a paragraph addressing the fallacious notion that indie games are somehow filling the "novelty" void, when they are either A) no more than tech demos, B) have absolutely obnoxious cargo-cultist aesthetics, C) simply ape existing ideas ad nauseum, or D) all of the above. I've yet to play a single indie game this side of Minecraft that gave me those "mind blown" chills.

It all boils down to a total lack of ambition. Game developers were doing full aircraft and car physics on 386, 33 MHz computers with 2 meg of RAM in the early 90s, along with simulations of ant colonies, entire theme parks, celestial bodies, and who knows what else, combined with totally experimental aesthetics-- which went on to become iconic because they were great.

Today's computers can push over eight million pixels at 60 fps, and developers are harnessing those 6+ teraflops of computing prowess by... making endless Morrowind, Halo and Super Mario Bros. clones that use "made in a factory" aesthetics, where you can scarcely remember if a given game even had music five minutes after you quit playing. It's very sad.

I think I'm feeling extra sensitive to this dynamic today because I've been trying to play and enjoy Dragon's Dogma-- which I've reviewed already-- and Yoshi's Wooly World, both of which are as stale as a three week old loaf of bread. Especially the latter-- I almost can't believe how mediocre it is, especially for a first party Nintendo title!