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It's called 'Earth', come back to it.

Zuma? Bejeweled? Diner Dash? Oh heck, here... http://reflexive.net/ Yes, there's a ton of copycats, but there's also a -lot- of innovative games on there in the last few years. A HECK of a lot more than all other genres combined. (There are other sites as well, but Reflexive tends to have the best sampling of any single site.)

Visually pleasing breakout game from Reflexive Entertainment. They have a community of level makers so it's nearly infinite gameplay as far as your natural interest is concerned.

Alien Sky from Kraisoft. Awesome Galaga remix.

The last suggestion is Swarm from Reflexive Entertainment, again. The only reservation that I have with Swarm is that there are very fine sudden movements required of a much different kind than the first two suggestions. Try it.

Here are some examples of hardware accelerated 2D games for you (just to prove this guy has a point).

Starscape by moonpod
Wik & the fable of souls by reflexive
alien hominid by thebehemoth All these games are good (IMO), 2D and hardware accelerated. The first 2 have free demoes available and you can just buy online but the last one shows the problems that go with success. Alien Hominid was lucky enough to get a publishing deal and is available on PS2 and GC, but as a result they haven't made a PC version. So there is no free demo and if you buy it you have to wait for the snail mail CD to arrive. All the games above could be implemented without hardware acceleration, but you would need an extremely powerful PC to run it. It isn't just the number of sprites being thrown around it is also the colour blending special effects being displayed. So maybe there are new markets for 2D even amongst graphics whores.

Three recent trends lend credibility to the image of those modest studios (indies) developing games: 1) the fact that many such developers are are coming from industry proper; 2) the actual nomenclature "Indie" being a positive term; and 3) small studios' newfound ability to create games that are visually appealing.

First: An interesting but not-well-known fact is that many members of the indie gaming community come from a background of well-known companies. Take, for example, the Moonpod team, which had experience at Gremlin and Infogrames before starting out on their own. Monkeystone is headed by none other than id's John Romero. I would argue that games industry experience is not a prerequisite for the development of a good game; but the recent movement of folks from big gaming companies to their own studios makes independents more credible. Put simply: if folks who have worked on shipped, big-budget games are now part of the indie community, there must be something to the indie community.

Second: The actual term used for smaller studios (Independents or Indies) is an important one. You could call many of the products in this category "Shareware Games," but there's a horribly negative connotation to that term. "Indie Games" evokes the notion of a small, dedicated team of professionals crafting out something new and interesting. By contrast, the term "Shareware Games" evokes the notion of some dude in his basement churning out a buggy arcade clone that looks like it was written for the Intellivision. To parahrase someone, (I want to say Chris Barrie): A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but may be less appealing if it were called "sewage-weed." The adoption of the "Indie" label has helped legitimize games made by smaller studios.

Fifth (20 years from now, we'll be those old farts still making Python references to people born in twenty-oh-one): Independents can make games that look good. It may be because indies now have access to tools that would have made Pixar cry during its formative years. (Maya, for example, can be had for about $2k, and is even free for personal use.) It may also be because there's great talent now available. Either way, I think indie titles, taken as a whole, have become visually appealing. During the '90s, shareware titles had a bad reputation for being ugly, because they lagged so far behind the cutting-edge. These days, titles like Starscape, Dark Horizons: Lore, and Wik & The Fable of Souls are (IMO) looking pretty good. And, while indie titles may not be as spectacular as those developed by a major studio, (our own Inago Rage focuses on bright colors, but doesn't quite outdo Tron 2.0, for example), decent sales suggest that gamers like what Independents are doing.

However, given the dearth of posts in this thread, I still believe we have a long way to go. :) So, if you haven't already, check out the DIY and Game Tunnel coverage of the 81 IGF entrants. You may find that precious diamond in the rough.
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The first is a superb remake of Robotron, the second is exactly what Breakout would have been if the technology supported it.

I prefer original equipment like the Devastator II from Treyonics and good arcade remakes.

Mutant Storm by PomPom Games and Ricochet Xtreme by Reflexive Entertainment are my all-time favorite shareware titles and both could easily sell at twice there going rate ($20). While there's always going to be crap in the shareware world, there's also some gems. These two are definitely gems.

What other people have been saying still holds true. Unfortunately for software publishers, it makes a certain amount of sense to measure piracy in terms of lost profits (how else would you measure it as a monetary figure?), but the fact is that the vast majority of pirates are opportunitists who simply wouldn't use the software if they were forced to pay. A few would, of course, but a very small proportion of the total.

The classic example of this behavior is Microsoft, who now has such a vast majority of the market that they have to look into other avenues to expand -- and have aimed their guns at the pirates with the registration in Windows XP. But they're missing the key point: People who are pirating XP aren't going to pay for it if you magically force them to stop pirating. (Any antipiracy system is exploitable, anyway.) So the net effect after all is said and done is very little change in revenue, and a bunch of inconvenienced customers. Wasn't there a time when a company was supposed to provide a service to its customers for a profit, not put shackles on preexisting customers who have coughed up the dough?

For the record, I've purchased two shareware titles in the last month: Ricochet and Uplink.