Those are sort of a special case, because the concept was proven as popular through arcades before being brought to home consoles, and more importantly, making a new DDR type game is not particularly complicated or expensive. It's a great idea, but at the same time it's a pretty simple one, and it doesn't require complex 3D graphics or advanced AI or physics or anything.
I'm no programmer and I don't know much about Fable, but couldn't they take a cool yet ultimately useless feature like that, and only have it run in otherwise idle cycles? It might not be as constant and dynamic as they had originally hoped, but it sounds like there could've been a decent compromise in there. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that other issues (budget, time) factored into their decision, but it could've been cool.
It's as much on the government officials who have insisted on moving to electronic voting so quickly, without taking the time to figure out good guidelines for functionality, security, and accountability. In my opinion, there are some decently good arguments as for why electronic voting machines can be better than traditional voting systems, but none of those arguments are so compelling as to explain why we've needed to rush and spend tons of money buying all of these brand new systems without verifying and testing the hell out of them.
I'm all for technology, and it's exciting how modern design tools and manufacturing can enable us to roll out new solutions in no time flat. But that doesn't mean that it's always a good idea to abandon the old just as soon as something new appears.
If you're halfway intelligent and aren't in the top 5% income bracket, you'll remember how quickly DVD players came down once the format became common knowledge. Seeing how DVD's are already pretty decent quality, I don't think waiting a year or so for a much wider selection of players at much better prices is going to be too hard for most people.
Ultimate Frisbee is a great game. Simple rules, very light equipment requirements, and if you've got a pickup game going in front of your dorm, you can keep adding people without messing up the game (within reason for the size of your playing field). It "scales" well with a player's experience and athletic ability. Just about anyone can learn to throw and catch a frisbee halfway decently in just a few minutes, but an experienced player can make the disc do amazing things.
How does "promotional material" not echo the concept of marketing? That gears of war trailer is meant to make people want to buy the game. It's not a piece of entertainment. It's not really informative. It doesn't have any sort of story or lesson. You're supposed to watch it and say, "Wow, that looks really cool."
It's been a long time since advertising moved well beyond simply creating awareness of a product's existence. Playing semantic games all you want doesn't change the fact that video game trailers exist to sell more video games. Xbox Live charging people to see their ad isn't necessarily evil, it just seems counter-productive, since after spending all those resources to make your ad, you'll want to get it in front of as many eyeballs as is possible. Add in the fact that it's already possible to get the ad for free other places, and it makes even less sense.
They're not creating more incentives to upgrade to Gold. They're not creating anything. They're taking away something that you used to have unless you'll give them extra money to keep it. I don't think that Tycho really thinks they're being immoral or even unfair with this new change, just that they're taking the lazy route, and it probably won't convince many customers to upgrade (or stay with gold if they already have it).
Nintendo had plenty of brand recognition back in the day, and that didn't stop them from getting their asses handed to them by the playstation.
A brand can help, but in the end, it all comes down to the games. It's really that simple. The PS3 is going to need some really high-end exclusive games to match its high-end price tag, but if they can build up a solid library, they'll do fine. I don't think they'll dominate as forcefully as they did with the PS2, but they'll end up making some money, and life will go on.
Yeah, they were playing like a couple of human beings, instead of systematically analyzing everything like a computer might play. God forbid they treat it like a game instead of a mathematical exercise with only one correct solution.
The single most frustrating thing in SL is that running into invisible walls. If there's collision detection, then the client must know there's something there. Why it can't show some default textured shape is just a huge mystery to me. It seems so simple and obvious, yet it's still an amazingly annoying problem.
While it's not quite the same as being there, it's closer than just watching on TV. The music might be streamed via mp3, but there's a path of communication back that doesn't exist for television.
SL occupies a space between TV and "actually being there". Of course it's not the same, but it lets this guy get closer to the real thing than he would otherwise. And he appreciates that. So what's the problem?
I entirely agree. There are a whole lot of technical issues that are really holding SL back, and the devs seem to have the common problem of being more interested in adding new features than fixing all the existing stuff that doesn't work well. It certainly has not scaled well as its grown in population, nor can the servers cope with the increasing skill levels of creators, and the complexity of the types of projects that experienced players are attempting.
The scripting language, and the relative ease with which it lets you do all sorts of things can be very inspiring, yet at other times it's amazingly frustrating, because it's full of oddities and ugly work-arounds and just plain missing features.
I'll also agree that the Lindens pretty much all suck. Many of the rules and very vague, and enforcement and punishment is often very arbitrary.
Like you said, there's tons of potential. It's a very ambitious experiment, and at this point, I don't think Linden Labs has the focus/resources/whatever it takes to finish it. It's like a big project that someone was all excited about, but halfway through they got distracted, and sort of lost interest, and it'll never get finished. I have lots of projects like that. But then again, I don't charge anyone to use my projects.
The PS3 will do well. But I don't think it's going to dominate this console generation like the PS2 did. And I think a lot of people not only agree, but are hopeful that Sony gets a bit of a kick in the teeth this round. The way they've been talking about the PS3, and really a whole lot of their attitude as of late has been pompous and irritating. They've been acting like they walk on water, and gamers are lucky that Sony has the time to provide us with their hardware. And that's annoying.
Like Nintendo before them, Sony could use a good shot of humility, maybe it'll help them refocus. They need to remember and understand that consumers have choices, and that they need to earn our money.
Zonk is a Nintendo fanboy (so am I), and his anti-sony bent is pretty strong. All that being said, there's been way more bad news for Sony than good news for the past year or so, so it's not all Zonk.
It's silly to pretend that there are a bunch of people walking through the streets so short on water that they're damaging their bodies, but from my own personal experience, drinking more water really does make me feel better in general. Which isn't really surprising, considering how much of our body mass is water. I'd rather have more than I need available to my body than not enough.
If I make an effort to consume more water throughout the day, I tend to feel less tired, and soreness from athletic activity often seems to go away quicker. A number of years back, I used to do some pretty intense backpacking, and while the stresses that it put on my body were beyond what most people normally experience, drinking tons of water did amazing things to help my body cope. I had much less soreness in my joints, particularly my knees and and ankles on days where I drank a literof water first thing in the morning.
Honestly, I don't understand the hostility towards franchises. What's wrong with a company making sequels to succesful games? There's obviously a market for them. Nintendo practically defined the platformer with SMB, and their mario games are very consistently of high quality. If Rockstar games wants to keep improving their GTA series, good for them, it's been an excellent series of games, and I'm sure they can make it better. Valve can make FPS games for the next fifty years for all I care, as long as they continue to take their time and put out quality stuff. It doesn't even bother me that EA puts out a new madden each year. Let people buy it if they want it.
I'm a little less enamored with other companies jumping onto whatever the hot genre bandwagon is and putting out a crappy clone really quickly.
One of the really neat things about being a human is that our minds give us the ability to go against our innate conditions. We can act against our own fear, greed, or doubts. The flip side is that we can also act against our best interests and common sense.
Basic survival has built a degree of selfishness into humanity. And looking out for yourself is not a bad thing. That does not, however, mean that we should accept all forms of greed as good or even inevitable. And obsessive greed in a video game, where all that you create or collect has a very limited real value, is definitely something that we should be wary of.
I'd still say it's a game, just a different one. You're still interacting with a bunch of pre-made content for entertainment purposes, which is pretty much how I'd define a game.
It gets even more cloudy if you look at something like Second Life, which tries to be less of a game and more of a virtual world. And many people have the same problem with it, their online existence takes precedence over everything else in their life, and SL has way less structure than WoW.
I think that for both the article writer and your average reader, that jump of logic is obvious. I don't think that the writer was actually attempting to imply that the child themselves would sue.
Can't normal people get on with their lives?
on
School Bans 'Tag'
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· Score: 5, Insightful
It seems that we hear about two kinds of parents now-a-days. Ones who neglect their children so completely that the kids lose all sense of perspective and discipline and then go out and hurt innocent people. On the other hand there's a bunch of ridiculously over-protective parents who try to coddle their children every step of their lives, freaking out if the most minor of misfortune comes across their precious future.
As is often the case, the majority of average, decent, middle of the road parents/children are dealing with the consequences of vocal extremes. On one hand, we have unsupervised kids causing all sorts of problems, and resulting zero-tolerence policies in schools where even a minor, accidental infraction can cause a serious interruption in the education even of a model student. On the other hand, we have over-supervised kids whos parents live in so much fear for their child that neither that kid nor their classmates can act like children are supposed to act.
A normal child with decent parents will take some bumps and bruises as he/she grows up, and will end up stronger for it. While getting hurt is not pleasant, it's often an excellent learning experience. You learn that not only will certain things result in pain, but also that bad things are going to happen in your life, and you need to learn to cope with it. Denying a child the chance to learn such things is not good parenting.
This guy really hits on what I think is the biggest problem with MMO's. There's no end game. If winning is really important to you (and it's an important part of games in general), then you're never going to be satisfied.
I don't play WoW, but I do play Eve-Online, and it's basically the same thing for a lot of people. They've built big and powerful alliances, they control vast in-game resources, and they're deeply involved in all of the political intrigue in the game. But they're stuck at this terrible point where no matter how much they collect, how much territory they control, there's still tons more out there.
Just like many wealthy people in life spend their money trying to procure more wealth, the means and the end have become basically the same thing, watching a few numbers constantly increase. And since there's an infinite supply of higher numbers, there's no final goal to be reached. You end up playing to win a game that can't actually be won. Not because you're unskilled or aren't working hard enough, but because there is no game-mechanic that qualifies as winning.
Yet it still manages to sweep up lots of people, and stings them along until they burn out. But at least with real life wealth, if you eventually realize what's going on and gain some perspective on life, you've probably got a decent pile of money to support you as you move in a new direction. When you burn out on a video game and decide to leave it, you've likely sacrificed a lot of what you had in the real world.
No kidding. When someone's got their avatar running around with oversized genitalia on it, and when you click on it, it makes some ridiculous moaning noise... how can you not just click it over and over again until it drives them insane.
I'm generally happy to let people do whatever they want and not be judged, but when given a giant digital sandbox in which to create whatever you want, if you end up making big floppy animal dongs and wearing them around...you're going to get ridiculed. Common sense dictates it.
It's fun because there are so many people who take SL so seriously. Whether they're fulfilling some weird fantasy, making up for an unsatisfying real life, or just lacking perspective... it's bizarre, and not really appropriate to a game.
One of the most fun things to do in SL is to hang around crowds of people but not participating in their little event. Since at least half of everything that goes on in SL revolves around some sort of sexual weirdness, you can see some really strange people doing some really strange stuff. Even if you just stand there next to their land, it'll often really piss them off, because they know you're watching them and they don't like it.
Of course, Linden Labs is well aware that a large amount of their income is from those perverts who use SL as an outlet for all their strange fantasies, so they're likely to take punitive action against you if someone complains. You can get banned for just standing nearby someone if they don't like you. SL justice is random and unfair.
So yeah, griefing is very much alive in SL. It ranges from stuff like I just described up to people exploiting the scripting language to crash the grid. The Second Life universe is absolutely full of problems, many technical and many social.
While MS would probably love this, as a consumer, I would not like it. It would basically remove the ability to rent/trade/borrow/resell games. I'm also not confident that the sort of bandwidth that would be necessary will be common place everywhere. Especially if the amount of content in an average game continues to increase like it has been doing.
I like going to the store, browsing the games, and reading the instruction manual on the ride home. Modern games tend to be too large for the "immediate gratification" feeling that you get from something like music. The only real plus is that it would drive down distribution costs, but I doubt consumers will see many price breaks as a result from that.
I don't think that innovation or creativity is gone from the game industry. It's probably at an all time high. It just appears to be lacking because their are lots of "me too" titles being put out as well, often with a lot of publicity and hype. There are plenty of companies that are perfectly happy to churn out franchises and incremental sequels, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's obviously a market for continously refined gameplay, or else companies would stop producing them. It just so happens that those sorts of games are quicker to make, so we hear about them more often, and they're generally produced by well funded companies that can advertise a lot, and so we see a lot of them.
Add in the fact that a lot of the "easy" innovations, the real big shifts in game play, have already happened. There are a lot of different genres out there, almost any worthwhile idea that you have is going to be similar to something that already exists. Which isn't to say you're not innovating, just that it's not likely to be some sort of earth-shattering revolution. Something significantly different than we're used to, like non-tradition control schemes(Exhibit A: Nintendo), will allow even the more conservative developers to innovate in more blatantly obvious ways. These innovations will have a great "bang for your buck" ratio, because there's a lot of uncharted territory. A nice example being EA and their madden game on the Wii. Having you actually motion like you're throwing the ball to pass is an obvious direction to take the game in, yet it'll be a very new way of playing for gamers. Compare that to trying to write an innovatively intelligent AI for an FPS, which is likely to be much more difficult to pull off, and at the same time be something that you'd need a good amount of gaming experience and play time to really appreciate.
Innovation is still very much alive and going strong, it's just harder to see amongst the crowd of more standard stuff being produced today, and the huge library of stuff produced in the past.
Slashdot Mirror
Those are sort of a special case, because the concept was proven as popular through arcades before being brought to home consoles, and more importantly, making a new DDR type game is not particularly complicated or expensive. It's a great idea, but at the same time it's a pretty simple one, and it doesn't require complex 3D graphics or advanced AI or physics or anything.
Making a new DDR type game is a low risk project.
I'm no programmer and I don't know much about Fable, but couldn't they take a cool yet ultimately useless feature like that, and only have it run in otherwise idle cycles? It might not be as constant and dynamic as they had originally hoped, but it sounds like there could've been a decent compromise in there. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that other issues (budget, time) factored into their decision, but it could've been cool.
It's as much on the government officials who have insisted on moving to electronic voting so quickly, without taking the time to figure out good guidelines for functionality, security, and accountability. In my opinion, there are some decently good arguments as for why electronic voting machines can be better than traditional voting systems, but none of those arguments are so compelling as to explain why we've needed to rush and spend tons of money buying all of these brand new systems without verifying and testing the hell out of them.
I'm all for technology, and it's exciting how modern design tools and manufacturing can enable us to roll out new solutions in no time flat. But that doesn't mean that it's always a good idea to abandon the old just as soon as something new appears.
If you're halfway intelligent and aren't in the top 5% income bracket, you'll remember how quickly DVD players came down once the format became common knowledge. Seeing how DVD's are already pretty decent quality, I don't think waiting a year or so for a much wider selection of players at much better prices is going to be too hard for most people.
I think gunning down people is a bit violent for the older crowd. The Wii remote, however, is perfect for shaking your fist at those unruly teenagers.
Ultimate Frisbee is a great game. Simple rules, very light equipment requirements, and if you've got a pickup game going in front of your dorm, you can keep adding people without messing up the game (within reason for the size of your playing field). It "scales" well with a player's experience and athletic ability. Just about anyone can learn to throw and catch a frisbee halfway decently in just a few minutes, but an experienced player can make the disc do amazing things.
*sigh* I miss college.
How does "promotional material" not echo the concept of marketing? That gears of war trailer is meant to make people want to buy the game. It's not a piece of entertainment. It's not really informative. It doesn't have any sort of story or lesson. You're supposed to watch it and say, "Wow, that looks really cool."
It's been a long time since advertising moved well beyond simply creating awareness of a product's existence. Playing semantic games all you want doesn't change the fact that video game trailers exist to sell more video games. Xbox Live charging people to see their ad isn't necessarily evil, it just seems counter-productive, since after spending all those resources to make your ad, you'll want to get it in front of as many eyeballs as is possible. Add in the fact that it's already possible to get the ad for free other places, and it makes even less sense.
They're not creating more incentives to upgrade to Gold. They're not creating anything. They're taking away something that you used to have unless you'll give them extra money to keep it. I don't think that Tycho really thinks they're being immoral or even unfair with this new change, just that they're taking the lazy route, and it probably won't convince many customers to upgrade (or stay with gold if they already have it).
Nintendo had plenty of brand recognition back in the day, and that didn't stop them from getting their asses handed to them by the playstation.
A brand can help, but in the end, it all comes down to the games. It's really that simple. The PS3 is going to need some really high-end exclusive games to match its high-end price tag, but if they can build up a solid library, they'll do fine. I don't think they'll dominate as forcefully as they did with the PS2, but they'll end up making some money, and life will go on.
Yeah, they were playing like a couple of human beings, instead of systematically analyzing everything like a computer might play. God forbid they treat it like a game instead of a mathematical exercise with only one correct solution.
The single most frustrating thing in SL is that running into invisible walls. If there's collision detection, then the client must know there's something there. Why it can't show some default textured shape is just a huge mystery to me. It seems so simple and obvious, yet it's still an amazingly annoying problem.
While it's not quite the same as being there, it's closer than just watching on TV. The music might be streamed via mp3, but there's a path of communication back that doesn't exist for television.
SL occupies a space between TV and "actually being there". Of course it's not the same, but it lets this guy get closer to the real thing than he would otherwise. And he appreciates that. So what's the problem?
I entirely agree. There are a whole lot of technical issues that are really holding SL back, and the devs seem to have the common problem of being more interested in adding new features than fixing all the existing stuff that doesn't work well. It certainly has not scaled well as its grown in population, nor can the servers cope with the increasing skill levels of creators, and the complexity of the types of projects that experienced players are attempting.
The scripting language, and the relative ease with which it lets you do all sorts of things can be very inspiring, yet at other times it's amazingly frustrating, because it's full of oddities and ugly work-arounds and just plain missing features.
I'll also agree that the Lindens pretty much all suck. Many of the rules and very vague, and enforcement and punishment is often very arbitrary.
Like you said, there's tons of potential. It's a very ambitious experiment, and at this point, I don't think Linden Labs has the focus/resources/whatever it takes to finish it. It's like a big project that someone was all excited about, but halfway through they got distracted, and sort of lost interest, and it'll never get finished. I have lots of projects like that. But then again, I don't charge anyone to use my projects.
The PS3 will do well. But I don't think it's going to dominate this console generation like the PS2 did. And I think a lot of people not only agree, but are hopeful that Sony gets a bit of a kick in the teeth this round. The way they've been talking about the PS3, and really a whole lot of their attitude as of late has been pompous and irritating. They've been acting like they walk on water, and gamers are lucky that Sony has the time to provide us with their hardware. And that's annoying.
Like Nintendo before them, Sony could use a good shot of humility, maybe it'll help them refocus. They need to remember and understand that consumers have choices, and that they need to earn our money.
Zonk is a Nintendo fanboy (so am I), and his anti-sony bent is pretty strong. All that being said, there's been way more bad news for Sony than good news for the past year or so, so it's not all Zonk.
It's silly to pretend that there are a bunch of people walking through the streets so short on water that they're damaging their bodies, but from my own personal experience, drinking more water really does make me feel better in general. Which isn't really surprising, considering how much of our body mass is water. I'd rather have more than I need available to my body than not enough.
If I make an effort to consume more water throughout the day, I tend to feel less tired, and soreness from athletic activity often seems to go away quicker. A number of years back, I used to do some pretty intense backpacking, and while the stresses that it put on my body were beyond what most people normally experience, drinking tons of water did amazing things to help my body cope. I had much less soreness in my joints, particularly my knees and and ankles on days where I drank a literof water first thing in the morning.
Honestly, I don't understand the hostility towards franchises. What's wrong with a company making sequels to succesful games? There's obviously a market for them. Nintendo practically defined the platformer with SMB, and their mario games are very consistently of high quality. If Rockstar games wants to keep improving their GTA series, good for them, it's been an excellent series of games, and I'm sure they can make it better. Valve can make FPS games for the next fifty years for all I care, as long as they continue to take their time and put out quality stuff. It doesn't even bother me that EA puts out a new madden each year. Let people buy it if they want it.
I'm a little less enamored with other companies jumping onto whatever the hot genre bandwagon is and putting out a crappy clone really quickly.
One of the really neat things about being a human is that our minds give us the ability to go against our innate conditions. We can act against our own fear, greed, or doubts. The flip side is that we can also act against our best interests and common sense.
Basic survival has built a degree of selfishness into humanity. And looking out for yourself is not a bad thing. That does not, however, mean that we should accept all forms of greed as good or even inevitable. And obsessive greed in a video game, where all that you create or collect has a very limited real value, is definitely something that we should be wary of.
I'd still say it's a game, just a different one. You're still interacting with a bunch of pre-made content for entertainment purposes, which is pretty much how I'd define a game.
It gets even more cloudy if you look at something like Second Life, which tries to be less of a game and more of a virtual world. And many people have the same problem with it, their online existence takes precedence over everything else in their life, and SL has way less structure than WoW.
I think that for both the article writer and your average reader, that jump of logic is obvious. I don't think that the writer was actually attempting to imply that the child themselves would sue.
It seems that we hear about two kinds of parents now-a-days. Ones who neglect their children so completely that the kids lose all sense of perspective and discipline and then go out and hurt innocent people. On the other hand there's a bunch of ridiculously over-protective parents who try to coddle their children every step of their lives, freaking out if the most minor of misfortune comes across their precious future.
As is often the case, the majority of average, decent, middle of the road parents/children are dealing with the consequences of vocal extremes. On one hand, we have unsupervised kids causing all sorts of problems, and resulting zero-tolerence policies in schools where even a minor, accidental infraction can cause a serious interruption in the education even of a model student. On the other hand, we have over-supervised kids whos parents live in so much fear for their child that neither that kid nor their classmates can act like children are supposed to act.
A normal child with decent parents will take some bumps and bruises as he/she grows up, and will end up stronger for it. While getting hurt is not pleasant, it's often an excellent learning experience. You learn that not only will certain things result in pain, but also that bad things are going to happen in your life, and you need to learn to cope with it. Denying a child the chance to learn such things is not good parenting.
This guy really hits on what I think is the biggest problem with MMO's. There's no end game. If winning is really important to you (and it's an important part of games in general), then you're never going to be satisfied.
I don't play WoW, but I do play Eve-Online, and it's basically the same thing for a lot of people. They've built big and powerful alliances, they control vast in-game resources, and they're deeply involved in all of the political intrigue in the game. But they're stuck at this terrible point where no matter how much they collect, how much territory they control, there's still tons more out there.
Just like many wealthy people in life spend their money trying to procure more wealth, the means and the end have become basically the same thing, watching a few numbers constantly increase. And since there's an infinite supply of higher numbers, there's no final goal to be reached. You end up playing to win a game that can't actually be won. Not because you're unskilled or aren't working hard enough, but because there is no game-mechanic that qualifies as winning.
Yet it still manages to sweep up lots of people, and stings them along until they burn out. But at least with real life wealth, if you eventually realize what's going on and gain some perspective on life, you've probably got a decent pile of money to support you as you move in a new direction. When you burn out on a video game and decide to leave it, you've likely sacrificed a lot of what you had in the real world.
No kidding. When someone's got their avatar running around with oversized genitalia on it, and when you click on it, it makes some ridiculous moaning noise... how can you not just click it over and over again until it drives them insane.
I'm generally happy to let people do whatever they want and not be judged, but when given a giant digital sandbox in which to create whatever you want, if you end up making big floppy animal dongs and wearing them around...you're going to get ridiculed. Common sense dictates it.
It's fun because there are so many people who take SL so seriously. Whether they're fulfilling some weird fantasy, making up for an unsatisfying real life, or just lacking perspective... it's bizarre, and not really appropriate to a game.
One of the most fun things to do in SL is to hang around crowds of people but not participating in their little event. Since at least half of everything that goes on in SL revolves around some sort of sexual weirdness, you can see some really strange people doing some really strange stuff. Even if you just stand there next to their land, it'll often really piss them off, because they know you're watching them and they don't like it.
Of course, Linden Labs is well aware that a large amount of their income is from those perverts who use SL as an outlet for all their strange fantasies, so they're likely to take punitive action against you if someone complains. You can get banned for just standing nearby someone if they don't like you. SL justice is random and unfair.
So yeah, griefing is very much alive in SL. It ranges from stuff like I just described up to people exploiting the scripting language to crash the grid. The Second Life universe is absolutely full of problems, many technical and many social.
While MS would probably love this, as a consumer, I would not like it. It would basically remove the ability to rent/trade/borrow/resell games. I'm also not confident that the sort of bandwidth that would be necessary will be common place everywhere. Especially if the amount of content in an average game continues to increase like it has been doing.
I like going to the store, browsing the games, and reading the instruction manual on the ride home. Modern games tend to be too large for the "immediate gratification" feeling that you get from something like music. The only real plus is that it would drive down distribution costs, but I doubt consumers will see many price breaks as a result from that.
I don't think that innovation or creativity is gone from the game industry. It's probably at an all time high. It just appears to be lacking because their are lots of "me too" titles being put out as well, often with a lot of publicity and hype. There are plenty of companies that are perfectly happy to churn out franchises and incremental sequels, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's obviously a market for continously refined gameplay, or else companies would stop producing them. It just so happens that those sorts of games are quicker to make, so we hear about them more often, and they're generally produced by well funded companies that can advertise a lot, and so we see a lot of them.
Add in the fact that a lot of the "easy" innovations, the real big shifts in game play, have already happened. There are a lot of different genres out there, almost any worthwhile idea that you have is going to be similar to something that already exists. Which isn't to say you're not innovating, just that it's not likely to be some sort of earth-shattering revolution. Something significantly different than we're used to, like non-tradition control schemes(Exhibit A: Nintendo), will allow even the more conservative developers to innovate in more blatantly obvious ways. These innovations will have a great "bang for your buck" ratio, because there's a lot of uncharted territory. A nice example being EA and their madden game on the Wii. Having you actually motion like you're throwing the ball to pass is an obvious direction to take the game in, yet it'll be a very new way of playing for gamers. Compare that to trying to write an innovatively intelligent AI for an FPS, which is likely to be much more difficult to pull off, and at the same time be something that you'd need a good amount of gaming experience and play time to really appreciate.
Innovation is still very much alive and going strong, it's just harder to see amongst the crowd of more standard stuff being produced today, and the huge library of stuff produced in the past.
Zonk is just upset because they canned their original "boomerang" shaped controller. He loved that thing.