Ok, I'm not trying to troll, but this one comes at me hard.

The GameCube generation Harvest moons, and the new Harvest moon DS, and most likely the Harvest Moon Wii are low budget... Compared to other games coming out today.

However the old harvest moons were not that low budget. The graphics in them, I felt were on par with Square's graphics. I felt the gameplay was flawless for the time. Infact, I think the old gameplay is in quite a few ways better than the modern gameplay. If anything the new harvest moons are low budget, while the old ones werent.

(it is all relative. a game with a 100,000$ budget 20 years ago was MASSIVE, a game with a 100,000$ budget today... ... I dobut flOw was under 100,000$.

katamari damacy comes to mind...

I'd say a game like Chu Chu rocket probably didn't make huge dents into Sega's checkbook. I love that game.

I also have Space Channel 5 (though i don't know the budget, but I got it for 5 bucks), along with SC5 part 2  (don't know the budget, but got it for 10 bucks)

 And certainly a game like Animal Crossing didn't really break nintendo's bank.  

Iono, they are out there if you look for them! 

and thus the wii and DS success is born. Alot of low budget companies are trying their hand at wii and DS games, and youd be amazed at how good they are, but you have to give them a try. you cant say, "well that game looks dumb, and the company is a no name, so im not gonna even bother wasting a rental on it." if you do that, you will miss out on some of the best games of this gen. i do alot of renting and will give most any game a try, particually when i run out of renting the bigger name games, thats when i really start to do some hunting for the under-the-radar games. are alot of them jank? yes, but like you said, you try enough of them (just simply put a few bucks into renting) and you will find plenty that are easily at least worth the few bucks of the rental, and some that you realize are great MP games, and some you realize you simply have to have because they are solid games all around.

For the 360

Earth Defence Force - It's seemed to have sold out everywhere, but most believe it's cause most stores never even heard of it

Geometry Wars - great XBLA game only $5 (400 points)

With ease of development, large installed base, and users who seem to love 'quirky' titles, the DS probably has the biggest potential audience for independent publishers.  Cooking Mama (which wasn't all that great, IMHO) was a prime example of 'budget ware'.  (How Majesco thinks people will pay $50 for the Wii version is beyond me.)  Other titles include the Brain 'series' (Age and Academy), most puzzle games, and a large amount of licensed content (movies, cartoons, etc.).

The Wii may be similar to it's portable brother in those areas, but Nintendo has so far disappointed the development community with the lack of annoucements for original Virtual Console games and lack of support for smaller developers.  Once Nintendo gets those production issues ironed out, they have some other work cut out for them.

Earth Defense Force was pretty dang crappy though...mainly because it seems like a big budget game that just didn't get enough money in the end...it could have been much better.

Look below.

This generation, I think killed low budget gaming. The graphics are only made from high budget games.