Have you ever played a Euro style boardgame?  Being able to finish a game up in an evening is not an indicator of how "hardcore" it is.  You can do a bunch of strategic depth in less time.  In the boardgame area, a big issue is that empire building games usually take too long to be playable.  A game like 7 Ages will take says to play.  So, what is going on here,  is to come up with something more manageable.  In the case of Fantasy Flight, they have Twilight Imperium, which goes on hours also.  The original Civilization boardgame also went all day affair, if not longer.  In regards to grand strategy wargames, those can be week long monsters.    It just means longer, not necessarily less strategy or depth.  A game like chess can be played in less time, or even Go, and finish up in an evening, but still can require hardcore skill to play well.  Even Blitz chess fits this.

Toy I can understand - I treat all games as toys. But a boardgame? That comparison makes no sense at all.

Why do you think? I think its because of a graphics whore approach some developers take.

Honestly, I hate that, not because of the Wii neglect (which I hate separately), but because it's the wrong priority. How detailed the graphics are never make a game great, as such games become dated the next gen. It's how great a time you have playing a game, regardless of the content or genre. That's what makes the greats.

Yes, this is off topic, but it shows what matters in gaming. Many games from previous generations got touted as deep art like Heavy Rain, and most are forgotten, with only a few being remembered due to also being great to play (like System Shock).

If Cage focused on a game that was hella great to play first and foremost, any art and graphics added onto it would just be gravy.

So, you now on a witch hunt to correct every single person in this thread who has taken a dump, FAR WORSE than anything I ever said about Heavy Rain, in this thread?  The real issue is this: The videogame industry, in attempting to increase production costs to make things more epic and aspiring itself to be more like the movie industry (without having a thing called BOX OFFICE to recover costs) is putting itself on a road to potential ruin.  You can say that I am daft and say I am wrong, but go and look it up.  I don't believe an early 80s crash is going to happen, but I believe contraction is definitely a possibility here, unless the industry decides to pursue other avenues that provide entertainment at a lower costs.  Nintendo had done just that, and look at who had been the most profitable of all the companies?  The drive for motion control and games people bash here (stuff seen as toys) are also something that helps.  The funding of indie games to, and digital downloads and lower costs, are another factor involved.

Want me to do a dump of articles that speak to what I am saying?  Well, here we go...

http://www.slate.com/id/2210732/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10188950-17.html

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/39087/Comte-Games-pricing-must-change

http://www.next-gen.biz/news/namco-videogames-are-too-expensive

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=255016

http://destructoid.com/games-need-to-cost-more-to-survive-says-chris-deering-142231.phtml

(So retailer say they cost to much, but those producing content says it isn't enough. NOT good)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/technology/30game.html

I could go on here.  But, in short, the videogame industry can't afford to pattern itself after Hollywood.  Do you want me to google even more articles on this?  By the way, if you want to google, look at how sales of software for consoles is going:

http://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=s&hl=en&source=hp&q=sales down videogame software&btnG=Google Search

Downward trend going on.

Yes, there are exceptions as I said.  What is important here though, is that Cage didn't mean those when he referrenced "nice parlour games" (no, he didn't specifically mention board games, as some of you want to stubbornly believe.). 

What he ment was that the Wii is more of a casual experience overall, by its features and game library compared to the PS3, which has a game library much more centered around "hardcore" games (or more traditional videogames, if you prefer, compared to the Wii's more casual approach [let's be honest here]) and does a lot more than just play games compared to the Wii.  I don't think his stance was really difficult to understand at all and he doesn't appear to be bashing the Wii at all.  But of course, understanding French makes it a lot easier to get what he meant.  The translation you got there is just going for the sensational, taking his claim out of context, without his intonation of facial expressions, and of course, it left all the praise he sent to Nintendo before and after that part in the process.

But again, some of you are also just overly sensitive.

I take issues with people who claim that shooting for better graphics and cost of production of games is what is causing the downfall of the medium.

First, I think it's really hypocritical of Nintendo's fans to mention the issue of graphics. Partcularly after seeing them time and time again complain about the art style that Nintendo is choosing for their next Zelda games.  Wind Waker and Skyward Sword being the 2 best examples by the way they polarised the fans by their looks only.  Wind Waker was not made a bad game by its visuals.  Core gameplay remained completely Zelda and was in fact a big improvement in polish from what had come before, even if the series didn't make such a big leap forward since Ocarina of Time.  My problem here is that you complain that graphics are not what is important to a game, yet throw a fit when a game like Zelda uses a cartoon look when in the end, the gameplay is just the same it would have been had it used a more marute look, like it's the case with Twilight Princess which had the same core gameplay all around.

Then comes the issue of the production costs.  Some of you seems to fail to see or understand that it's not only the vision of the producers that isin play here, but also the demand from the consumers to play ever more realistic games.  Although the Wii managed to bring a lot of new gamers in, with different tastes and habits, the gamers who've been into the kind of gaming that has been there since the beginning (the usual gameplay styles that most of us here enjoy) are indeed asking for more intricate and realistic gaming experiences. 

Graphics don't make a game better as far as the gameplay mechanics are concerned, but they do achieve a better immersion in many types of games especially if they're played in the first person, or in the case of Heavy Rain, graphics adds the realism required to give the emotional impact that the producers were aiming for.  Graphics may not be the be all end all of what makes a game good or bad, but for many types of games, they help put the playing in the shoes of its protagonists better than they would for games like Kirby or Mario where the aim of the games just isn't the same.

Exactly i love graphics but gameplay should be first. And for the record the wii can do a little more than play games.

Yeah, and Heavy Rain is a movie :P

The graphics vs gameplay dicothomy is a boring simplification. Even talking about art is misleading. The keyword being experience.

Everything that is conductive to an entertaining, moving, satisfying experience is good.

That can come from pure addictive gameplay mechanics and replayability a-la Tetris. It can come from hinting at worlds and stories with various methods of character building and storytelling and visual trickery.

A generation later, Farhenheit/Indigo Prophecy is certainly dated graphic-wise, and yet

a) we're still talking about it and the direction it chose. Someone hates it, someone likes it, and its many shortcomings are really glaring. And still we're talking about its underlying idea because it was a bold interesting move and for many an interesting expereince.

b) today its tech is dated, and yet that doesn't mean that the graphics could just be "added on top". Putting it bluntly, that game could not have been made in the 8-bit era.

So let's stop with the naive idea that tech is just a glazing you can add in various amount over game design. Technology and game design have a much more complex interplay.

Elite could not have been made on a ZX81, but was great as soon as its mechanics and design could be implemented on Spectrum/C64/Apple ][. It did not gain much on the Amiga or Atari ST, but the added capabilities allowed Braben to design Elite II:Frontier on those machines.

Half Life 2 relies on the underlying visual/physics tech and is designed around it. Shadow of the Colossus stresses the capabilites of the PS2 and would have been impossible to achieve on anything less technically apt for most of what made it what it is design-wise (the vistas, the world, the scale showed a story instead of telling it).

Downplaying tech to irrelevance is naive. Saying that storytelling or artstyle is authorial masturbation (see Malstrom) is close-minded. I want different experiences from my so-called video-games, and not all of them, not every day, are arcade gameplay ones. If that's all you want, good for you, there's excellent choice out there, but I can't see why you should be defining for everybody what experiences are good and what not.