Makes me wanna play wipeout!! bring it back Sony!!! It'll be the first playstation console without one, sad times

You have no idea what you're saying if you genuinely believe this.

Shin'en is a five-man squad with some of the best optimization (graphical and otherwise, such as package and compression optimization) in the gaming world. That is nothing short of technical innovation on the cutting edge, its just innovation you can't see or easily understand or point at. If you think Monolith Soft or EPD don't do technically innovative or impressive things, then you simply have no appreciation of the streaming technology used in XCX (or a lot of other things for that matter in that game), or just general appreciation of what it takes to make games even on the WiiU within the scope of the WiiU's capabilities.

Also I wasn't putting them above top of the crop AAA developers. I was saying that they have a talent that few people or studios will actually use in this day and age.

Really ? Then what on earth are they doing by not showing up at SIGGRAPH or GDC ?! 

The Nintendo developer community has been extremely silent over these past few years and I wonder where exactly are their research papers or their presentations ...

... That's your metric? I have no words.

I didn't realize people were so scared of an indie studio or Nintendo software tech.

That's where the "innovations" really happen if you knew what the term really meant ...

As good as Nintendo's software tech is, I have yet any original or new method formulated by them in a long time ...

I love this game. Highly recommend getting it. It has the feel of a racer that you need a lot of skill to win cause it is brutally hard. But that's what makes it so awesome.

That isn't true at all. That is where innovations are shown off or discussed. Ever consider that some development studios would like to keep some stuff close-knit, or don't have time for showing off?

This is like telling me that TED is where "innovaion" really happens in science/tech, it isn't.

Hmm, seldom amounts of research papers and blog posts too ... 

Just what exactly is new or original about their tech that their showing off in games then ? The developer community around Nintendo hardly has anything to hide about "cutting edge" when just about everyone else in the industry are covering every basis as far as real time rendering goes ... 

If that's your metric than basically no one is innovative. Technology is largely itterative.

Their technology is new for the system for which it was custom built, no such solution existed or they didn't use a contemporary one that could be brute forced (largely due to efficiency reasons, likely). They developed a specialized, new engine with their own home-baked solutions to problems. That is original. Is it "new" to the overall world? No, but then by boiling down development/programming to such a base, is to do a great disservice to the work that goes into said, and we'd effectively be left in a world with nothing all that fascinating.

Don't worry, Shin'en won't drive those AAAs and their "innovation" out of business. You needn't worry about giving them a little credit for their work.

Technology is largely iterative but in the field of real time computer graphics we still have long ways to go ...  

It's customized, I'll grant you that much but don't pass it off as a "new" solution when it's been implemented before and I don't mean to undermine Shin'en's achievements when there's lots of hardwork to be had in their case ... 

Shin'en does earn the credits it deserves but you underestimate how many talented graphics programmers there are on the other side ...