BTW, Boom Blox is at number 10 in the list of highest reviewed Wii games on Metacritic, so that would also fall into the category of "one of the best games this gen".

@horriblebastard: No, i would like both. New IP:s and good sequels.
Look, being a sequel isn't a bad thing, being a sequel that just repeates the same old, with nothing new, is a bad thing.

By the way, i addressed a post to you earlier today, would you like to read it?

@bdbdbd
Correct, but I'm saying that even CoD4 had an underlying style to it's graphics, the style demands more graphics, a la MoHH2 looking like crud but playing great means the game ended up being a success anyway and developing a cult following. I may have to correct myself and note that the developers who work predominantly in that art style demand more tech power.

How this affected the Wii should be obvious as these developers always want more power, it would take someone with a genuine interest in fps from a game designers stance to generate something on the Wii that had good enough and intuitive slaped all over it in the right places.

I remember reading an article on Kotaku about Shigeru visiting Free Radical to see Haze, he had a look of disgust from what you could tell he wasn't sure about the job of the game, from that you could ask "would anyone want what it was doing." The answer came later. Not saying Free Radical isn't brimming with great designers, just that game designers can tell when something isn't right. Of course in Shigeru's case he'd head to the streets and have people play his game to find what was wrong.

@dib8rman: Yes, it's all about the values.
I think it was you who, earlier in this thread, mentioned the developent budget. As long as we have limited budget and improvements in graphics and gameplay can be done, it's balancing between the two and which way the developement focuses, is only about the values and skills of the developers.
The reason why 1st party games are in general than the 3rd party games, is because 1st party games serves other purposes, than just game sales, they're supposed to drive hardware sales too. Which automatically justifies bigger budgets.

My only contribution to this thread: A good game is good regardless of how it looks. Now, I'm going to go play Braid.

 The real question is did Boom Blox make a profit. It probably has since development cost is 4 to 6 times less than HD consoles. What you fail to realizes is that games like that have long legs. The more wii's get in the hands of true gamers the more those games will sell. There is still a lot of people trying to get a wii. And you may not have noticed , but the wii has been and will be getting more core type games. Plus games like Boom Blox and Zack & Wiki could have used a lot more advertizing. We know about them because we are on gaming sights. But most people aren't.

What I can't figure out is why people keep saying that Zelda and Mario are the same over and over again. Like any GTA or Halo has been so different. And that go's for any series game. Will Gears 2 be that much different than the first? Most likely not. But i'll take as many Mario's and Zelda's as they can make cause they are just masterpices.

I always say that if you are so busy focused on graphic, the game play can't be all that good. Case in point. I decided to give Star Wars KOTOR another run through a month ago. At first I really noticed that it's not even on par what decent wii games graphically. That lasted all of a good ten minutes then graphics were the furthest thing on my mind.

How well did Okami, Killer 7, Psychonauts, Ico, and Katamari Damarci sell on the PS2?

Boom Blox has received lower scores (on average) than many of those titles, has seen less marketing than many of those titles, and was released on a system with a far smaller userbase and yet its slow and steady sales pace has it outselling most of those titles.

The 1 Million unit mark is not "The" definition of success ... In particular, if you're focusing on inexpensive titles that are based off of creative gameplay a much smaller number (potentially as low as 125,000) may be considered amazingly successful; a company like EA may look at the sales of Boom Blox at 500,000 to 750,000 as a sign that there is a market for this kind of game, invest more money in a sequel, and then market it more heavily which would result in much higher sales.

Just because Madden 2009 will come out in a few days and sell Millions upon millions of copies over night does not mean that other titles have sold poorly and are not worthy of further development; if it did all we would see on the market would be dozens of Football games, dozens of Sandbox crime games, and dozens of simulation racers ...