Modern Warfare 2. COD is really just a standard FPS with good multiplayer. No revolution or anything.

Ah, alright.

Well, just for a recent example on topic with this thread, I'd have to say New Super Mario Bros Wii.

Having played through the entire game, I enjoyed it and found it to be a fun Mario game. But it isn't the amazing 'revival of Mario' many people and reviewers are making it out to be. In fact, I would venture to say there's a number of past Mario games that are better than it. It seems to suffer from some repetitive level design and a few other things that keep it from being that amazing game on par with other Mario titles. Most of the fun comes from the few secret levels and trying to obtain hidden star coins, but that's not the majority of the game content.

If anything, New Super Mario Bros Wii is more like a fun platformer reusing many of the best ideas of past Mario games (such as Mario 1, 3 and NSMBDS). While the game that truly is the 'revival of Mario' this gen was Mario Galaxy. And was much more fun.

Other games I can think of would be Metroid Prime, Zelda: Twilight Princess, Pokemon Gold/Silver, Super Smash Bros Melee, Secret of Mana, StarCraft and Age of Empires II. I enjoyed all of these games, quite a lot. But while these games ended up being very popular, they were eventually surpassed by other games, often in their own series. Its just sad that popularity blinded people from seeing this.

^^^ Yea, NSMB was great, but not as classic as Super Mario World. Didn't have nearly as much fun in the beginning; had to force it.

Secret of Mana is by far my favourite Mana game, and I couldn't care less how popular it was.

Mass Effect: basically what Reasonable said, and also the dialogue choices too, I couldn't figure out what's so awesome about knowing what's the alignement of the response you're choosing, and most of them were all the same, like choosing to learn more about the situation or not. 00

The Longest Journey: I finished it after playing LOOM, and I also couldn't figure out why it was supposed to be one of the best adventure games ever, especially because I often saw people referencing "mature" themes and most of them were barely touched (the lesbian couple, for example). it felt like a Hollywood movie where they try to tell EVERYTHING in a single movie.

Braid: a good game, but whenever a world was getting good, it was over. comparing to World of Goo, it was exactly the opposite. both presented new stuff in each world, but Braid had so few levels that you couldn't even enjoy a world.