Ah, the best day's for me we're the old Super Nintendo day's, those were actual games made from intellect.

I've always loved gaming since the NES days, but I've always had complaints. I guess these days we simply have different complaints.

It's normal to lament the "good ol' days", but the good ol' days had their own problems. Take Half-Life, for instance: a great game, but the physics were simplistic, there were about 4 NPC models in the entire game (and half as many NPC voice actors), but it was still a great game. Nowadays we have far more realistic physics, huge voice casts and games where no two NPCs look alike.

Whenever I feel jaded about gaming, I sit down, pull up my broswer, and play some free, indie games online. It always rejuvenates my love for gaming.

Exactly, that's the point I'm trying to make, everyone just overlook's any small game cause it's just that.. A small game, some games have so much to them, yet people just play Call of Duty cause it's what most people play online, with their friends.

This is true and a side erffect of it is that it's harder fort odd, personal ideas to carry through as one person's vison in the biggest games these dasys.

Also, and it's just because of how big gaming has become, for the first time the games are being controlled by money men like kotick rather than the creatives who started making games because they wanted to play them. It's been going on for a few years now but we reached as point where the industry is so big that the money hats are controlling the creatives and until the levels settle down and the industry matures a little we're bound to get short sighted guys who don't game using slash and burn tactics, milking franchises and stifling creation in favour of "£safe" bets on the money front.

There's still a ton of talent willing and able to make incredible new experiences and the tech gets better all the time to help them get us closer than ever to the pictures in their heads. Sadly, we'll never get back to the majority of dev houses being run by the most creative people in the industry since it grew so big and for now most of the great, NEW ideas are probably going to be found in smaller games and in the indie scene. The big companies WILL get more confident with new IP/ideas as time passes and they start seeing the need to expand into fresh areas but it's a question of the industry maturing to the same degree as music or TV where we get the big mainstream stuff AND innovation with money behind it. That's the usual pattern with new media/artforms from where I'm sat.

Indeed, I agree with that, but the fact is, money is money, and people just want a lot of it no matter how generic a game is.