I'll keep this (relatively, for me) short.
My kids and I have been playing Mario Kart World on the Switch 2. It's really well done, free roam is fun (but limited), and the controls, smoothness, graphics, etc. are REALLY well done. It's lacking in many features (ghosts racing, competitive free roam trials, tracks, items, etc.) and I hope many of the gaps will be filled in over the coming years. It's feeling a bit played out already.
BUT... I've also recently introduced Double Dash (Gamecube) and Mario Kart Wii to the kids. They got a kick out of wii motion controls and double dash's gimmicks, but even with a retrotink, playing it on a big flatscreen TV is just not ideal.
So I sailed the high seas for some ROMs (to games I already own), installed the Dolphin emulator, and installed some 4K texture packs. My PC is ok... i7-4790 processor (10+ years old) and a 3080.
Double Dash, a game from 23 years ago now looks almost as good as Mario Kart World (you can easily find Youtube videos). It's staggeringly good. The controls and speed -- better than World, imho. The performance is fantastic.
If you took the base Double Dash or Wii game and compared to World, you would say we've come incredibly far. But, with a little upscaling, some new textures, etc., it's clear that we really haven't.
I get that Nintendo games are not known for pushing the envelope, but I think this is just one good example of how ... empty ... modern AAA gaming is.
Just look at Firaxis & Civ7's release last year after almost a decade since their last IP.
They tried to change up the formula from their classic Sid Meier franchise dating back to the early 90s (decoupling historic leaders from their ethnic civs, forcing civ switching at the end of eras stealing ideas from the failed competitor Humankind, dumbing down gameplay to make it easier for casuals - getting rid of classic gameplay mechanics like workers, assigning citizens to work city tiles, etc).
While I think their experimental changes were crass and shortsighted, it's also a good example why most AAA devs and studios are cowardly & lazy.
The response to the expensive & undercooked release last Feb may have destroyed one of the most successful remaining PC IPs dating back generations.
Civ 7 was such a massive fuck up that only women could have made that change. No grand strategy fans were going to”you know what, fuck one long continuous game that takes hours or micromanagement and planning. We need separate games where everything just kinda resets and becomes redundant if you play a full game”
Seriously, not finishing a long game didn't need to be fixed, it's fine if I can just play until I'm satisfied that the end is set and then start a new game.
It doubly didn't need to get fixed by chopping the game into four parts, then packing the fourth part up to sell me as part of the first expansion pack.
It was a mind numbingly stupid decision
Their dev staff is all pretty soy dating back to the promo vids for the DLC releases for Civ6 over the pandemic.
Hard to tell how many of the Civ6 team is still around though. They took so long between the release of Civ6 & Civ7 that there seemed to be tons of layoffs & natural attrition.
The problem was that they made a Civilization game where you can pick Ada Lovelace or Harriet Tubman but not Queen Elizabeth (either of them) or George Washington.
The wokeness was definitely a dog whistle, but Civ7's structural problems go way deeper than that.
There's a lot of shitlibs who have been assmad since Day 1 that Firaxis chose to fuck with the classic formula of the 4X mechanics.
There's also some sweet poetic justice that Firaxis' ultimate downfall was copypasta-ing the failed experimental model of Sega/Amplitude's Humankind which had failed hard itself 5 years earlier despite being promoted as the latest "Civ Killer". Where Amplitude's dev team was similarly infiltrated with public-facing trannies too.
It was a civ killer, just not in the way they hoped