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.
Most of corporate products have stagnated because it’s more profitable. Innovation is expensive and risky, it’s way easier and cheaper to let 50 companies do startups and then buy out the innovation after 45 of them fail. You let others take the risk, buyout the finished product and lump it in with whatever other slop there is, rinse repeat. Thats AAA gaming in a nutshell as well, innovative games get bought, bastardized and then the studio is gutted after the bastardized product stops selling. The few that survive all eventually turn into whale fishing pay to win slopfests.
Nintendo is the most innovative triple AAA company out there, the switch is still easily the most innovative game console of the past decade and the 3ds is definitely a strong contender as well for the decade before, but Nintendo will also never change their golden geese. This is both good and bad, the good is Nintendo is the most conservative on micro transactions and most games have little to no DLC, they also will have the most consistently “good” quality games because continuing the IP is their priority, the bad is that games will almost always be 90% the same and three iterations down the road you will not notice much innovation and very rarely any actual big changes.
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.
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