My view on graphics is pretty much this

PS2 was good enough.

By this day and age If a game at least has PS2 graphics and awesome gameplay, I'm satisfied.

Why hasn't anybody mentioned ET yet .... or the video game crash ?

Graphics always have room to improve in my opinion

However I think we are getting to the point where so many companies are all focused on "MAKE THA GAEM LOOK GUD" instead of the actual game

This is why Killzone 2 was so medicore: Guerilla spent so much time on the damn engine instead of the actual game (Killzone 3 thankuflly was brilliant but damn)

Not to mention that Art direction > Graphics. Always

In this day and age we have games like Gears of War which TECHNICALLY look good however the art direction is horrendous and it looks like complete crap and not just because everything is Brown and Grey

Meanwhile Okami still looked awesome back then and it still is very very pleasant to look at

just some of my thoughs

LOL. I still remember that ET article in Electronic Gaming Monthly that wound up giving that journalist his own section. XD

Because I think everyone already knows about it and not to mention that the "Video game crash" only really happened in the US and A

Developers don't usually cater to gamers - they cater to casual consumers.

Casual consumers want to be the first on the block with the latest tech.

To a casual consumer, they rate a game or system's tech advancement by graphics.

Remember Dragon's Lair back in the eighties? They still haven't been able to match those graphics but remember, there was no actual gameplay there either. It was an illusion and an illusion that made Don Bluth a whole lot of money.

I already replied to that and clarified what I meant. Maybe read the whole thread (all two and a half pages) next time.
Or alternatively, "casual consumers" are the ones making Rovio, Zynga and Popcap a fortune and couldn't care less about graphics.

With all respect, I skim threads sometimes, we have many pages on many of them. I see your reply and I still think you're wrong, I was speaking about sales, which is not the same as review scores, but you seem to conflate the two, so I'll play along; let's just pull up some random scores of games I mentioned on Meta-critic:
Castlevania: LoS: 85
TFU2: 61 (no surprise there, it sucked, and yet I bet it sold like hotcakes)
New Vegas: 85
Fallout 3: 93

Now let's check the high scores:
XBox 360 Last 90 days: Dead Space 2
All time: Bioshock, GTA IV

Ah screw it, not gonna check every platform. Most of these games end up on 2-3 of them anyway.

I get that few people buy a Halo game solely for the single player experience, but to imply that lack of multiplayer negatively influences reviews or sales in general is a non-starter.

Those are lil' girls playing those games.

I don't know if I agree. Assassins Creed Brotherhood has multiplayer, but I can't imagine anyone bought it just because of that. I remember the Internet AC fanbase being up in arms because they (thankfully erroneously) believed that the inclusion of multiplayer was going to mean that the core game was going to be half-assed. Same goes with Red Dead Redemption... yeah the multiplayer in RDR is fun, but all the accolades the game got were based around the single player, and I'll guarantee that Undead Nightmare sold better then any of the mp-only DLCs for the game.

I prefer the game philosophy of the 80s and into a bit of the 90s where they didn't expect you to read a manual before you started to play. It was always a joy to sit there and figure out through the process of elimination what you should be doing to win the game.

Complicated games can be a lot of fun, but I think it's unfortunate that designers have forgotten about leading a player into the game and letting them learn the controls before they are expected to do anything too hard. Bad pacing can easily ruin an otherwise quality game.

So what is your definition of "casual gamer"? I mean, if you define "casual gamer" as "a gamer who cares more about graphics than gameplay" then I suppose you're right, but that's kind of self-fulfilling and doesn't exactly bear out how things are progressing in the real world.

Everyone I knows has Angry Birds. My little cousins, my boss, my coworkers, my friends, my parents... everyone with access to something that can play it, has it. The damn thing is a sensation. It's not just "little girls" making those millions upon millions of dollars, and it's short sighted to discuss modern gaming while completely ignoring that market, which is growing faster than any other segment.
I have to say, that seems like the exact opposite of what I find these days. You can't start up a simple color-matching puzzle game without an involved tutorial, while back in the day manuals were pretty much the only place you could find anything resembling an explanation of the gameplay or story (mostly because there wasn't enough space in the games themselves). Hell, the Gold Box series literally required you to read the manual because that's where ALL the plot was.

I mean... do games even COME with manuals larger than a couple black-and-white pieces of tissue paper these days?

I can't remember the last new game I played that didn't have a tutorial of some kind. Either a whole training level, or a couple of easy missions where they're constantly telling you "press B to climb" or whatever.

In general, most people tend to have social lives and invest themselves in outdoor sports, events, schooling, hunting and their professions.

They probably spend only one hour a day in front of a game.

They're the type of people that can afford I-Pad's, I-Pods and Android cell phones.

The rest of us spend waaaaaay too much time researching this stuff.

So when your average, down to earth person walks into a game store looking for something to buy, the first thing they do is pick up the package and look at the back of it for screen shots but not because they're attempting to find out what type of game it is but more so what the game looks like.

Yeah, there is a large demographic for shovel-ware, like the tremendous amount of Bejewled clones that keep rolling out the door. But if I took the eighteen year old male, down the street, and said "Hey man, I'm going to give you a game, your choice." I don't think it would be ignorant to assume that he will choose Dragon Age 2 over Nancy Drew Mysteries.

Tutorials aren't what I was talking about. Games of old didn't have tutorials or manuals and were perfectly playable. You opened the box put it in the drive/slot and started swinging away at it. A tutorial is more or less exactly the opposite of what I was referring to.
In olden times we didn't even get that much hand holding, dagnabbit. We got a controller, and we pressed buttons until we succeeded. And games were structured around that, so rather than having to be told how to play, we were encouraged to figure it out ourselves.