I actually posted this in a forum at first....but I put so much work into writing it, I couldn't just let it go. It is just a rant, but a few things dawned on me while I was writing it. Do you ever sometimes find part of the answer to your own question? That's what happened here:

I am one of those 30 somethings that been around since the days of the Atari 2600. I think you've definately got a good point. It's not just backwards compatibility though. If you look at the difference between PS1 and PS2 games, it's fairly obvious there was a visual upgrade there. In fact, most PS1/N64/Saturn games look so horrible, that I can't stomach playing them anymore. (There are, of course, exceptions. I won't list them here.)

If you look at the difference between the PS2 and PS3, you can see a difference. It isn't the difference that most of us are looking for this time around though.

Here's the classic example. Soul Blade, for the PS1. Released in 1997.Great game. Great fighting engine. At the time, it was a great PS1 3D fighting game. Perhaps still the best on that system. It had incredible backgrounds, dynamic lighting in those backgrounds, that lighting reflecting off the characters, excellect music and rock solid gameplay. There was jaggies, pixalation pop-up/draw in and polygon tearing and alot of low resolution textures, but back in the day, it looked better than almost all the other games on that system.

Fast forward to 1999. The Sega Dreamcast launch and a game called Soul Caliber. Same great fighting engine. More amazing backgrounds. More dynamic lighting affecting a wider variety of objects, both in the forground and background. Very few jaggies, no pixalation, polygon tearing or pop-up/draw in and beautiful high resolution textures. While this looked wholly more beautiful than Soul Blade for the PS1, none of the above are the reasons this game was forever remembered for knocking our socks off.

It was the effort put into the fluidity of movement of the characters. Motion caturing with real martial artists. Every move you performed in the game looked as if it was being executed in a believable way, and there was always a smooth and believable transition from one move to the other. The backgrounds had alot more life...lotus leaves falling while the trees were in bloom, more than adequate realistic water effects for a fighting game, and a variety of environments with so much detail packed into the background, it would take a minute or two of staring at it to absorb it all in. All this and more options, modes ,unlockables and special features ever seen in a fighting game ever. At home or in an arcade. This game was TRULY next generation. It was all these features and details meant to submerge us into the world of Soul Caliber, that blew us all away.

When you first played Ocarina of Time on the N64, you were blown away. It wasn't going through the first "Great Deku Tree" dungeon that blew you away. It was in a sense the intuitive control set-up, but not entirely. I'm willing to wager that it was the same moments that put you in utter disbelief that I also found to be genuinely amazing....the way Saria's face looks sad and worried after giving you the Ocarina as you exit the forest, the cinematic of her standing there alone on the bridge for the few seconds after Link walks out of the forest, and then reaching the sprawling Hyrule Field that stretches out as far as the eye can see as you realize that the sun is rising and setting in real time as you make your way to Hyrule castle. These are the memories that stay with us forever. When a new feeling is achieved. A new level of immersion.

Twilight Princess, unfortunately, offered very few of these moments. While it is a most amazing game, and there where time when I played it where I just stopped and stared, I was not MOVED. For example, the ruined entrance to the Temple of Time where you first get the Master Sword is beautiful. One of the most beautiful spots in the game. But how much better could it have been if more of the little details had been addressed? A light breeze making the leaves turn as branches sway back and forth, the light filtering through the leaves dynamically as their position changes...the grass beneath your feet swaying in unison and the occasional leaf fluttering down around you. A scene this immersive has yet to be achieved in any game.

The problem with the Wii/PS3/Xbox360 is that the launch games didn't make these kind of leaps. While the graphics have obviously been improved...something is missing. Even if the visuals were double what they are currently at launch, the problem is that GAMES still look like GAMES. No matter how many polygons characters are made up out of, whether their movement is motion captured, and especially even if the lighting and environment are almost photo realistic...these games still lack....life.

That's what we expect now. We expect it to be difficult to see the difference between a game and a movie, but it's still easy to tell the diffence. Especially now that Sony and Microsoft want us to buy a new HD television to view these visuals with, we expect them to be almost real. For the untrained eye to say....."I didn't know that was a game." Hoping that we ourselves will even forget one day that we are playing a game. But this isn't going to happen anytime soon.

That is exactly why this new generation feels a little.....lacking.

I realize it comes off as a little arrogant since I have yet to jump into the new generation myself as of yet. I'm sure there are games now that offer what I was talking about..I suspect "Gears of War" or "Wii Sports" may be those games. But it still happened differently than alot of people expected....and less frequently...or so it seems.