WTF happened to games

Video games are not games anymore.  I don't know what they are, but they aren't games.  No matter how much of a graphical facade a video game has on the outside, the real game is about an abstract goal which is achieved through twitch skill or mental skill.  The true fun in video games comes from success and failure of doing these acts.  Any enjoyment from the graphical facade - like an emotionally engaging story or the splattering of gratuitous blood - is merely an added bonus and it is not meant to deliver the main 'fill' of the game.

Too many modern video games have an absolutely crap game underneath.  All these games have to offer is the graphical facade: the story, the characters, the explosions and the particle effects.  To make up for the shit gameplay these types of games try to succeed (and often do) by making the presentation beautiful so that no one stops to notice/care about the mentally retarded gameplay.  It is a cinematic video game disease.  It is especially common in post FF7 RPG's and post half-life FPS's.

Video gamers have already diverged into those who buy into empty shell graphical facades and those who don't.  I don't know what the fuck happened.  The empty shell camp seems to be winning too.

Say, me and my friends have been trying to come up with a new way to do the platform fighter genre.

For those who don't know, platform fighters are games like Smash Bros. and Digimon Rumble Arena.

Anyways, not trying to out do what is out there, just provide a different way of doing it.

First is environmental interaction.  In my honest opinion, alot of games that have "interactive environments" just don't seam all that interactive.  They all just have stage hazards and destructable terrain.  I would like to see more than that.

The second, a somewhat different fighting system where defense requires skill.  The reason for defense requiring skill is mostly personal.  Me and my friends strongly despise turtling and not one fighting game has successfully come up with a way to deal with the cheapness of repeated blocking.

Our only big problem is character design, so we ain't got much to work on, per say.

I also have an idea for a point and click, RPG crossover that should work well.  Sadly, I never got it down because I keep failing at getting the story set right.  Basically, multiple paths and player based decisions done right.