A common misconception.
The simple, horrible truth is that the transition from Sprites to Polygons transformed the gaming industry in one very importanting way: scope, and boy is scope expensive.  Making a 2D Animated Sprite in a 2D Sprite world is cheap.  Making a 3D Textured and Animated Model in a 3D and Textured world is infinitly more expensive. An increase in development costs increased the risk attached to any one project, and in response decreased the level of risk investors and developers were willing to take with their ideas.

As computing power has become cheaper, the availability of home-grown development tools has increased.  This has lead to the current resurgence of the Bed Room Developer; the Independant Developer is now able to cheaply produce quality titles on a multitude of platforms and achieve enough success to continue development.  This is where the innovation and risk will take place due to the low cost. id, the makers of Doom, started out at Bed Room Developers.
Mark my words; we're about ten years away from another "Golden Age" of gaming.  Companies like Activision Blizzard and EA Games - companies with enough money to fund literally HUNDREDS of small teams producing innovative titles who instead focus on Big Budget, Michael-Bay-esque games - are responsible for the current industry stagnation.  Their time is nearly at an end.

Oh, gosh....just imagine the trills galore...with my nice XFX 1G GTX285 Black Edition GPU pumpin' out the framerates for.....

 

 

 

Pong.

Donkey Kong in HD.  The most realist jumper man model ever with perfect bump mapping and lighting effects.  Physx driven barrel animation, and normal mapped environments.  Oh the Humanity!

 

 

I would like to see companies stop remaking games, and  clones.  We need new ideas and innovation please.  That goes for the movie and music industry as well.

No you misunderstood me, although to be fair i wasnt very clear.

I was talking about character, not quality or ingenuity. It's somthing thats hard to put your finger on. Kind of like steam trains to electric, propeller planes to jets. You make good points, but it wasnt really what i was talking about.

It's just a personal thing really.

yah there remaking the game but according to some pc magazine its going to be "NOTHING LIKE THE ORIGINALS AT ALL' completely different everything some fbi investigation i think it was fps style at least from my memory of the few pics they posted, i believe they are using the name just to boost its sales and so on. . those fucking bastards better not give it a bad name . if you loved XCom UFO/Terror i didn't notice till recently that  1cpublish remade teh series in 3 games, the first 2 i still haven't tried out much but UFO AFterLight was the shit it was the 3rd and last one they put out, very good game very very close to XCom but its in a real time setting sort of like UFO Apocalypse but still XCom UFO style, very similar minus the resource system but once u get used to it i think it was as good almost on a equal level as XCom, still original is the best but this game came closer then any other remake ive seen like open ufo or UFO Extraterrestrials

There is not a day goes by that my friends and i ask the same thing over xfire 

I would buy some older remake games like legacy of Kain series in a heartbeat.

for example the remake of NFS Hot Pursuit 2 coming out ,no way i'm missing that   

There's actually an old game I really wish someone would remake, or make a game like it, that to me is a shining example of what "need better graphics" has done to gaming.  Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance.  I don't know how many people even ever played that game but it was a weird mix of turn based strategy and third person adventure.  I don't think a game like it would be made today simply because it it was almost more than one game, and the need to graphics would just make it cost too much to develop.  It's hard to explain it but when it came out in 1996 it wasn't the 'best' at any of its 'parts' but it was adequate at all of them.  But of course now everything costs more to make and so games like this are probably gone forever.

I know BtGA was not the only game of the time that melded together multiple games/genres like this, I just can't remember any others.  These days it seems the trend is genre blurring, I think Elemental is a good example of this.  There's nothing wrong with that at all but I miss games like BtGA.

 

Edit: RPGs of old were great for this.  Many RPGs had '99 level dungeons' (Lufia 2 for example) that were basically complete rogue-like games just thrown in as a side-quest.  Today RPGs just don't have that anymore, Final Fantasy 7 was the last RPG I'm aware of that really did the whole 'game within a game' thing.

Hastings...  It's at your local Hastings Book and Music store...  I'm not kidding.  There really is a Starcraft board game, and it's been around for about a decade.  Might be able to find it at Borders, though I doubt they carry it anymore...  Honestly, you'd probably have to dig super deep to find it these days...  It's been years since I've seen it anywhere.  I always thought about picking it up, but I would rather have a video game than a board game that I have no one to play it with...

I've wondered the same thing about re-making the classics, and always come to the same conclusion...  Money.  Which has been discussed in depth here.  So here's my take on the whole money situation...

Small team, works for food and beer, re-making that old classic at a slower pace than your big corporate teams do these days.  Literally make sure that it's the last game on the market before the technology involved loses its influence, only feasible way to do it.  Meanwhile, you fund this team with your other larger teams, selling games at a more acceptable pace, and using portions of their income to fund Team Remake.  (Not the paychecks, obviously, I mean the revenue from the games.)

After the first one, the trend would hit and spread like wildfire, and you'd have maybe a decade, though more feasibly, five years, to put out as many souped up remakes as you could and hit the money-making band-wagon.  The risk with this is actually far greater than truly innovative games, however...

You're not just remaking a game, you're re-visiting memories, loving memories of loving people who really love their games.  You're encouraging certain expectations, with a high risk of failure to meet those expectations.  You're adding things, it's a given, and certain additions may put off certain parts of the market.  You're sinking money into a game that isn't likely to have the same old-school charm of its predecessor.  You're being extremely ambitious in taking on a project of this scope and magnitude.  You're putting your very heart, soul, and lifestyle at risk for the sake of one game, and hoping it's a good one.

Screwing this up would ruin a company forever.  Makes me wish EA would try it.

And for reference, IMO, the 'Golden Age of Gaming' was back before I was born, in the 80's, before Nintendo had its death-grip on the console industry.  Lots of truly innovative and awesome games, and franchises, were born out of the 80's era.

One remake I would kill to see?  Quest for Glory.  The whole series.  Now that was game hard in a good way.  And fun.  I remember the Gargoyle...  Asking you questions to get into Erasmus' tower...  I never could answer most of them...  But I know one of the questions he asked that any person at Stardock would probably know the answer to immediately....

"What is your favorite color?"  Yeah, it really is a Monty Python reference.  The only question I knew the answer to however...

"What is the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything?"  I had to climb up that mountain like six times before he asked me that question...  I was sure I was gonna have to look up the answers, but I didn't have to thanks to that one question.  It was awesome, and I seriously laughed out loud for like an hour.  The QFG games were full of awesome references like those, from start to finish.

One more remake I would kill to see (Completed)?  A Bard's Tale.

Edit:  @ ZehDon:

That's my biggest gripe with the gaming industry these days...  So many small-time gamers are desensitized to the mindless button-mashing, trigger-pulling, seizure-inducing games that make up a majority of the market...  No longer do we have games that take days, even weeks to complete...  Now, they can be completed on a Friday Afternoon, and are unlikely to offer any real content in the process...  I miss the good ol' days...

I own Starcraft boardgame and it is really cool game if you like competitive boardgames.

 

As for remakes, Majesty 2 was "recently" made and was almost same as Majesty 1 (except better graphics) which was an awesome game but I have not heard it was such a huge success or anything.

As for remakes I would kill for the Gorgon alliance (mentioned here) or Syndicate Wars remake. As well as MoM one (why I am here as this is as close as it gets to that game).

 

As for new games based on old way of making games be sure to check out Knights of the Chalice, I cannot recommend a game more then this one to anyone that loves old school RPGs (especially D&D ones).

I''m playing HOMMV like mad right now.   I don't understand why the two expansions got such lousy reviews.   Their more-of-the-same formula, but just enough new stuff to make it better, works for me.   And I played all 4 of the other HOMM's.