I think it's a little unfair to compare games from the earlier years of personal computers/consoles with more recent games. But only a little.
It's the same with any new innovation - when the technology is fresh people have to experiment with it, see what works, what doesn't work, what might work if the technology improved. That's when there is most inventiveness, most quirky development and the era from which sound ideas emerge. Look at the early history of the automobile - almost every aspect of modern car design has an early 20th century ancestor. I don't suppose many people miss manually controlled ignition advance and retard but I think most of us would concede that early cars, whatever their faults and sometimes because of them, had far more character than the technological clones produced today.
So if games today seem derivitive, distinguished only by their graphics I think that it's because the the companies have decided which designs work, i.e. which make money. I think there is still innovation though - but never again to the degree we had in the 80's.
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