Devil's avocado here: sometimes games benefit from a narrower focus.
I still play Kirby Air Ride semi-regularly, and I can say with confidence that City Trial is the only mode worth playing. The base game is too simple and not compelling as a racer, and mapping nearly everything except steering (brake, use power, drift, release to boost) to the A button is clunky. Vehicles perform very differently from one another and are unbalanced. That's the Air Ride mode: just a straightforward, simplistic kart racer. Top Ride is a top-down racer where everyone has the
same generic vehicle and races with the same stick-and-A scheme, which just feels tacked-on.
Somehow, though, throwing all of these vehicles into an arena, letting racers collect power-ups to fix their vehicles' flaws or make them ridiculously good at one thing, and pitting them in a random challenge where their build is anywhere from perfect to laughably useless just
works. I'd love to play the Kirby Air Ride where they made City Trial the main event - more challenges, more arenas, more machines, sideline Air Ride - or focused on making the control scheme better within their design goal of keeping it simple.
I've replayed some of Sonic Adventure 2 recently. It kinda sucks, and I understand why preteen Dolfin got so salty over it: it controls like hot garbage and somehow looks and sounds worse than the first SA (at least, the Director's Cut on the GameCube, dunno about Dreamcast). The Chao Garden is arguably the most fun part of the whole game, and I wish they'd spent more time polishing that and the base game without feeling the need to tack on multiplayer.
I'll cap this off by saying this is a very different situation than, say, EA coming out with an empty-feeling The Sims 4 just to sell endless expansions of things that should've been there to begin with. If I order a pizza, I'm not asking for a mediocre-to-bad pizza with wings and breadsticks and a salad and ice cream, and I'm definitely not asking for half of a pizza with an option to buy additional slices as extras. I just want a goddamn pizza.
It's not even just video games but technology and software in general. Modern Windows has practically nothing like Clippy or space pinball. The closest would be Cortana I guess but Cortana is awful anyways and just doesn't match up.
Just to address Windows specifically: operating systems shouldn't come preloaded with "content." I liked 3D Pinball: Space Cadet too, but while that's nice for a home user who likes games, it'll sit unused on everyone else's (read: most corporate installations') computers. There's a thin line between nice-to-haves and bloat, and I now prefer my OS to come lean with plenty of a la carte options because Microsoft and seemingly every major PC manufacturer have forgotten what useful preloaded software looks like.
