Hong,
I'm very much in agreement with you about the games that seem little more than self-conscious parodies. I think this increasing level of parody comes, in part, from the fact that D&D has become its own genre to the point where the function of the D&D rules system is to model itself. I'm not a big fan of the self-conscious parody of a world in which one is tripping over tongue-in-cheek anachronisms at every turn.
While I like the Underworld thing as a film, it's not the kind of story I find gaming is best for. For me, this is because the reason Underworld works is because you get to be overwhelmed by the visual aesthetics -- the way Chronicles of Riddick works to make an otherwise crappy film watchable. The big assets of Underworld can't be translated into the game world; whereas things like plot intracies can be. For this reason, my tastes lean in a more shamanwards direction.
)
