If we're talking AAA games, then there are very few I'm interested in, and my PC can't handle them anyway. And even if it could they are mostly DRMed so whatever.

But I play a lot of new indie games. Well, new-ish. I usually play them when they are a year or two old. But I play older stuff too, sometimes really freaking old. I don't really care whether it's old as dirt or new and shiny, as long as it's the kind of game I'm in the mood for.

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We all feel that way, the only difference here is that most of us typed the same post you did and felt the way you do back when you were playing Human Revo when it came out.
You might not remember it but the straightfoward, generic, mindless AAA game design was in full throttle during the whole era that HR was released in.

So what's happening here is that you're seeing the modern games being pushed out which mostly range from 4/10 - 7/10 along with a few true gems that outshine everything else in the year. You're going back to the gems from the previous generation while the average and generic have faded into obscurity and aren't even a blip on your radar. You're doing what we did when we exclaimed how modern 360 games are pieces of shit that hold your hand like a child and retro games are so much better because they offer challenge and have colors other than browns, yellows, and dark red.

We went back to Mario and Quake and forgot about games like Clayfighters and Daikatana
You went back to HR and forgot about HAZE and Conduit.
People six years from now will play Cuphead, feel the same way as you do and type the same message while forgetting about Battlefront and Umbrella Corps.

To be honest, not really. I usually play around 1 - 3 new AAA titles per year. A ton of Indie games however.

Its a reason I do enjoy a pixelated artstyle is because it reminds me about older games. Its a neat little nostalgia botton I can press whenever I feel like it, if you get what I mean.

Quite often I'm more about going back to "ye olde shite", playing a ton of Prophecy of Pendor recently for instance.

Yes. You're preaching to the choir, dude.
(Then again, this place used to be Good Old Games.)

I have bought some new games and supported some on Kickstarter, but I mostly end up playing older titles anyway. Among the latest games I have installed and played are The Colonel's Bequest and Freddy Pharkas - Frontier Pharmacist. Although I guess you could call them new games too, as I haven't played them before, so the gaming experience is new, at least.

One thing is that older games are often better than newer ones. Another thing is surprisingly enough convenience. Where downloading a newer game can take hours and then you need to start thinking about updating drivers or whatever, an older game gets downloaded in less than a minute, and if it's supported by ScummVM (or other such program), it will work on any computer.

I have even been thinking about doing an extended excursion into very early days of gaming, text-only adventures, Zorks, Ultimas, obscure abandonware, and whatever. Haven't done that yet though, and guess that might be a bit too much - but honestly I find that more appealing than even checking out what new titles are being released.

I mostly spend my cash on older games (though did just preorder Darksiders 3 and Pathfinder). A lot of the classic games from the early years have one thing a lot of new games dont have and that is gameplay such as unreal, Fallout 1 & 2 . Games where more fun but also due to their more limited tech there was an element of your own imagination of putting your own voices to characters as you read the text.

Yes. I'm not into COD, MMOs, MOBAS, Battle Royal, lootboxes, VR, or whatever the current trends are, but there are still many interesting new indie games and the occasional good AAA game coming out. Then again, I never ever cared for E3 or what's the latest greatest, I just play whatever appeals to me, old or new. and I often wait until the new games are old(er) before I play them. ;)

Well - yeah, 'spose I'm speaking the obvious, then, aren't I.
Funny enough, I seem to be one of the few that played the hell out of Clayfighter. But that was on the SNES; I heard people specifically referring to N64 when calling it shit.

Edit: Now that I think about it, I know back then I was way more open to games in my early-twenties, even though they were kinda shit. Nowadays I've become more conservative with what games I buy next. But I think there's some easy explanations for that, too.

For AAA's, it's pretty much been the same for me since 2013-2014. Eg, Dishonored 1, Bioshock Infinite & The Talos Principle were the three last AAA games at the "tail end" of the stuff I like. I have zero interest in "Battle Royale" trends or online multi-player in general. Although part of it could be subjective "gamer aging", I think it's more like "franchise fatigue" (getting really sick of publishers being totally incapable of making new games which aren't spammed sequels / remakes / re-releases). Stretching 90's IP to late 2000s is one thing but will we still have Tomb Raider, Hitman, Assassins Creed, Call of Duty, etc, by 2030? 2050? 2100? 3100? It's not just "aging". I don't like the feel of many post 2014 AAA's but I love pre-2012 stuff like Bioshock 1, and yet that doesn't scale backward per decade. Eg, 10 years ago back in 2007-2009 I never felt "Bioshock / Dragon Age Origins are rubbish because they're new" just because I previously liked System Shock or Baldur's Gate. Going back another 10 years, I also never felt "Quake & Thief are rubbish because they're new" in 1997-98 just because I liked DOS games. Going back further, I never felt DOS games were rubbish just because my first was a ZX Spectrum, etc. Even today I can and do play titles from 64kb 1980's emulators through to 2013, and yet there really is something objectively different this time around post 2014-ish where whatever previously made the feel of AAA games immediately "click" with me just seems to be missing. It's not just nostalgia either, eg, I completely missed Unreal (1998) the first time around but immediately liked the "feel" of the game and Unreal 1 engine (same as Deus Ex) playing for the first time in 2016 with no prior "nostalgia hook" there to overlook any faults.

Objectively the "feel" of the games has changed over time. Eg, the "raw" feel you talk about I identify with actually having full continuous uninterrupted control of your character (eg, Doom, Quake, Thief, Bioshock, etc) whilst modern "cinematic-first" games constantly snatch control back & forth in the most irritating way possible via micro-cutscenes, QTE's and turning every trivial action (picking up something, jumping over a 1ft high wall / climbing a ladder, etc) into some drawn-out over-scripted, animation heavy contexual sequences. What the newer games gain in "sparkly bits" they often lose vs older ones in fluidity of play.

There are also genre-level objective changes too ("streamlined for the casual audience...", etc). Eg, "Old school" RTS's have virtually been dumbed down into glorified MOBA's mostly because it's hard to do a decent console port of the former "designed for keyb & mouse" PC exclusives that neatly fits controllers and 10ft UI (consoles). For FPS's, fewer but more bullet spongy enemies is due to being designed around slower-turning "thumb-scrolling" movements of game controllers vs a large number of monsters requiring many more rapid mouse optimised "wrist-flick" fast turns. For same reason, the focus on aiming precision skill in shooters has been replaced with auto-aim and more "upgrade grind" as some 'substitute'.

Developers have also changed. "2018 Single-player AAA's are too difficult to make" seems to be the new mantra of many lazy devs whose "can't do" is more like "won't do" purely because it's easier to throw an effortless loot-box saturated "Battle Royale" clone together than pull off a new Bioshock. Mobile gaming and related "pay2win" / MT / lootbox economics is an ever-encroaching cancer we never had to deal with in the 90's. Post EA-acquisition Bioware single-player RPG's have moved more into "mostly filler grind fests", ie, gone from like 66% main quest / 33% side-quest ratio's (DAO, NWN) into almost the reverse for DAI (35% main quest / 65% obvious filler), and that's on top of the usual EA dumbing down vs earlier titles. Dumbed down sequels made +15 years later are generally failing because they were bought by pushy publishers who want to flog every acquired IP to death yet also lack the original team / personnel who gave the earlier games "that feel" in the first place.

"We don't make games only franchises" Ubisoft is still making re-textured variants of Far Cry 3 whilst modern "Tom Clancy" games have almost nothing remotely in common with the earlier "smart tactical shooters" (Rainbow Six / Rogue Spear) for which the rights to his name were awarded in the first place. And no-one loves performance crippling DRM like layering VMProtect on top of multiple layers of Denuvo quite like Ubisoft.

For Square Enix, Deus Ex: HR was just a lucky one-off fluke and Deus Ex: MD goes more hand in hand with Invisible War in being "dumb and dumber" when comparing 2 & 4 vs 1 & 3. (Mankind Divided 15hrs main quest length is half the game that Deus Ex 1 & HR's 25-30hr were for a reason - the dev (Eidos Montreal) wanted a proper full 30hr, but rumor is Square Enix told them to split into 2x "unofficial" parts after the success of episodic Hitman. However, since it had a weak plot plus was also crammed with garbage like tiered pre-orders and one-time use micro-transactions, the resulting "mixed / negative" Steam reviews and lower sales means "Mankind Divided Part 2" probably won't be made, which makes half-baked Mankind Divided feel even less of a proper Deus Ex game than it already did). And then there's Thief 4 (2014) audio engine vs Thief 1 (1997) audio engine (use headphones). Seriously, I can't even...

Anyway after that long rant whilst I've lost interest in modern AAA's, there have also been quite a lot more newer games from smaller studio's like Larian (Divinity Original Sin), Frictional (SOMA), etc, and far too many great Indie's / adventure / puzzle games to list individually here, plus a several hundred strong collection of Golden oldies to replay are more than enough to fill up my available gaming time without even looking at or worrying about EA / Ubisoft / Square Enix's future "games as a service" planned 'direction' anymore.

I got into MMORPGs several years ago and stopped following gaming otherwise. Now that MMORPGs went away for me I didn't get back to the,uh, game, yet. My computers are old, no interest in making new ones happen, so I'm out.
I did want to get some consoles a while ago but something game up. Like, how Switch ended up being like. Might be that Playstation 4 happens sometime soonish if it gets cheap enough or might not. I kind of do want another blu-ray player for another location so... might.
So all that is left is older PC games which there are many that I have never heard of, and many I have heard of and would buy if they would appear DRM free.
I don't follow indie games at all. I don't know for sure but it feels like indie games happened "after my time" and apart from old games "I don't do 2D". For several years I haven't looked into AAA either. There are still some favorite series I check news about now and then. Final Fantasy! Oh, not my type currently.

I hated DRM when Sims 2 vacation expansion time happened, later lot of events on that front were going on around Mass Effect time. I had forgotten, I didn't research their DRM enough, just went by some headline and got it for PC when it was out. I was NOT happy. I felt very stupid. I hated EA. I still hate EA. Thanks a lot, EA.
I didn't like DLC either and that becoming a trend, games being "unfinished" at release day was another thing that I found unappealing. "I'd just have to pay more later" though I and looked no more at that game, is what must have happened several times with and around... Dragon Age, PS3 Prince of Persia, probably. Oh what the hell are you telling me, internet, Prince of Persia was 2008? Wasn't it recent, like only few years ago? I bought it, by the way, never got far (QTEs!!!) and naturally didn't get the apparently-important-to-story DLC of which there was some commentary about I remember reading. For some reason I hate Ubisoft too, ever since... some time after that, I just can't remember why.

Still, despite my thoughts of DRM and DLC I did get into MMORPGs. :p

Anyway. Technology went past me. And trends. Oh, QTEs are still a thing? I hate QTEs. And... great, seems like competitiveness has became a popular trend, I don't like that either. Save for MMORPGs I don't want to play online games. What else do they do these days? Episodic games? Streamed games? Since TV and movies have gone to dark and depressing themes recently, or so I heard, I suppose games have too? I think I'll go find my old consoles some day instead.

Open up from your early twenties, and then scroll back in time to your 10s, then buy psychonauts with your dads credit card (which is actually your credit card), then understand why there are some games that time can't compete with.

More or less what Breja said, but with the added caveat that I've also given up on console gaming in concept.

Old games are still fun to play. For example, Blizzard released remastered versions for Starcraft and Warcraft 3.

Also, you know what you are playing already and do not need to worry about new bugs/glitches.

I think that today there are far too many games to play them all. And considering all the hype it is hard to tell, which are woth to play. However if a game is 10 or more years old and it is still well known and respected - this is clear the sign of its quality.

Also many old games are sold with huge discounts, given away for free, or even made freeware. So choosing to play good old games (reference intended) instead of questionable new ones is a wise choice. IMHO.