Because publishers are DUMB. And they also think the gamers are DUMB. So all those times we may use "consoletard" and "dumbed down", we should be aiming those words at the publishers. They force devs to have their games full of voice acting (which consumes a LOT of money) and OMGUBER graphics which require a lot of development time and many dozens of people slaving away with modelling, texturing, animating (it can be hundereds of people and the devs may even outsource -which again increases the budget- a good part of the production)... Nowadays you "have" to have lots of details, details consume manpower like a bitch, and most of the time they are useless (ie. they don't really add to the game because they are not gameplay details, they are just filling a room with a lot of crap and having diverse textures and shit looking shiny, all of which are -95% of the time- inconsequential, don't add to the atmosphere and provide no interaction for the player).

Then you have publishers wasting away even more millions in marketing, since gamers are dumb, we need a huge campaign full of SHINY. Hence trailers that showoff all the OMGAWESOME GRAPHX and FAST PACED COMBAT and BOOBS and prerendered trailers that HAVE NOTHING TO DO with the actual way the game plays and looks and consume another whole bunch of millions to produce a few minutes of.

So devs are forced to reduce their ideas (if they even had some to start with) by publishers to cater to the lower common denominator of ACTION-GRAPHX-BOOBS, compromising their vision and eradicating most of the potential innovation (which stands distinct from ZOMFGINNOVASHUN) and upping their required budget a whole order of magnitude. And all to publishers who just throw millions and millions of dollars in producing crap. Instead of you know, letting the devs use the cash in a more efficient and free way.

Everything you said is exactly like the movie industry, which AAA gaming are becoming

If you revisit it and find you still enjoy it, that's not nostalgia.

If you revisit it and find it's horrible ass, that was the work of nostalgia.

Oh, interesing thread. ;o)
I'll admit that I'm fool for nostalgia but on the other hand, sometimes a game needs to get old to see how good it upholds itself against more modern competition.

Example: X-Com Enemy Unkown aka X-Com UFO Defense is better than all its sequels (so far). I really tried to like Apocalypse but the poor interface design and the city view that really needed a zoom function (which X-Com 1 & 2 has!) among others just turned me off. And even with more modern remakes like UFO Aftermath I still prefer the original X-Com, which combined strategical planning combined with tactical combat so much better.

Another example: nineties spaceflightsims, nostalgia maybe but then you have the Wing Commander Series, Star Wars (X-Wing, Tie-Fighter, etc.), Freespace, I-War. Occasionally a new spacesim comes along, but so far none has improved on the formula of smooth gameplay, storytelling, addictiveness or originality of these games. To me I-War 2: EoC was the last good one and the genre is dead ever since.

Another example: I liked flight simulators a lot, games like Red Baron, Strike Eagle III, Hind, Falcon 3.0, EF 2000. But at some point (most) flightsimulators got just too realistic for my taste and they completely lost me. Still there are new sims that I like such as Rise of Flight (very realistic yet simple planes) and the Strike Fighter series (nice difficulty though terraingrapics are poor).

On the other hand it is better if newer games are better but for me I'm a PC gamer and the big publishers mainly develop games with consoles in mind and are only so so on a PC most of the time and indie titles mostly don't appeal to me either.

Getting back to the music - most importantly - why another GENERATIONS are still listenning to pnk floyd, led zeppelin, etc etc. after 30-40 years, and NOBODY's listening to the crap from the nineties?

Why people love 1980s horror movies and watch them over and over again, and detestmodern horrors telling they're not atmospheric, not scary at all, etc?

Because they WERE better. Mainly, because they were original. They were experimental. Many of those movies did something for the very first time.

You don't see that often now. Big companies like Warner Bros etc want to show only stuff that is already liked by people.

You've reacher for fine example with Legend of Grimrock. Some other people stated about "you could easily find 10 good indie games from the last year", forgetting how most of the indie games are going back to their roots. Space shooters, platformers, point and click adventurers, etc.

Also, I want to kill the "old games weren't long, there were just plenty of backtracking" argument. This argument is true only for console games (NES, PSX). They were like that, because they had very limited capabilities (especially in memory).

I don't recall any strict PC game that was so focused on backtracking. Older games might appeared longer, because they were hard as hell. You died A LOT, what forced you to replay the whole level most of the time, or at least some very large part of it. I don't know like others, but I liked to die a lot. Games were harder, they were challenging.
Now, even on hardest settings you may finish the game in two nights.
But even if you stick to the fact old games had plenty of backtracking... Modern games have none of those? They have a lot - especially in RPGs with repetitive and boring as hell quests (hello, Skyrim). Also, these games that don't have it - are short as dwarfs. Instead of shrotening the game, why wouldn't they make backtracking, making them longer MORE ATTRACTIVE? I can't see how cutting games short completely is an improvement.

And if someone's saying "youre too old for games when you don't like multiplayer" is full of crap. I don't like multiplayer in most games, because multi is overpopulated with 12-year-old-pimple-teenagers who can't play in team, who troll, shout in their squeeky voices swearings they don't even understand yet.
This is different in PC gaming (excluding MMO's that are full of those little brats), this is why I like to pop in Day of defeat, Lefr4Dead2 or something else. Because multiplayer gaming culture is higher on PC's (expecially on dedicated servers, of course)

I'd say most of the good old games, with modern graphics and iterface would still KICK ASS of any modern games now.

This is the reason I even buy games on GOG - because I think and I feel they were better. You're buying them only because of nostalgia? I pity you.
True that. But you can observe that less and less mainstream PC titles are being made. Mostly because consoles are more popular than PCs on the world. I don't like that fact, I'm strict PC gamer, and there aren't much strict PC games that are good enough for me. Except indie titles. Like for example, in 1999 there were like 5-6 different football manager games (3 of them were great). Now we have only one.

At least for me. I don't like shortcuts and things that make modern games easier, this is mostly why I don't like new games.
Thanks for the link. It's good that my imaginations about gaming are not just imaginations.

Dozens of great games, that are considered legends, precursors, milestones, were done in that era.

Bulshit.

Casablanca has only 50-60 thousands more votes than American Pie. And this is just an example from top of my head.

Blockbusters gain votes pretty fast. But none of them is going near the list.

Ps. Shawshank redemption is a GREAT MOVIE. One of the greatest. It's also on the first place of polish equivalent of imdb. Coincedence?

If you're so into new movies, and you like vampyre stories, watch Twillight Saga then. I'll stick to the Dracula from 1930s, and Dracula with Gary Oldman. Thanks. (it's just an example)

I'm done here :P If you people still stick to the "fact" modern music, modern movies (mainstream) are better, go listen to Lady GaGa and watch Tron: Legacy. I'm outta here :P Going to listen to some Queen, and watch Dawn of the dead.
CaveSoundMaster pointed out a fine example of The Thing. I still prefer watching movies with robots / real life special effects instead of CGI.

Mostly because I know how much work it needed to be completed. Now it's just bunch of graphic designers and computers who do everything for you. And green screens everywhere.

I prefer old special effects (like in Alien or Nightmare on Elm Street)

Where is anybody saying that everything modern is better? Oh, right, nowhere...you're just being ridiculous.

What people ARE saying is that there are good games/movies/whatever in every generation, AND there are BAD games/movies/whatever in every generation. We just tend to remember only the good stuff when we look back and ignore the crap that was there alongside it.

Many people here state that modern games are better. Maybe you should just learn to read first and stop insulting me without a reason.

Yeah, these forums were better at the beginning, too. It was impossible to find posts like yours - with zero content and purely offensive.

ps. I bring up examples from movies and music, because I believe gaming industry is not so far from them.

Yeah, these two films are excellent material for comparison.

You're ignoring the argument, there's no point talking to you. For every band such as Queen, there were a thousand more no one remembers today, and for good reason, too. And while Lady Gaga may not be remembered twenty years from now, I guarantee that there will be some other artists who will be considered "classic" by then. Because that's how it fucking works.

EDIT: Just look at the vote breakdown and try to think about what I was saying for a little while.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034583/ratings
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0163651/ratings

As you can see, many people aged between 18-29 rated Casablanca 10/10 or 9/10. So it's not nostalgia. They watched it for the first time and they believe it's a great movie. Even black&white.

Also, again. I could easily name at last double dozens of cult bands from the 70s. But only like 5 from the 90s. Maybe it's only me.

Then you haven't listened to a lot of music made in the 90s. I bet that I could list just as many great bands and artists from the 90s as you could from the 70s.

Do you actually play modern video games to a great extent? Or do you just play one or two and regard the rest as being as equally as bad as you perceive those games to be? This seems to be your approach to music.

Which is almost exactly the "truth" part from the cracked article linked. I would suggest reading it through, not just the titles.

But that's always been the case. More so than it is now, even. The only reason why console exclusive wasn't a phrase back then is because practically every console game was anyway. There were exceptions of course, but a lot of those ports were worse than those we get today. Especially anything from Japanese publishers.

What exactly qualities as a 'strict PC' game? On one hand you seem to be asking for more ports, on the other hand you seem to be saying that's a bad thing.

That said, I personally like the idea of the largest publishers (namely EA, Actiblizz and Ubisoft) distancing themselves from the PC and preferably leaving the market entirely. Will that mean less PC games? Not in the long run, as it's plain as day that others will fill that void, as the rapid rise of the indies has demonstrated.

Thanks to the advent of digital distribution publishers aren't quite as vital as they used to be.

Unless you like AAA games with big production values, which I do. Some of my favorite PC games recently were from those publishers.