ZOMG A-10 tank killer, <3 the Dynamix software.

I also have sort of a soft spot for MS Flight simulator version 1.0.

Publishers are actually notorious for UNDERstating the requirements to play their games at all smoothly or enjoyably, seeking to reel in hapless ignorants or those with older systems who really do know better by now but are in serious denial. Many of us have played that latter type of player, who enters into a multi-way game and immediately slows the thing to a crawl as his system tries desperately to crunch the numbers to match his bandwidth. But sometimes, people just don't know. And publishers, though rarely called out on anything by the people who take their advertising dollars, have been raked over the coals (gently) about this a number of times over the decades. By the accounts I used to read, this has gotten steadily worse.

Way back when we were playing our videogames off the energy provided by ox-drawn millwheels, having more polygons and more complex shading and water effects were a much bigger deal. Now, not so much. Back then, water didn't ripple and light didn't cast shadows. Figures were blocky and ran through chunky worlds, often with a greatly reduced color palette. Video cards were introduced at a dizzying pace with head-spinning new improvements; sometimes a few months made a huge difference.

So with every upgrade in hardware or improvement in graphics, you really felt and saw the difference. Audible gasps were produced!

Now, it doesn't matter so much. Even if your game does not render images at the state of the art level, you hardly feel it because what you've already got is pretty darn good. And maybe even (audible gasp here again) smooth despite how good it looks. (Back in the day, even guys at the top of the hardware food chain often had to sacrifice smoothness when pushing their cards to give the best graphics quality.)

So new improvements don't promise gasp-inducing results anymore, whether hardware or software. It's not so impressive and fewer people obsess on it and brag about it. There will always be some hyping of new graphics cards, CPU's, and games, but they don't sell each other and produce such a reliable mom-shocking whirlwind of upgrade demands anymore. Saving up your quarters to take little Sally Sweatermeier to the corner soda fountain for a malted has assumed its rightful place once more in a young man's life, becoming more compelling than soldering pin connectors or writing batch files to tweak your parameters. Onscreen graphics are fine; now it's time to wonder again at what marvels bob beneath Sally's blouse when she steps off the curb and runs to the bus, and dream up mighty hopes and perhaps a plan.

If only lil' Sally were a computer too that the boys could spend their time working on. =P

See, about the multiplayer thing - I don't like taking my games online so if sys reqs are now getting over-stated in respect to online gaming, I might be having so much luck running newer games on my ancient system simply because I've never tried the multi-player modes.

Oh god, I miss the 486/66 days and the games (Apogee anyone?) where they actually asked you if you wanted to install the sound as well... Me being deaf, this was a godsend due to the music usually being 3/4 of the size of the CD.

I miss these days :'( Imagine how many gigs I would have free if I didn't need to install your fucking "incredible, authentic and atmospheric" sounds...

Point is: we can't all win.

I've got a friggin' mahjong game that installs massive amounts of music. *sheesh*

In this case it's less about vision and more about tolerance. I haven't personally done much gaming in recent years so pretty much every title I see blows my mind, even if it is on a sub-optimal resolution. And even the new games that I do play tend to be on PS3 which I think tops out at 720p in terms of resolution in most cases.

A lot of games with somewhat marginal, for now, graphics still impress me a great deal.

EDIT: Also starting ones gaming prior to 1990 helps a lot with the imagination aspect.
That had more to do with not everybody having a sound card. The first time I had a sound card was with my Parent's Intel 75 rig, I can't recall what the sound card for that was, probably a soundblaster 16 or similar.

Plus hard disks were wee small, you were lucky if you had even a half gig of space.

That's because the entire game is installed to the hard drive nowadays, I think it's because drives can't keep up with the speed of many things nowadays. Movies at high resolutions for example take up a lot of the space but can sometimes stream faster than slower dvd drives are capable of (this is why the 360 has a fast drive & the PS3 has partial installs) along with some other things.

It is annoying that there's no options like there used to be (minimal, normal, full etc) I remember my 2gb hard drive on our first family pc and then the whopping 233mb my 486 I was given had.

The _only_ game I know with this reputation is Crysis. I'll let you in on a little secret. My ~600USD 2010 build, which replaced a 2003 era machine whose PSU blew up, plays Crysis a 1080p and Very High with no filtering and Warhead at 1080p on Enthusiast with no filtering smoothly. FRAPs reports 25FPS in the first half 17FPS once everything is snowy in Crysis and 25FPS in snowland with Warhead, visually it's all smooth.

My rig is a:
Athlon II X2 260 3.2GHz (3.86GHZ OC)
Granted it's overclocked by 20% via the clock, but that's to get the memory controller up to the proper rating as per G.Skill suggestions, and required no voltage adjustment.
4GB G.Skill 1600 DDR3
HIS 5770 1GB (OCed using Catalyst's auto-tune)
Gigabyte 770TA ultradurable motherboard
(That comes out to 308USD last time I looked on Newegg. The rest of the money is the box, quality PSU, quality case, drives, etc.)
It's both very low power and cold running.

AMD's Llano A-series APU which will come out in April and is meant for OEM 500USD systems is a highly refined quad core and what amount to a 5670 with an extra SIMD. That should be able to easily handle Crysis on High. For reference consoles will be struggling with a tinkered with version of Low made to look more like Medium with their version of Crysis 2. Next year the Trinity APU should offer even more performance in that segment, particularly with the dynamic Turbo Bulldozer uses.

And to add a cherry on top here's a AMD C-50 netbook processor playing Crysis, among other things. Resolution there is 1024x600 on a 10.1" screen.

The bottomline from where I'm standing is if you can afford to buy games at release mark up you can afford the hardware upgrades to run it these days. If on the other hand you wait for game prices to come down you can afford leapfrog the hardware, and unlike in the golden days you don't have to worry about games disappearing thanks to digital download services.Ignoring things that are just badly coded or compiled, which are actually rather rare, "optimization" is just a nice sounding codeword for cutting corners like reducing draw distance in order to reduce system demands. Some people do actually like to able to look across the bay in Crysis or STALKER and have a sandbox environment instead of a rail shooter. If you don't care for that kind of gameplay, you obviously don't have to play the games.

And just for reference Crysis 2 just went on Steam for preorder with the following listed requirements:
OS: Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7, with the latest Service Pack
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo at 2Ghz, or AMD Athlon 64 x2 2Ghz (SUBJECT TO CHANGE), or better
Memory: 2GB
Hard Disk Space: 9Gb (SUBJECT TO CHANGE)
Video Card: NVidia 8800GT with 512Mb RAM or better, ATI 3850HD (SUBJECT TO CHANGE) with 512Mb RAM or better
Sound: DirectX Compatible Sound Card
DirectX®: 9.0c

Note: These are lower then the recommended requirements for Crysis 1.

The only positive benefit of AA is smoothing the jaggies on the edges of models, so that's not surprising. Anisotropic filtering/mipmaping are the processes that improves the actual textures.

You can build a pretty good gaming rig off newegg these days for 600-800, I concur. My last rig only cost 1500 bucks if you take off the cost of the speakers (they will go onto any new system anyway) and has been in use for 4 years with one 135 dollar video card upgrade so I could play Warhammer keep sieges on the highest settings (a game known to be riddled with performance problems, I was just throwing horsepower at it, it worked).