I remember how much I played Pandora Directive (which is part of a series of games I'd LOVE to see om GOG.com * hint hint *), and how much I loved the dialogues and the fact that I could have a good or a bad ending.
It's something that I feel when I play Fallout, too: I feel like I'm part of something, like I'm helping to write a history, and not just play a role on one.
I used to love adventures SO much. From the more "serious" type, like Pandora Directive, to the "nonsense fun" of Monkey Island. Now, the recent adventures I've played are either the boring kind of "serious" or the stupid kind of nonsense fun.
There are adventure games, and games with good and bad endings, and things like that, nowadays. But they seem so... lacking, compared to some of these classics.
I LOVE some "new" games, I play Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core, and Guitar Hero III, and Spore, and love all of them. But some kinds of games seem to have lost something.
I miss not being treated like an idiot at the beginning of every game. "Oh, you're a veteran spy, but let me explain how to move to you...". It they feel that a tutorial was necessary (Metal Gear Acid HAS a weird gameplay, after all), couldn't they make a tutorial OUTSIDE the main story? It kind of breaks the climax - "Oh, the world depends on you... but, just let me explain how to breathe in case you've forgotten"...
I don't really miss being stuck for life in a game - Sierra adventures, anyone? But I really miss not being able to do EVERYTHING in the game - "oh, you want to be the strongest, fastest, most honorable, get the girl and still learn how to cook and drive an airbus? OK, just spend enough time on the game and you will learn". I miss meaningful decisions: save the girl or the hostages?
The games seems to go so easy on the gamer nowadays... you can do everything, save everyone, get all the good equipment, if you just play long enough.
"Hardcore" games? What's that? People seem so full of pride of playing games that take them by the hand and guide them? That's not very "Macho", if you ask me.
I miss being slapped hard on the face by a game - even the plot twists of recent games are weak! "Oh, you betrayed me! But, well, I kind of expected that after you started acting all funny and weird around me... the fact that you have 'evil' eyes helped, too".
So, am I the only one to feel that? Am I playing the wrong games? Or was something really lost along the way?

Both.
Increasing development costs mean the publishers intend to increase the size of their games' target audience, so compromises get made, edges get rounded off, and in general, they try to play things safe. Making an excellent game isn't as much of a goal anymore, instead it's about the game not turning away most people. So you get games that everyone kind-of-sort-of likes, but no one really loves.
Indie developers don't tend to worry about their game only shifting two million copies instead of five, so some games that might as well be from ye olde days still emerge from there. Fallout is a good example here - big publishers wouldn't dare go with an isometric turn-based cRPG, so we get a bunch of indies that try to fill the gap instead.
As for the needless hand-holding: while Portal is a great game, the fact that it's designed so you could sit down a chimp in from of the monitor and it could finish the game just as well pisses me off. While it's nicely integrated into the game (considering the setting it takes place in, that's not too difficult, though), that the tutorial still makes up 65% of the game is pretty annoying.

From Bioshock that kept on popping up a text box saying 'Hit x to Stand Up' every time I crouched, more or less saying 'this is a shooter thief style RPG guy!' to Mass Effect giving me the ability to increase my conversation skill and then every time I got to use it, it was ignored so the mission could play out the only way it was intended, modern games do not want to be mature any more.
We will always get the 'STALKER's' and the 'Witcher's' from independent minded developers, but I doubt we will see a Daggerfall, a Morrowind, a Gothic, a Fallout ever again from the major developers/publishers.
When we have STALKER and Mass Effect and Jade Empire being called RPG's you know we are never going to get 'real' RPG's again!
This is what has taken me, over the last 2-3 years, back to my retro PC games of pre 2002 or so.
I have found out by doing this that there are texture updates for games like Morrowind, and utilities like Morrowind Graphic Extender and Morrowind Script Extender that allows for no fog and distant vista's and mods that are very sophisticated indeed, like a life detection spell that shows just human or just beasts, etc. Much more that the life detection spell in Oblivion can do! This leads to even deeper more immersive games than even when first played!
I have said elsewhere that I believe all mainstream AAA PC games are moving to one Action/Adventure/RPG Lite genre. You won;t have 20character classes, you'll have 3. You'll have an inventory of weapons instead of just picking them up off the ground, you may even have the odd conversation, but you won't see people coming on here and showing how they did the same mission differently from you, because we will all play the same missions the same way (as in the planetary sub quests in Mass Effect)!
GOG has started up at just the right time. I have to say though, as much as I hate EA, if they had started a service like this they would be able to sign titles from anybody, because that's how powerful they are. I worry that the big publishers will gang up against GOG, thinking that the $5.99's and $9.99's are somehow taking money from their pockets.And that if they release back catalogue they will just have their old titles competing with their new titles! That's how stupid Mainstream Publisher's are! It's no coincidence that the major gaming sites that rely on advertising have not said a word about GOG. It has been left to the independent bloggers and some smaller gaming sites to get the word out!

Well that's not entirely fair now. Remember that Bethesda was not the titanic development team when Daggerfall was released.
The video game industry wasn't a multi-billion dollar a year juggernaut 15 years ago. Times change and things evolve. What was once an RPG (a game like Final Fantasy used to be the absolute definition of an RPG) but since it came out, people have re-evaluated what an RPG is. RPGs are not just about numbers and cold, hard facts. A game that immerses you in a customized roll can be considered an RPG. Games are no longer made in garages, but rather in studios and across many platforms. This is not only true of video games, but any media. You can look at movies like Nosferatu (1922), an absolutely classic vampire movie (and in my opinion the creepiest vampire ever on screen) and say "we will never see another movie like this." And you're right, we won't. Not because movies are worse now, but because time and technology has changed.
We still get those magical games and special moments. STALKER has been mentioned, and that is a defining PC title in my eyes. No other game in 2007 immersed me like STALKER. People cited Portal or Bioshock or Mass Effect, but no. STALKER made me jump and made me tense up. This is a game with a decent budget behind it (and a more-than-decent development cycle) too, though it might still be considered indie.
So yeah, I agree that the independents are where you go for those special games. The games full of glitches, bugs, exploits and more than anything else: heart. Look to the smaller games. Look to services like Xbox Live Arcade or Steam. Games like Braid or Audiosurf.

About the big sites not talking about GOG.com, I don't think that's entirely true.
Here are some links:
There's a good interview about GOG at Gamespot (I HATE that site, but, well, it has some useful things): http://www.gamespot.com/news/6197407.html?sid=6197407&part=rss&subj=6197407
http://www.joystiq.com/2008/09/05/good-old-games-offering-early-beta-access/ (I'm not sure if "Joystiq" is a "big" site, but, well, I sign the feed, it has a lot of updates, so yeah)
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/gog-com-drm-free-old-game-download-site-starts-early-access-beta-on-monday (I don't really know that site, but it's a pretty site. )
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=19368 (gamasutra is one of my favorite sites when it comes to the gaming industry)
http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/Solivagant/gog-com-good-old-games-first-impressions-103087.phtml (it's destructoid. Destructoid and Kotaku are just my favorite gaming sites, really)
http://www.geek.com/preview-play-great-old-computer-games-with-gogcom-20080801/ (never seen this site either, but, hey, they have the geek.com domain. They have to be good)
http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3169758 (1up is another great gaming site)
See? There ARE big sites talking about GOG.com. And talking well. On gamespot, GOG.com says that they received "tens of thousands" of inscriptions for the beta test. Well, this shows that people ARE interested in good old games. What is just great :)
Yeah. Nowadays, they want to be everything and end up being... nothing. As much as I LOVE Bioshock, it really isn't a RPG where you can choose your path. I don't mind games like Final Fantasy, which are about playing in a story. I know that I'm not "telling" a story, but mostly playing a role, and I'm cool with that when there's a good story being told. But when the game is advertised has a game that has "moral dilemmas'", I expect a game with meaningful decisions. With choice. And not just "choose A or B. Not that it makes a difference, you will end up in the same place"
I mean, it REALLY annoys me that almost every game released today has some kind of fps/tps element.
My boyfriend loves Neverwinter Nights, and i have watched him play a few times, and I talk about it sometimes. And, really... well, after he finished playing Neverwinter Nights 2, he spent a week talking about how bad and SHALLOW was the ending.
There's a reason why RPGs and point-and-click adventures aren't a sucess anymore. They rely on really good stories, and recent games have anything but that.
And, really, there are a LOT of people who could make really, meaningful games. But the industry, the publishers, doesn't seem to want that anymore, so they don't let people develop that kind of game.
I guess I should turn to indie developers, but... I haven't see a really good game from them in quite a while. I mean, I have played good indie games, but none of them raised my interest when it comes to their stories.
And the publishers aren't the really ones to blame - how many of you have seem opinions like that "This game is UGLY! It sucks!" about games that weren't even released yet? I mean, when you see things like that, you kind of understand why they spend more money in the Graphics area and not in the Plot area...
It's a vicious cycle, which I hope could be broken.

miwi - what you say makes sense. I would argue that only 2 or 3 of the sites you mentioned I would call 'Major'. It's also about how buried the news was when it first come out - not just when specifically searched for.
I give you one example of how you can be disappointed with a modern game if you have been playing deep RPG's, or indeed, games in general, for many years:
This was Bioshock and the hype about whether to kill the little girl or make her normal and let her go -and that that was a moral dilemma - would you do the 'right thing' was the mantra. Well, in the Bioshock world, full of crazy, drugged up psychopaths I never saw making the little girl 'normal' and letting her into this crazy world a 'good thing'. Letting her loose into this crazy world would end with the likelihood of a gruesome death! One would argue the other option could be seen as the best for BOTH parties? In a deeper RPG the options would not have been the two 'bad' options. The story would have been written to allow for the good at one end and the bad at the other with choices in the middle.
If I had only come to PC gaming in the last 4-5 years ago, I may have not have seen this Bioshock 'non dilemma' in the same way.

That's spot on, 100% agreed.

IMO a hardcore game is a game that your play HARDCORE (i.e. all the dang time.)