To venture in the other direction, though, I take comments such as "only 1% of current titles are good" to be far from the truth. I manage to enjoy most every game title I come across, and if there was a meter for determining how much tolerance of games a person can have, I'd expect "Played the CD-i Zeldas" and "Has good things to say about arcade ports on the Spectrum" to qualify me as some sort of gaming maschiochist. Regardless, I look at games today and most of them are just as well done as classic, say, Konami titles (with their excessive borrowing from 80s movies).

Game developers have much more to think about (and worry about - try to convince Hideo Kojima that he can use the likenesses of a dozen real life actors and other famous personalities today, whereas his early classic Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake does just that). Many games are overcomplex today, but there are many that manage to deliver pure, simple gaming bliss despite the hardware.

We have a ton of FPS titles today because that method of displaying a world view is intuitive. In the 2D days we saw all manner of creatures walk from the left to the right. Yesterday's cast of characters was easily as diverse as the characters we control today, including Dragons in a certain Intellivision game, robots that take over other robots in a classic Commodore title, and lots of ninjas and warriors. Today we have Spyro the Dragon in a certain PlaySated title, characters that hack and take over devices, and lots of the same ninjas and warriors that we saw back in the 1980s.

It's alright if one refuses to accept the new way of presenting the world and giving the player control, but I don't think all that amounts to games being much worse than they used to be. The problem lies with companies that suck at updating their classics and break the system. I'm going to guess one of the reasons Epicenter wrote that would be his experiences with the 3D Sonic titles. They're nothing much at all like the classic Sonic titles, but classic updates are (thankfully) only a small portion of the market.

Some deride Ninja Gaiden, saying it's just a DMC clone...but back in the late 1980s, it was stated that original titles like Tetris and Quarth (from Konami) appeared "much less than we'd like to see." Castlevania was just a polished version of Ghosts 'n Goblins, and how many Street Fighter 2 (or, for that matter, Yie-Ar-Kung-Fu and Fighting Street) clones did we praise back in the day? The quality is still there, and so is a lot of unwanted hype. There's much to like in gaming today, and lots that didn't work out well.

It took the game industry a decade longer than Namco to run into the problems Namco did with Pac-Man 2, that's all.