I would put it as 60% nostalgia and 40% games getting worse. People change, tastes get more complex, and most importantly, the distribution of games got easier thanks to internet. Nowadays I can just youtube a walkthrogh in seconds and find out all about the game. But I remember before I had internet and knew how to download games, I would have to ask my mom to take me to the videogames store, sit in the back of the car, spend like half an hour in the store while my mom did the shopping, then read the entire box of the game, get home, read the manual while setting it up, and finally then playing it. It was almost impossible not to enjoy it. Nowadays, I just set up a download in less than 10 minutes, leave it downloading overnight and ta-da I got the game. I'll play it for 20 minutes, get borred, uninstall. I'm pretty sure that if my memories got erased and someone gave me Ocarina of Time, I would end up dropping it before getting past the deku tree. It's not that the game is any different, its just that we've come to expect too much from them, which in result had the devs playing it safe with generic shooters. I hope I didn't' ramble too much and that you get my point. @Boros: Yeah, I upgraded my pc almost solely for Skyrim. There aren't many games that had me hyped for them like it.