Better games....really? (Score 1)

I've spent the last 20 minutes reading through replies on this one. One thing seems to be constant; "if they made better games...(insert argument here)". This seems to be, if they made better games, people would buy them rather than pirate, or piracy would be higher. While reading these arguments, I started thinking about whether games have been getting better or worse. Now through time, quality ebbs and flows, but overall, what has the quality been like. Let's look back to the dawn of gaming; Pong is groundbreaking. However, no one now will disagree that Pong sucks. King of the Hill summed it up nicely for those of you that have seen that episode. Moving forward, on the Atari 2600, there are numerous "classic" titles; Adventure, Yar's Revenge, Indiana Jones. I remember spending HOURS working to memorize the maze in Adventure, drilling a whole in the shield to fire the beam in Yar's and seeing how many times I can complete Jones without biting it. But in reality, 20 different screens do not an adventure make and completing the same 15 tasks successfully 7 times is not overly engaging. Move still forward, the original Nintendo had Ninja Gaiden, Mega Man and Super Mario Bros. These were certainly engaging, and sold very well. But looking back, would you play those with such vigor a this point? I know I wouldn't. In fact (looking at my antique NES), I don't. PCs have made serious strides over time. The original Doom was fantastic. Playing it in the computer lab with three other friends was about the coolest thing ever...then. If you load that game now, the graphics are painfully bad, the sounds, while memorable, just aren't as scary as I remember, and the storyline of the single player is as predictable now as it was then. Now a big leap forward in time to StarCraft. An amazing game to be sure. The story line was engaging, graphics were great, unit variance was fantastic. I loaded it a year ago, and was sorely disappointed to find it did not have the same draw that it once had. The same happened with Half Life Source. I purchased Gold because I wanted to play through the original before continuing to HL2; just as a refresher. About halfway through, it became tedious. I couldn't get past the "blocky" graphics of the scientists. I was itching to get to HL2, but I had dedicated myself to completing it, and muscled through it. I was rewarded when I played HL2, and it made it that much better. Plus, there were some nuances that would have been missed had I not experienced the first immediately prior to playing the second. I now there has been a lot here, but now my point. Gamers are ageing. Old school gamers are no longer engaged in the same ways. Meanwhile, new gamers have a completely different need. The 14 year olds like quick, simple "blow-em-up" games. If you look over time, games HAVE been getting better. Graphics have made leaps and bounds, processing power allows more intelligent AI that now responds to your every move, and the amount of sheer data that these games consist of is astronomical (remember the quote "No one will ever need more than 256K or memory") LONG story short, give'em a small break. I'm of the "they need to make better games" category too. But the conclusion I'm coming to is that, as a middle aged gamer (wow that hurts) I'm looking for a much more engaging and creative game than has ever existed. I won't pirate it because I have the money to purchase, but there was a time when I didn't. Access, either for financial reasons or sheer lack of existence, to new and creative games is limiting growth. Just like knowledge, the only way to grow is to share. There is a middle ground that no one has found yet. Unfortunately, that answer hasn't been found yet and that's what needs to be discovered.