georgec said:

Everything was better in the early to mid 90s.

:(

For myself, I would say 1987-1993 is the high point of the 2D era, when games were fast, furious, complex enough and also graphically and acoustically advanced, and 1996-2002 is the high point of the 3D era, where it was kind of the same situation but in three dimensions. Since then, other than technical sound and graphics upgrades, the only new gamechanger to come around is motion technology (Wii, XB connect, etc.), but so far these are gimmicks rather than fully developed new genres (and more often than not badly designed). It's also a bit of a shame because motion-technology games are incredibly fun when done right, but they haven't quite figured out how to make product good enough to inherant the mantle that light-gun games occupied (since they are basically equivalent, relative to their respective times).