I wouldn't say that at all. Certainly nostalgia makes us judge old favorites by lower standards than we impose on modern games, however that doesn't make the older games bad. Just because early films generally had far more primitive special effects, cinematography, acting, and even storylines, does not make old classics not worth watching. Casablanca and Citizen Kane are still worth viewing, even though they're unimpressive by modern standards. The same is true for games.

The key, IMO, is to judge a game by the standards of the time. Sure, there are some games that are so obsolete that simply playing them can be difficult because of our reliance upon the mouse and other such interface methods. The King's Quest games were brilliant when they first came out, but there's no way I would currently enjoy sitting around trying to figure out the right keyword to type to just open a door or use an item. There are a lot of even old games that don't have limitations like that.

I certainly think that you can find plenty of stuff that is fun to play even going back to around 1990. Computer power and game development were sufficiently advanced to allow early 1990s games to be at least recognizable and understandable by modern standards. Ultima VII is a good example. It was released in 1992 and is a DOS game. However, it uses an isometric viewpoint, is entirely mouse-driven, and offers a large open-world to explore where pretty much every object you see can be picked up and used. It's also very challenging and has a play time that's best measure in the hundreds of hours. It's not alone either. The SSI gold box games have a superb tactical combat interface that makes for fun and very challenging gameplay. While the graphics are extraordinarily primitive by modern standards, I guarantee you'd get a huge amount of entertainment value out of them due to their length and difficulty. The first gold box game (Pool of Radiance) came out in 1988. That's a 21 year old game, which is older than a lot of people currently on this forum, but it would still hold up on entertainment value if you could look past the obsolete graphics and interface.

Considering you can get most of the games from the early 1990s and before for free these days, they're a pretty good way to have fun cheaply. I would actually think that things like the SSI gold box games would sell decently well if ported to a modern platform like the iPhone (which could run them easily).

If there's a better option, I haven't seen it. Measurement of health in numerical increments is pretty much standard in all games, regardless of genre. Modern games display health with a bar instead of a number, but it's just a UI change... the number is still what drives it. I think this is an inherent limitation of gaming, simply because representing health in a realistic manner isn't conducive to fun. In the real world, if you get shot once in the hand, you're probably out of the fight and will take weeks or months to heal properly. Not exactly entertainment material. Even STALKER turned a lot of people off with its slightly more realistic health system, and all it really did was require a player to bandage himself after being shot to stop the bleeding. If stopping your own bleeding is too extreme for a lot of players, I doubt whether further steps towards health realism would be successful.

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