I barely play games anymore to be honest. The increasing drive for graphics at the expense of gameplay and the prevalence of console based games kills most of the fun for me. The only new game I've truly enjoyed recently is probably Supreme Commander. I'd prefer to play Deus Ex than any of the similar games released in the last five years.

The gaming industry is moving on, from effectively small target groups to a large mainstream. This is good for the industry (maybe?), but bad for the originally focused groups. Games are a lot more about the intial wow factor now, in order to get the sales out rather than catering to people who will play it to the extreme.

Look at the TW games. R:TW was the major turning point and it got worse from then on - effectively CA focused more on easy to play battles that look good, rather than hyper intensive battles that required skill. A majority proportion of the gaming population completely suck at games and this proportion is rising. Game developers and publishers understand this and so refuse to alienate that proportion by throwing the fact that htey suck back in their face. Older games could get away with it, because games were more nichey and less mainstream, ie. they catered to people who could play them with a reasonable level of skill. Now however, you have to make a game that a guy with 80 points of IQ can easily win, or else you lose sales. Guess what? They make games like that and because they can no longer compete on gameplay, it gets to be a battle of image quality.