User blog comment:Radical M/New Nintendo Console/@comment-2151472-20110611234231/@comment-1046241-20110612024715

Though even in that list you named games that I never found to be challenging at all (two in particular, Kingdom Hearts and Budokai Tenkaichi, at least some of them. I'm not even good at Fighters), but maybe I just excel at action-adventure/platformer 3D games. I believe the older games were made specifically to take a longer time to play on average. I just played, for example, Tales of Symphonia (not the best example, though) and it took me 31 hours with reading all the dialogue and doing side quests and all that jazz. I still remember that Tales of Phantasia, made by the same company originally on the SNES took an additional 15, and that's without any sort of cutscene or slow-rolling dialogue.

Like you said, there are bad older games. I feel, though, that it was just so much easier to tell back then. Now, bad quality games are masked by good graphics. There aren't a lot of new gameplay mechanics in shooters and sports games, so companies almost always attempt to improve graphics from year to year rather than come up with anything new in those departments.

I'm in the same boat as you, though... I'm a Nintendo person. Though until recently my favorite game was not by Nintendo, but Super Mario Galaxy 2 overtook it.