My questions were rhetoric, really. I always wonder if the games I played when I was a kid were equally crappy for the most part and only nostalgia makes them seem otherwise, or that they were indeed better. Surely, since in those days games were not so much products but more uhm, experiments and art - for the lack of a better word -, they catered to a different kind of audience.
As far as I'm aware, there have always been great games and there have always been crappy games. Pacman wasn't a crappy game. Donkey Kong and then Mario Brothers weren't crappy games, Doom and Tomb Raider weren't crappy games. But it depends what you played in order to make the comparison.
The nostalgia aspect of your brain only lets you remember the games you either really loved or really hated. Nostalgia is brain-memory as opposed to written history. For example, my memory of a great game would be Worms, but an internet search for 'great' games from that era would be 'Myst', even though I've never played it. My memory has a 'nostalgic' memory for Worms, but also an academic knowledge of Myst.
What 'appears' to be the issue with modern games is that the customer simply doesn't have the 'variety' of games to choose from because most of the big budget games are all some variant of the same First Person(ish) Adventure involving high death tolls and AI companions all with very similar objectives and 'rewards'.
You think how different Worms was to Civilisation to Doom to Mortal Kombat to Mario to OddWorld. When people look back on this particular era, will it have the same sense of 'variety'? To our eyes in the here and now, no it wont, but to future eyes they'll be picking out the best of the varieties - they'll sit around and say "Angry Birds to Minecraft to Stanley Parable to Halo (insert number) to Skylanders to GTA V" etc etc.
All the games that copy-cat with the worst of the least popular mechanics, AI and rewards will get soon forgotten.
But what makes our current era 'feel' that bit extra lacklustre is that all the copy-cat weak-ass games are the ones getting the $toomany$ production values while many genuine gems are still getting by on 'normal' budgets. And it's the big budget fails which get stuffed in our face from their big budget marketing campaigns - which wasn't necessarily the case not so long ago.
Basically, when I was a kid, you 'expected' crappy games along with the gems, but when people start spending $rediculous$ amounts on games - and then still delivering crap - that's the modern difference.
