Response to Brendon

I think that modern games definitely have an advantage in several economic aspects that give them a slight edge. Obviously larger market and more money involved, but also many gaming engines now exist which alleviates the game developers from spending time and talent on creating whole new gaming engines (Take anything from Bethesda for example, Fallout, Oblivion, these were made with Gamebryo); for those that don't know, the engine is really what runs the underlying code in the game, a developer can use an existing engine and put a different set of graphics and voices into it and easily make a new game. Much like a car, hence the analogous name.

Whenever I launch a game now I see a bunch of logos on the opening slate telling me that the game uses Gamebryo (engine), Speedtree (tree and foliage generation), Havok (physics simulation), there are others for lighting which escape me, and even more for sound. Because of these options they don't have to spend time on complex development and can commit more resources to creating deeper stories, plots and logic trees for the player to pursue, and thus heighten the degree to which the player has agency within the game. With all the technicalities taken care of, developers can focus on telling stories, which is what video games are great for!

That said, I love old computer games, especially Sierra and Lucas Arts adventures. There is a different amount of effort required to fully immerse yourself in these games, and they do tend to read like an animated book just waiting for you to click the right button to turn the page. But the stories themselves have always been more unique and more rewarding. Often people will state that new games spend too much effort on looking pretty but having no substance or depth to their stories, I'd say it's only partially true.

The developers of the older stock of games really had the hard road to forge, the first developers at Lucas Arts were writers, artists and musicians who had to learn to programme code to get their stories out there. Here's a great tour of iD software (developers of Wolf3d and Doom) in the early 90s. They had to build everything from scratch, but of course they were able to create more unique products because of it; the newer games don't have that, they're almost identical to each other (Fallout is just Oblivion with guns is a common saying) on the surface and in the mechanics.

Old games are finding new lives though on touch-screen platforms! They're also perfectly suited for the devices, this may just be an accident though due to the novelty of the platform.