PC games in general are something that I miss. I like a little number crunching, learning the menus, hotkeys, and fiddling with .ini settings. Everything I've played in the last 3 years is either a console port, feels like a console port(streamlined derp), or is a short, sweet indie game.
Do you know why that is? It's because of the market growth in the industry. Way back in the day there were only three types of games that were played on PC. FPS, RPG, and Strategy. That was it. Period. PC gaming its-self, all of it, was a "niche" market. This all changed in late 80's and early 90's, but still in trend continued for a good while. Console type games were kept on consoles and PC type games were kept on PC and they never mixed and rarely matched genres.
In the last 8 or 9 years though this has all changed. Console gaming now routinely surpasses PC gaming in terms of profitability. PC games used to be confined to a Sim Type level were everything was a shooting simulation or a flying simulation or a Warfare simulation, and the people who played those were almost always exclusively Adult Gamers. There were some "kids" playing back then (hell I was one of them), but it was a predominately adult market which can be seen by there being games like the early "Leisure Suite Larry" games which were dirty adventures that honestly got quite raunchy for their time and if graphics would have been better they would be considered porn by today's standards.
With the advent and domination of consoles kids entered the market and have dominated it ever since. Games took a drastic turn downward in complexity because kids at the time didn't want complex games where they had to think. They wanted action games or games based on cartoons or on sports or Tv shows. Now those console kids are grown up so they've turned into the market that buys today's "mature" games like the God of War series and Grand Theft Auto, though those inevitably become attractive to the kid market as well.
Back in the day even owning a PC meant you had a decent amount of money to spend and the people who had the money generally had better jobs and we're pretty intelligent and thus wanted more intelligent styles of games. Once game systems hit the range that kids started wanting them and then got them the market adjusted to meet it's new audience and hasn't looked back since. Hence more and more games get "dumbed down" because the game makers want to make money. They don't want to pander to a high-brow audience, they want to appeal to the most common denominator and make as much money as possible in as short a time as possible.
