19 here. I think most of today's next gen games are starting to lose their cool factor. They're starting not to be all that interesting. Gears of War's design just doesn't appeal to me just like most games are now geared to getting new people into the market and/or appealing to gamers who are extremely hardcore. There are no games being smartly advertised with any sort of middle ground where a non-hardcore, non-wannabe (wannabe are people who want to be gamers, are new and evangelically hate casual gaming like Satan, ie 4chan's /v/) gamer like myself would enjoy. I don't enjoy games that only operate in varying forms of easy mode or are only playable with extreme skill or co-op (co-op is fine as long as it's optional). There are very few games with the philosophy that changing difficulty would change how things will play out (ie Touhou series changed spell cards while increasing bullet count of said cards and Halo changed enemy locations while modifying AI stats). Now I seperate mainstream games into two difficulties: Easy and Multiplayer.

I got a Wii because it had the next SSBB (a game that represents the middle ground) and because it had the store which had several games I grew up to love, however I'm not willing to shell out on other games in boxes in fear of buying crap due to the vague packaging. I'd also like to point out the last two words in the last sentence again: vague packaging. It's frightening. They only put one paragraph and barely describe what features the game will give to please me. I'm not willing to shell out for a game I randomly pulled off because the extent of description says "70 hours of gameplay" or "Seal of Quality" anymore (I was stupid to buy the Black Label SoQ-ed GBA Lord of the Rings game, it sucked sweaty monkey anus). They spend the whole extra half of describing features to only copy the other half and vomit it back out to french and spanish translations and take the other half of the box to fill it with system-related warning crap that should be written on the first and last leaf of the guide. I mean, what's the point of the game being exciting if I don't know if the game will suit my expectations of exciting? I know PS3 and XBOX360 games have been doing this too, I've looked and shied away at several titles. If you look at the back of old boxes for games (the PSX, N64 era), you'll see more relavent and curt descriptions that tell the player as to the game in terms of content, rather than being a vague blur of what the game is.

I long for the days where I didn't need to blindly bob for apples when buying games or wait several months to figure out if a game is what it is by watching/reading a review by someone who has different expectations and views and then reviewing their personality to see if the game is what I want. I long for the days where gimmicks and vague descriptions didn't tell us what the game might be, but what the game will be.