I agree with some of the points made (too many to quote).
There is an enormous amount of crap on my Genny. I've tried out/played all the games in the genres I like, and it's just amazing how bad so many of them are. I can't imagine people having chucked out 50$ for these games.
At the end of the genesis life, I had just half a dozen genny games, and ended up selling them all before I went to college. I only had segaCD and 32X gmes left (because I liked them better than any of the genesis games, or I'd completed the genesis games so many times already).
Then a couple years ago when I rediscovered genesis games (due to their new low prices), I discovered dozens of gems hidden amongst the garbage that I'd missed from the day. Many of these games where never advertized, or were just too expensive for me to pick up in the day. Or they were never on the shelves of my local Funco.
Also, my tastes changed. I used to glamour for the higher end. I didn't want 2D games when I could get games with 3D effects or real 3D polygons. I was really into 3D sims. I didn't want games where you just "walked around and punched things" or "flew around and shot things". It just wasn't enough of a game to pay 50$ for, and I'd done that stuff so much on NES already.
But after wading through all the PS1, N64, DC, PS2, GameCube, X-box games that look great on the cover but have no fun gameplay, I go back and enjoy how much fun all those older 2D games were.
We still do some "new gaming". I've picked up a some games for the DC and PS2. But they're never as fun as their older ancestors (except the DDR series, which is a lot more fun than the old NES powerpad games).
My wife has GTA3 and some PS2 RPGs. But still, when we were on vacation, the only games she picked up was Kirby and Q-bert.
The only games I've found that have some good fun gameplay with the high-end 3D graphics are on the PC. Like the X-wing and Jedi Knight series. The PC was my place for 3D games, since at the time of the PS1 and N64, it was still huge steps ahead of them in terms of power and grahpics. Plus you can play in much larger resolutions, and use better controls like joystick+keyboard.
But even now the PC is going down the tubes. All the consoles and the PC just port the same games around. And the only PC unique stuff is off on this MMORPG tangent.
Also, another angle to it is in 1996 when sega scorned me by dropping support for the segaCD and 32X. It just let them die because it didn't put any support behind them, instead always pushing forward with new projects. They had such promise. I became disenfranchised with the console gaming industry. And junk like the Playstation and N64 was leading the pack and getting all this attention, when they had these new controller styles that sucked and were a beetch to use (and still are), and the 3D graphics were poor and ugly and vastly inferior to what I had on my PC. So I just dumped console gaming in leui of PC gaming for the next 5 years.
JMT.