Dusk is a 90s style shooter from the mind of a teenager (2016)

I agree with this, which is why I have a nes classic plugged into the TV too. Everyone who uses it vs the xbone agrees its 100% a better experience. I don't have to log into an account to play, it doesn't take 10 mins to update a game, etc. Two people grab controllers and within a few seconds are shooting/fighting/whatever each other. Plus the variety is much larger.

I think a lot of the problem is the commoditization and merging of genre's along with the overwhelming dominance of a small number of game engines.

This means that a modern RPG pretty much plays the same as a strategy or shooter. Which makes everything feel like a remake of something you have already played. Particularly as the games don't really have differing artistic styles anymore either because that is more a function of how the game engine works than what texture selection or lighting effects are used.

Maybe the best way to describe it, is that modern games are "cold".

Goldeneye wasn't ignored, the thief designers have talked about the difficulty vs mission structure coming from straight from Goldeneye.

Edit: timesplitters, that was David doak and his goldeneye mates when they left rare and set up free radical. I think that franchise lost its way on the third one when they ditched the Goldeneye style controls.

I wonder how much of the difference is attributable to sensitivity (or lack thereof) to the art/medium/representation, and how much is due to the fact that the fears addressed by the work of art were more relatable to people at the time than they are to a modern audience.

My mom found "The Exorcist" truly frightening, so much so that she refused to re-watch it in adulthood. So my friend and I rented it one night looking forward to a good scare; instead, we mostly found ourselves laughing at how ridiculous it seemed. We must have been around 12 at the time, so probably already quite desensitized to horror movies in general, but I think it is also the case that the subject matter was just less frightening to us than it was to her. We were all raised Catholic, but she was of the stern-nuns-with-rulers generation whereas our elementary school in the 90's had been of the hippie-nuns-with-guitars variety. I don't think things like demons/the devil had ever felt like real objects of fear for us like they may have been for her (in such a deep way that their representation continued to creep her out long after she stopped believing in their literal existence).

I bought Serious Sam from Fry's and remembered it was pretty bad (I did play it all the way through in 1 day). The multiplayer was bad.

Halflife was still a step up, having been released years prior. The gameplay of HL had stagnated at that point so I was looking for anything else.

It does, and some of the later Halos had more accurate weapons (I recall a 3 or 4 shot burst rifle being the new starting weapon?).

The pistol actually seemed popular among players with better accuracy than myself, specifically because it was one of the few weapons accurate enough to reliably land headshots.

I tried some of the later Halo games, and it felt very non-Halo, and I think this pins it down. In the original Halo, it was relatively difficult to die instantly. Grenades, sniper rifles, the bazooka, and the hand sword were the only weapons that could do it, and each of them had substantial tradeoffs (grenades were limited, the bazooka traveled rather slowly and only killed on direct hits or very close hits, etc). Now there are tons of weapons that can kill in one hit. I think the starting rifle can't one shot, but two bursts to the head is death. And they've turned up the aim assist to the point where players are fairly good at getting headshots.

It misses all those "if I hide behind this rock and let my shields regen, I might survive" moments. There's no tension to the game as you struggle to survive; in a flash you're either the conqueror or the conquered. There's no cat and mouse as you chase someone through their base, hoping they don't hide behind a corner and stick you with a plasma grenade.

Maybe the tension is what I miss more than the slower speed of play. After all, fast playing games can still be fun (like Sonic) because they keep that tension that you could die at any second. That kind of tension that keeps you on the edge of your seat, so when you finally make it through you get the level you lean back and pat yourself on the shoulder. Modern AAA games seem to want to get directly to the dopamine hit, so they crushed the combat sequence into a very small number of actions so that you can do it over and over again faster. It just doesn't do as much for me.