As a 42 year old, Apple II era gamer, I haven't had much of a problem adapting to the console age. I'd probably be better playing FPS games with a mouse, but I'm not sure that everyone else would as well - leaving me just as pwned in online matches.
At the risk of re-hashing a topic that has been beaten to death a million forums over, I'd like to talk a bit about the "Fallout 3 is a shadow of its former self." It certainly isn't a shadow; it's much deeper in some ways, and shallower in others, but I don't believe this has anything to do with the fact that it was implemented on a console. Oblivion was a PC-first (and PC-centric) game, and F3 isn't substantially different from it in terms of depth. For me, the biggest perceived negatives were:
1. Dialogue trees went from being a "chose the wrong response and sections of the plot are closed to you" to "choose from the list of stuff to get the NPC to dump out some info". I can understand how story-centric gamers would see this as a huge negative, but I actually preferred it. The game already takes an extraordinarily long time to play (I'm 60 hours in and maybe halfway through the main quest) - I don't want to miss interesting content because I made some odd dialogue choice.
2. The main quest is pretty linear, and can be accomplished by following HUD reticules, compared to the original one that was more exploratory. But it's not like the first game's quest was hard, and it was basically linear anyway. There was never any uncertainty as what you needed to do next. This is another "streamlining" aspect that is a product of modern game design, not console design. "The Witcher" is seen as old-school and somewhat hardcore, but with its quest logging, it's pretty much the same; you can cruise through the game following waypoints.
3. The biggest issue for me, in terms of challenge, was the way the now allow you access all your inventory, including stimpacks, without any action point hit. This certainly has made combat easy (although combat was never hard in the original games anyway). I'm not sure why they did this. The original game did allow you to do tons of stuff in the inventory screen, but you at least had to pay some action points to get there; it's pretty absurd that you can change your armor, heal yourself completely, and don different stat-boosters with no downtime in the new game. I don't have a big problem with the real-time/turn based mixed mode combat, but I don't see why they made this change.
4. The fact that they use a limited form of auto-balancing to match the enemy difficulty is something I wish they hadn't done. The main casuality of this decision is that there isn't much feeling of fear when encountering some unbeatable badass, or accomplishment when defeating it. Again, I understand the reasons for this (streamlining, like in #1 and #2), but with a game like F3, with so much content, I don't see why they couldn't make certain areas just too threatening at early skill levels so that you were forced to wait until later. With so much to do, there isn't a risk of hitting a dead end (which is the goal of all this streamlining). I miss the fear of running from the big badasses and then coming back later to exact revenge. But this also isn't a console thing; the quintessential console game, the platformer, is based on the idea of uncrossable fire pits & such that can only be unlocked once you unlock or level p some power later in the game. And what could be more console like that "World of Goo"?
What's the point of this long ramble? The issue that consoles have killed the PC-style game is a myth; it's gaming that has moved on, or matured. Even CivRev; as a 42 year old father, when am I going to find the opportunity to carve out 6 hours to play a 4+ person game of Civ 4, let alone organize the group to meet up again if we're not able to finish the game in that time? People demand high-content games, but they get pissy when they make concessions to appeal to a wide range of players. Well, no shit - nobody's going to waste tens of millions of dollars to create a game that sold in the volumes of the original Fallout or Planescape games. If you want depth and avante-garde stuff, you're going to have to settle for low-fi stuff like Dwarf Fortress.
