Well, I think the dumbing down of Maxis' products, namely the Sim games and some of their newer titles like Spore had more to do with EA devouring them whole. When EA acquired Maxis they pretty much cut the balls off of Maxis and ultimately strong-armed them into making games that any retarded toddler could play.
Complexity doesn't inherently make for a better gaming experience, but the open-endedness of their games made them really fun to play. Looking back at the older Sim titles it was more fun, for me at least, to see what I could do to push the boundaries of the game. For example, a friend of mine - who ironically works for Bioware (Now owned by EA), spent an afternoon seeing who could make the most fucked up scenario on The Sims 3.
Without even mentioning what we intended to do, we both went at it. My first character was a homeless man - oh, he owned a property lot, but there was nothing there. I decided to make him evil, a clepto, and a number of other humorous personalities, and went around sleeping on park benches in the town.
My friend, doing pretty much the same thing, spent his time impregnating every female in the city, taking one of his own children, and abandoning it behind a bush in town. Our characters ultimately spent the entire day fighting with the males of the town, impregnating females, and steeling shit from our "friends" in the game, fishing, and pillaging garbage cans in town.
The fun was had by the open-endedness of the game itself, not so much in it's complexity. The game established a variety of proposed "norms" for how to play the game, but fuck that, I'd rather shag the girl next door and pillage the garbage cans on the street for epic lewtz.
And we had a blast doing this, as messed up as how we chose to play the game was. It was the fact that the game allowed for us not just the complexity of that kind of game-style, while probably not intended, but it was open enough that we could do it if we wanted.
Casual games take away not just the complexity, but reduce the scope of gameplay into a straight and narrow path, where the "fun" to be had is a linear path - and you either enjoy it or you don't, as opposed to an open-ended gameplay mechanism that allows the user to find their own fun along the way.
I think that's why some games are truly timeless in that they provide that level of sandbox play that makes them that much more enjoyable. Like one game I still love to this day is Black & White. Being able to treat your people like shit or actually help them really made me feel like I was playing God in this game.
When Will Wright was discussing his plans for Spore, I was really excited, few games got my attention like this one. But then the scope of the game was suddenly narrowed, and the vision and depth of the game was suddenly bottomed out and we were left with what were basically 5 shitty games in one. The Cell stage is a waste of time and nothing more, then "Creature" stage was boring and felt like a mini-game that went on for longer than it should, the Tribal stage was a really shallow RTS with no real strategy involved.
The global phase was little more than a slightly refined RTS - at which point I was so sick of modeling shit that I didn't really what my crap looked like - after spending hours of ensuring I'd thoroughly attatched balls and dongs to my creatures it was kinda losing it's "fun" value.
But then the Space portion of the game came into play. And I wanted so much to enjoy this aspect of the game. But ultimately it fell flat, the battle mechanics were absolutely fucking terrible, even after you get allies you get picked off so easily that it really took away the "fun" I could have had dominated the known universe. The Missions were annoying and the innability to often find my intended target location put me off the majority of missions - especially when allies would demand that I, for example, destroy other ally's turrets on all their major cities because they were pacifists.
This is one title I'm glad I pirated and never purchased. There was just no fun to be had in the game. And while I don't advocate piracy, it's one method I've used, and will continue to use, to measure the likelihood of my purchasing a game in the future. If I pirate a game and I do legitimately enjoy it, I'll go out and buy it at some point.
Too many games are coming out though that really lack the open-endedness that I enjoy, and I'm still waiting for the next company to put out a game that really allows for the player to be the master of their own universe.
