So what has happened in gaming in the last seven or eight years?

It's been nearly a decade since I've been able to consistently play anything at all. From joining the USMC to wondering how the hell I'm going to get off the streets, I'm somewhat stable again and looking for knowledge.

The biggest thing that seems to have happened is Steam and online gaming. I've picked up Borderlands 1, Mass Effect 1 and 2, and Skyrim through my PC, perfectly easily, and they've been pretty much it. I'm not entirely sure what other notable games have come out in such a long time. Talk to my younger self and I wouldn't have said it would ever be so easy to get entire games. I love it.

Skyrim was a stunningly beautiful game, and I feel like I made a god character to dominate master difficulty. Borderlands was amazing for their ability to join two genres without putting a serious spin to it. Mass Effect was all right, but the replay for me is very limited. I know for nearly a decade's worth of games there are other notable titles to be found, but the internet is fickle with "current gaming" only for someone randomly searching in the dark.

A popular trend seems to be FPS and action oriented games with quick-time events. Extremely long grinds to max character and skill levels seem to be rare now, or I just can't seem to find a classic RPG. Have they all migrated to handheld systems? A laptop is all I have available for now, so if that is the case, could you impart some hand-held knowledge? During my console days, Disgaea (I've only played 1 and 2), Growlanser (2 and 3?), some of the Final Fantasy series, et cetera, were what I really loved. To this day, they still stand out very well in memory. A PS and PS2 were what I had for consoles because of the RPG scene, but it seems now that I need to branch out to somewhere else.

The PSP was still very new just before I joined the USMC, so I never got to experience the shift. For gamers that did, were you impressed or disappointed in gameplay and titles? Personally, since I'm so damn old in games, graphics aren't important. If I could go back and finally play Chrono Trigger -- since people still seem to rave about it -- the graphics would be negligible. I can only assume that handhelds aren't graphics heavy but instead focus on solid gameplay.

That's enough for a wall of text, sorry. There's just so much out there now, it's astounding! Thank you for taking the time to read and possibly even help me out of my little, dark hole of game deprivation with that all-important knowledge.