i have to recuse myself officially because it's exactly at the nostalgia point, but i do think there's some kind of inflection point at/just after the nintendo ds where games (at least on nintendo consoles) started feeling like modern games. i think the "feels like modern games" to me means "you can't see the edges of the system through the game". for example, all NES and GB games can be easily clocked as having sprites moving around on a scrolled grid of tiles. you can still see some of that in DS games, but after that it became hard to identify "oh, this is clearly using technology A of the console"