...right.
Getting back to the main subject matter here, I witnessed the same phenomena a few years back: none of the new titles really grasped my attention, the games I tried seemed utterly bland, and the none of the reviews in game magazines sparked any interest in me. It all seemed to be the same junk all over again with the same washed-put graphics and unoriginal gameplay.
Abandonware helped a lot then. Home of the Underdogs, Abandonia, and all the other sites listed at TUOL offered tons of excellent games to play, and from the depths of my own archives I found many classics I had forgotten about. My free time was spent for example playing the original Pirates!, going through the adventure classics, finally playing through the CPC version of Commando, and beating people in International Superstar Soccer 2 online. All this while complaining about the low quality of the recently released games. Then the real life kicked in, and suddenly I didn't have time for playing anything. Having to finish studies, working abroad, courting a spouse and so on all really do have their own impact in gaming.
But the break from games was a welcome one, in the end. Today I find myself playing games from the times when everything seemed terrible, and I'm being thoroughly entertained (Europa 1400 is surprisingly good and original, Crimson Skies rocks, the new Pirates! sucks only at the dance sequences, Psychonauts is ingenious, and The Longest Journey and Syberia 1&2 are worthy modern adventures). Some of the brand new games look really interesting and I'm even considering updating my gaming rig to meet their requirements. Either that, or I will invest in a new generation console. Of course there is a lot of quickly-produced utter crap out there too, but it has always been so. A true game connoisseur should be able to see through the ever-present marketing mumbo-jumbo anyway (just like he can judge the games on their gameplay values, instead of just admiring everything (s)he can max out the graphics on).
The point is that it does come back after having a decent break. I believe the reason is that I hadn't really accepted and adopted the major changes in games, and rather wanted to stay with the old times. Also, I had played a whole lot all the way from the '80s, and nothing particularly new was coming out; nothing that I hadn't seen previously. The break helped me to see the new games with fresh eyes, and believe I can respect the new and coming titles on their own good.
Of course I still play the old games, but it seems that the new games are not that evil after all. I believe it was all due just to gaming fatigue, nothing more serious than that.