No, it's not as good. I say this not so much from my perspective, but watching my nieces and nephews play SNES games all summer long endlessly, completely enthralled by the gameplay. They are young, they are not influenced by nostalgia, but they will play these old games and love them much more than the new titles.
That said I think a lot of new innovations have come along that are really cool. The graphics and sound are much better. Some titles have blown me away all over again over the years, titles such as Halo, FFX, WoW, WiiSports, SMG, Xenoblade, by offering either great new innovations or great evolutions of older ones. These games are on a level with older titles. But far too many modern games have low-level interaction masked by quick time events or fluid animations that mask the direct control of older (especially) 2D games.
Also lost a bit today is some mystery. You couldn't jump on the internet to figure something out...you could maybe flip through the pages of a warn-out tip magazine to see if you really could walk backwards through that window in that castle in that Zelda. Every game and genre was also new and fresh, a new style of game coming out every year. Things weren't big budget, so some random developer could just say "I want to make a game about a knight killing vampires and aliens and dragons with a sword and a machine gun" and BAM! instant gaming gold. This is all lost, making games a little bit less exciting than before. But things are still good, and indie games are filling a bit of that simple concept/gameplay void.
