People have low stardands today. Old Nintendo games are good.

So true.  This is like saying Calculus is not that impressive today because of the advanced mathematics courses we have.  Yet, you need to realize that Calculus is the FOUNDATION of many of those more "advanced" courses.

Translation: show some respect to your elders "son" lol.

The lowest standards in gaming date to the current time (for non nintendo games).

Been playing some old Mario games lately and they hold up really well compared to most old games. That said, if Nintendo was to release Super Mario Bros. now for $60 of course it would be considered daylight robbery. People expect more for their money and from games in general these days.

I think a lot of the older games had better design and gameplay, because that's all they really had to focus on.

I think newer games just hide their flaws better with larger landscapes and prettier graphics. But in my opinion, the root gameplay is usually worse than a lot of the classics.

For instance, the gameplay in Brawl is no where near as good as it was in the original Smash Bros. Instead, they added tons of characters, levels, extended single player, online, etc. - but the core gameplay remains a slow floaty mess compared to the original.

Metacritic:
Brawl - 93
Melee - 92
Smash Bros - 79

Nintendo had great games back in the day because they played so beautifully. Nowadays a shit game can be glossed over if it has stunning graphics etc, im looking at you Heavy rain.

No. The standards weren't "lower", they were most likely as high as they are now. The reason a select amount of older games are rated as high/higher than newer ones is because they were literally that good at the time. The standards met what was around them, and the standards were pleased.

However, some games have held up and some haven't. Games that were heralded back then due to us only knowing/comprehending what we had could be horrible by today's "standards." If a game is truly good though, that shouldn't happen.

Nope.
Games haven't gotten better over the generations; more complex maybe, but not overall better. For every improvement they come up with, they come up with a new drawback.

I've seen gaming since 1994 and I'd say game quality has been largely static since then.

But along with the improvements have come steps backwards; games trying to be movies, QTEs, excessively scripted setpieces, story and graphics prioritized over gameplay, etc.

This and this. A game should be about gameplay first, story should always be second. The point of a game has always been its gameplay, sure some games can have good or intruging stories (like RPGS), but the gameplay should help to advance the story. Playing a game, and then having to sit through hours upon hours of cutscenes can sometimes become tedious.