That being said, I have no interest in those “Final Fantasy” japanese RPGs. They just look dumb to me.
I’m also not a huge fan of driving/racing games. Nothing against them, and I’ve played quite a few over the years, but they’re just not my thing.
Most simulations aren’t my thing, in particular many flight-sims- too many get WAY too detailed, for my interest. I mean, you want to fly the plane, not have to click on switches, perform the right engine warm-up procedure, etc… I want to play a game, not go through pilot training!
This isn’t to excuse it, but that’s only about 90% of the content, what MMOs do well they do REALLY well. Bosses in MMOs (especially WoW) are probably some of the best bosses in all of gaming. I think most single player games could learn a lot from them. The sheer complex mechanics, timing, and coordination needed to pull off your first kill of a moderately difficult boss is staggering.
Not saying you need to give it a try or whatever, just pointing out that boss content is one of the things that shines about MMOs and is probably orders of magnitude more complex than other games.
For me –
Non-Kart racing games (meaning I like Kart racers, but more realistic racers I dislike)
Multiplayer focus or multiplayer only games, mainly if they’re competitive instead of Co-Op (with exceptions both ways).
Vehicle Sims
Console Shooters (I like PC shooters like Half-Life 2, but I dislike a lot of PC FPS’ too, but that falls more under “multiplayer” than “FPS”)
Metroidvania games – This one is odd, I actually love Metroidvania games until I realize I’m obsessed with 100%ing stuff, then it becomes an exercise in madness (I’m not sure how you would even GUESS to do some of the things to get upgrades in Zero Mission, much less pull them off without save states).
So let me sum up: “I refuse to rule out any genres that have good games in them, except for this one genre that I think ‘looks dumb’”? Seriously?
“Nitpicking” aside, there are a couple of genres against which I have an inherent negative bias. Those are:
Sports Games
Driving Games
First Person Shooter Games
Any game that shows up all the damn time in an average “top ten games” list. (Yes, this means I have a negative bias against Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Civilization, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Portal, and the like. It doesn’t mean I won’t ever get around to playing them, and I’m sure they are quite good, but hearing how everyone thinks they are the awesomest games since Centipede puts me off them.)
Flying sim: because I suck at them. In more than two decades of trying I never managed to master either stall or landing. Whatever the game. I absolutely loved Lucasarts’ “Their Finest Hour” (mostly because it had flying missions starting with you already in the air) or Dynamix’s “Red Baron”. It is more a rejected love thing here than a dislike. I’d love to get more into flying, but I really suck.
Racing: kind of like flying, but on a smaller scale. I love driving in Mafia, but a game solely devoted to driving will put me to sleep. And again, like flying, it stirs a feeling of deep inadequacy in me.
RTS: Ze genre that I dislike.I played Dune 2 when it came out. Look, if it’s real time it’s not strategy, it’s that simple.
So you’re going to bitch at me for generally saying that I’m not one to judge based on category, except for ONE category, and then you’re going to say that just because some games are judged as good, then you don’t like them? That’s every bit as bad, and a lot sillier.
I mean, I’ve played video games for a little over 30 years now, if you include the Atari 2600, and computer/console for about 23, and some of those games you mention ARE just that good. I know personally that Civilization and Mass Effect are terrific games- you’re just depriving yourself if you’re not going to play them because other people think they’re good.
RTS games. I like the concept of building your armies and marching them off to some conflict but the gaming reality just doesn’t do it for me.
Flight sims. It’s not that I don’t like realism, what I don’t like is realism that when implemented on a PC makes the “game” more difficult than the thing it’s trying to simulate.
Sports games. I like the idea of sports games but I’m not all that good at them and I find the single player modes to be a bit one dimensional. I think I’d enjoy them if I played against someone else though. Every now and then I’ll buy a cricket game, play it, and remember why I stopped playing the last one I bought.
Racing games. I actually like these a lot, but I find there is a period of intense enjoyment and it is preceded by frustration and followed by boredom. When I first play any particular racing game I’m not normally good enough to be competitive at the highest difficulty levels, I find this frustrating. I’ll then gradually improve until I am competitive but don’t always win, this I find very enjoyable. Eventually I’ll improve too much and be able to easily beat the AI, then it’s just boring.
Sim type games don’t interest me.
Music games such as Guitar Hero, while fun, just make me want to play the real guitar I have in my living room, so I end up doing that instead.
That’s what I was going to say, too, and the over-the-top gore of fighting games in my formative years (Mortal Kombat et al) were also a turn-off. The one exception I’ve found is the Super Smash Bros. games, where just mashing buttons randomly tends to work pretty well even if you don’t remember the combos, and the cartoony characters makes it more fun.
The other category of games I won’t touch is anything with a monthly subscription (in practice, this is mostly synonymous with MMOs). I want to be able to come back to a game 10 or 15 years later, and just fire it up and play again. I’d never be willing to pay a monthly fee, and if I did, I would feel obligated to play it as much as I could to get my money’s worth.
What I love are games with a strong strategy or puzzle component. Go, Chess, Backgammon, Civilization, Risk - even if all I get the time to do is to work on problems, I’m quite happy.
What I can’t stand are
simulations of musical instruments - I’d rather play the real thing.
twitch games; anything where you have to repeatedly hit the keys as fast as possible just irritates the snot out of me. I’ve got more satisfying ways of giving myself RSIs, like playing real musical instruments.
A) I’m not “bitching at you”, I’m pointing out your internal hypocrisy - YOU were the one who said you’d play games in any genre if they were good EXCEPT for the genre you won’t. I never said I would play games in any genre as long as they were good. I freely admit that someone could make the best racing game ever and I still wouldn’t like it.
B) I didn’t say that I don’t LIKE “popular games”; I said I am negatively disposed towards them. It’s just how I work. Once the “hype” for a game exceeds a certain level, it turns me off from wanting to play it. It doesn’t mean I won’t play it, but I will usually play it LATER, after people STFU about how totally megawesome it is. THAT said, I also sincerely DON’T LIKE a lot of the things that makes a lot of these games popular. First Person RPGs are really a negative for me, for example. I played the demo for Arkham Asylum, and found it to be okay, but not worth a purchase. I played Civ “back in the day” but never felt the urge to go back for a refined version, etc.
See above.
Er… what’s the “et al” here? Mortal Kombat was pretty much the only game in this genre that went for “over-the-top gore” (or gore at all, really). I guess you could argue that Samurai Shodown was gory in some of its incarnations, but otherwise? Street fighter? nope. Fatal Fury? Nope. Uh… Darkstalkers? Definitely nope. Gore really ISN’T a feature of the genre - FPS games are WAY more gruesome and violent than fighting games (Exception: Mortal Kombat.)
Well, I remember the genre being dominated by gore, but maybe that’s just because Mortal Kombat dominated the genre. My dislike of memorizing the combos probably led to me never really giving the others a chance.
I shiver at the idea of place where Mortal Kombat dominated the fighting genre. Yuk.
You might want to give some of the newer ones a try. BlazBlue: Continuum shift at least features a “beginner” mode that lets you button mash your way to autocombos similar to the old “brawler” style games, and I know Marvel vs Capcom 3 has some sort of “simple” mode, though I don’t know if that just prevents you from having to learn special move motions or not.
Mortal Kombat was the only fighting game I really liked, but it wasn’t because of the gore. It was because it was fast. Playing Street Fighter felt like everything was in slow motion after playing Mortal Kombat.
FPS. They make me dizzy, and the idea of shooting pretend people just makes me kinda squicky. One of my good friends gave me Left 4 Dead 2 in the hopes I might play it with her and her boyfriend, and I really, really fucking hated it. I feel guilty about it, but I get precisely zero enjoyment from it.
I think the only genre I haven’t found any fun games in is horror. Horror games fail to scare me. And even if they didn’t I cant see why being frightened is fun. But worse their attempts to scare usually just make me impatient. Few things bug me more in a game than slow pacing which seems to be pretty much a prerequisite for horror games.
I usually don’t care for racing games or fighting games either but at least there I’ve found a few exceptions. Uniracers, and Diddy Kong Racing. And Smash Bros. especially the first one for the N64, they’ve just got worse as they went along so far.
JRPGs are usually pretty bad too as far as the pacing goes. But there are at least a few good ones. Mostly from before the days of FMVs, 10 minute cut-scenes, and godawful voice acting.
