Gaming Outside your Comfort Zone

I avoid the following genres:

FPS-Never saw the appeal of them and most are indistinguishable to me anyway. You control a hand attached to a gun and shoot stuff...Boring.

Sports-Sorry, but videogames will never be able to reproduce the skills needed to play anything and most "innovations" that try to compensate just feel pointless. Some exceptions arise and make up for it by being just plain fun: Tecmo Super Bowl, the RBI Baseball series, Virtua Tennis and NES Ice Hockey about make up my list.

Survival Horror-I never quite bought into the idea of watching movies to be scared, so when I saw games that tried to do the same at the expense of playability (see: Resident Evil control mechanics), I decided to stay far away from this genre.

MMORPG's (or Pay-to-Keep-Playing ones, since some people don't consider PSO to be an MMORPG)-I just paid $50 for the game and I can plan on paying how much to keep on playing it online? Might not be so bad if there weren't so many other viable forms of games/entertainment that demand my time and money.

Stealth/MGS-style games-Eh, MGS just didn't work for me, so the various knock-offs don't carry much appeal. Same deal with FPS...

Driving (sim)-No fun. At all. Give me Burnout, Outrun or the older Ridge Racer games anyday.

3D Fighters-I eat 2D fighters for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but Virtua Fighter, Dead or Alive and Tekken would be lucky to be considered a light snack. I see the potential of Soul Calibur, but haven't felt much of a desire to get better at it yet.

I tend to lean towards games with decidedly old-school mechanics: 2D fighters/platformers/shooters, puzzle games, arcade-style racers, plus RPG's. Most of the "genres" that have emerged since around the start of the PS1 era haven't really done a thing for me. Not surprisingly, I'm quite a big retro gamer.

Jam it back in, in the dark.