I assume that many of you have a certain set of preferred genres when it comes to videogames. I'm interested if any of you had some significant changes in your choice of genres. Did you add a genre to your favorites or even shifted to a whole new set of genres altogether? Please post your experiences with this here (I hope a topic like this does not exist already).
As for me, I'm usually more into RPGs und Action Adventure, and besides the occasional platformer or action game, I was pretty strict with this. But recently I got to like 2D Shooters. This was because I got a bunch of games from a friend (including gems like Harvest Moon and Terranigma, and all he wanted for them was a Latte Macciato
) and tested them all right away. A few went straight to my fleamarket / ebay stack, but among the games that remained was the plain solid Solarstriker, the first 2D shooter I ever owned. I played it a few times and really grew to like it. It is very simple, yes, but the graphics are nice, you can determine everything, the tunes played are cool, and the controls are good. The spaceship behaves just the way you want it to, and it does move at a moderate speed.And it introduced me to the great wonders of 2D shooting: Blasting everything away you see, dodging bullets like a maniac and fighting again and again against huge bosses until you memorized their attack pattern and developed a strategy to beat them.
After realizing that I had fun with this, I was quite euphoric. I thought shooters were quite commonplace, so I looked out for new games to auquire. And I was baffled: Not only was one of the reference games, R Type Delta rare und expensive, but also the best games were only available as imports. That was quite a shock for me, a European who was always too lazy to make his consoles able to play imports and therefore already missed out on some great RPGs.
Nevertheless I started to extend my game library, buying R Type Delta, Gradius G und R Type (GB). Since my game money this month is short, I'll wait for July to snatch up a few titles that usually show up on the flea market.
So, how came the change of mind? I played 2D shooters before and kind of liked the overall style of them. But the gameplay seemed to blant for me (after all, I was an RPG fan). I think this changed because I became a bit dreary of RPGs. After spending almost 80 hours to beat Persona 3 I longed for something more simple, and then Solar Striker was just the right thing for me.
