What I Play, and Why ...
Genres and their points
What I play most is realtime strategy games, RTS, and first person shooters, FPS. Classic adventure games are great too, as is the odd racing or space combat sim.
RTS-wise, I've been in it ever since Dune II, and it's been a good time ... Call me wicked and evil, but I still want a good single player campaign before multiplayer. That's where Total Annihilation fails miserably in my eyes. And that's, incidentally, one of Starcraft's strongest points.
Doom never really hooked me, perhaps because I didn't have a PC of my own to play on. Duke Nukem 3d was the first FPS to catch my interest, it was cool, but Quake was a whole lot cooler and better looking. I've always been hooked by superior graphics ...
As for adventure games, anything LucasArts has always set the standard. I was too young to be able to enjoy all the old text adventures, so for me it started somewhere around The Secret of Monkey Island. Myst-like games have their sides too of course, but I haven't played as many. Maybe I'm just being nostalgic, but wacky multiple-choice dialoges get me before rendered from-the-eyes view visuals at any time ...
Flight and sport sims have never seemed very interesting to me, although I did play good old Gunship and Thunderhawk quite a bit. Landing a chopper is so much easier than landing a plane ... As for sport sims, Sensible Soccer is nice some times but nothing really compares to the brutally cool Speedball II. Sims of "real" sports ought to go stand in a corner and be ashamed of themselves, they can't beat this.
What Games Need
Perhaps I'm getting old and nostalgic again, but I still think story and strong single player experiences are very important. If nothing else, single player can be more relaxed and variational than throat-cutting multiplayer. Also, not everyone has the opportunity to play games multiplayer. Still, multiplayer is cool, and I think there's a lot to do with multiplayer that no-one has done yet. But, again, if there isn't a strong single player component I probably won't be hooked.
On the story side, something I really like is background information and continuity. Many games are bad at this, I'd like a lot more of "useless" background information in manuals or on websites, like on www.Starwars.com. I value things that makes you feel that the game world is alive and detailed, even if it has no value to actual gameplay. That's why I get so annoyed at all the talk about the Tacitus in Tiberian Sun, why won't they tell me a bit more about it, at least what it is?
