Games/genres you used to hate, but now love?

[DeadVoivod]

I used to hate FPS genre, thinking of it as the most brain dead thing ever, compared to platformers or character action games.

Same here, I could never understand why people played Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein 3D or Unreal in the early days, plus I thought this big 3D pixel art was horrible.

Don't get me wrong, I still don't like Doom (1993) and Co. but I appreciate a good FPS from time to time, like Far Cry or Sniper Elite series. Played also several Sniper Ghost Warrior games, love Bulletstorm, love the Killzone games and Resistance games. Sometimes the obvious like Call of Duty or Battlefield. Still not so keen on that hectic stuff like newer Doom, Killing Floor, Serious Sam or Shadow Warrior. Might try them once.

On the other hand there's also the opposite, game genres or mechanics. Old times I loved turn based RPG, couldn't stand action RPG, probably similar to my dislike of FPS or Diablo like. I always wanted to take my time in planning and executing. Nowadays it's just the opposite, I prefer action RPGs, I guess it's also because I have less time now. Although nothing against a nice turn based combat RPG, I played Dragon Quest XI and Trails of Cold Steel III lately.

 

[YoshifreakZX]

I used to not care for non-Smash fighting games, but then after giving games like KoF and Guilty Gear a chance back in like 2020/2021, I got more and more interested. I still suck at them though.

 

[albrown267]

While I would not go so far and say hate, I used to dislike beat 'em up's that were on hard difficulty since I had a hard time mastering them. Though, now I have slightly gotten better at them over time.

 

[Jeff]

Dungeon Crawlers
Whether be in first person or any perspective, I just hate the idea that the player has to go deep to advance the story while being ambushed with random encounters that are far too strong. And the player has to escape of the dungeon without dying or else the player loses everything.

FPS Games
The only FPS games I like are Metroid Prime, or Goldeneye/any 007 games. The whole FPS genre is in two sentences. War marine soldiers go boom! Drink Mountain Dew and scream at your Xbox Live friends or Computer screen. Murica! That's it.

Sports Games
Mario Sports games, Punch-Out, NBA Jam, Wii Sports, Sports games by Nintendo or Sega, or anime style sports that have items or silly arcade style situations are fine. I'm talking about real life Sports games are just a bore, such as later Madden games, PGA Golf, FES Soccer, Fifa Soccer. Much like FPS games, the Sports genre is "Go play Madden 26 on your Xbox or Playstation and buy a six pack of beer. Murica! sponsored by EA."

Western RPGs
Too complex than JRPGs.

 

[Frickinfrik]

Genre? Idk, maybe Online PvP games. I used to think all of them were boring and monotonous. But after playing Team Fortress 2 and having a blast with it, i changed my opinion. They can actually be very fun when made by the right people.


Now for games? I used to hate Mario Strikers Charged when I was a little kid, i was a petty kid. I guess 9-year old me was put-off by the more gritter tone the game took or I wasn’t very good at it. Now, revisiting it many years later my opinion has heavily changed. It’s a great game. I was very wrong about the game back then. I thought to myself: “kid me hated this?!”. I don’t know what I was thinking when I was a kid. But yeah, Mario Strikers Charged is great. Hard, but great.

 

[lil_thang]

I've found this for music genres far more than I have game genres.

For a long time i held a kind of truism along the lines of "If you think you hate something, try it again and you may surprise yourself". This did lead to finding some standout artists in music genres i would otherwise typically avoid from dislike.

Gaming genres however, I've had almost the inverse happen. As i grow older my propensity for try and try again-ing game genres i know that I dislike has greatly diminished.
my own natural game genre tastes are so nebulous and scattershot that i'm not even sure what it is i like specifically in game genres.

to work backward:
I don't really like fighting games. i had played and enjoyed the mortal kombats and tekkens etc from playstation era. thinking about playing those again, seems a positive and nostalgic prospect. booting up mk11 or tekken7 or streetfighter 8 or whatever fills me with dread and disdain. Ergo, i avoid fighting game genre.
I don't really like jrgps. i had played and enjoyed ff7-8-9, perhaps a few other less memorable titles of the era. i would not want to return to actually play those final fantasys but i enjoyed them at the time and can still find some enjoyment engaging in all of the aspects of those games, except for actually playing them myself. grinding whatever to 99 or farming a specific enemy for a specific item sounds like an atrocious value proposition to me now.
I don't really like strategy games, specifically 4x games. I find the high level results of the games explained by passionate players to make for something I can engage with and find interesting. I have installed Stellaris and attempted to get into it a couple of times, but I find the prospect of actually playing a 4x myself to be excruciating. they feel like actual work to me that you need to take a course in to begin to be able to start playing the job.

so what the fuck do i even like?

uh.......


i like morrowind......
rain world, pathologic 2, binding of isaac, noita, elden ring souls games whathaveyou, all the deus ex games even the one you hate, hearthstone(long time ago....)/slaythespire/monster train/deckbuilders etc,
i like no mans sky, postal 2/4, cyberpunk, doom eternal, subnautica, yakuza, caves of qud, the fallouts.

from this haphazard list one can deduce i like primarily first person (but not always) mostly with a heavy narrative focus (but not always) that contain novel interactions in their systems.

i cant exactly give that a genre name but i know it when i see it

i guess my ramblings are to say that gaming genre tags in my experience have not been as useful a category to return to after having judged and made a conclusion on. perhaps even extrapolating to other mediums, would say if you hated horror movies, continually expose yourself to horror movies in the hopes that you see a horror film that you as someone who dislikes the genre enjoys?

then it gets down to the rigidity of genre terms and i'm out i've already rambled enough

 

[opeb]

Racing Games and STG/Shmups

I had barely any racing games growing up but I started playing the ridge racer series and realized I actually love drifting around I just had to figure it out. Now trying out Genki's racers, gran turismo, racing lagoon, some others
STG wasn't exactly hate but I didn't realize they could be super fun until I played ESCHATOS and then opened myself up to tons more, I think I've played like 30 different games in the genre in the past two years

 

[Graw]

Sounds awesome ! Gonna hunt it down . Thanks for your recommendation .

Definitely go for the remaster version. There's no reason to play the original ps2 version over it. The remaster is an improvement in every way and the original version can be played in the remaster. I recommend also not worrying too much about the event rank or trying to see and do everything the first time around. It's a lot more fun if you go into it with the mindset that you won't see everything. There's a lot of advice online about avoiding enemy encounters to keep the event rank low and that seems like it would make the game really tedious and unfun.

 

[King Koopa's iconKing Koopa]

Racing games. When gaming went 3D the racing genre improved greatly.

 

[Adrastia]

FPS games. To an extent. I played the SNES Doom as a kid and one of my favorite Genesis games was Zero Tolerance. But for the most part I totally skipped them until I saw Portal on Steam for 99 cents. I also got the sequel. Those are more like puzzle platformers that happen to have a gun in them. And said gun is not a combat gun anyway. But you are still in first person shooting at stuff.

I would always go around collected dead turrets and putting them in a pile. Sometimes I would make a portal and drop them all somewhere. I liked collecting Xboxes, pots, cans and chairs too. I missed the amount of interactive items when I played Portal 2. But the humor made up for it.

I got the Bioshock collection on Switch like a year and a half ago. I really enjoyed those. But I'm not likely to buy any old FPS. It has to be something that holds my interest.

 

[E0N]

I won't say that I hated it (more like I couldn't get myself into it) but after playing Hades I started to appreciate rogue-likes a bit more.

 

[kuroninneko]

I used to think visual novels were stupid until I played Spirit Hunter NG. Awesome game.

 

[Nidoking's iconNidoking]

Anything turn-based, and as @CargoRoms said... FPS.

When I was really young, I just didn't get them and they seemed super boring. Like "Nothing moves... and it's all menus? Stupid." Then years later I decided to give the genre another shot... and picked up Quest 64. I had no idea that was NOT a well received game and probably a pretty awful "introduction" to the genre. So I hated it, like most people did, and just thought it was the whole genre that I still hated.

Finally, even more years later... Final Fantasy X. I'd heard so much love for FF, and I was like "This is the newest one and it's super popular, plus it's really cheap right now." Fell in love, became totally addicted, and it gradually became a favorite genre of mine.

As for FPS'... I don't know when it changed, and there were always exceptions. Like, I always loved Turok, Duke Nukem, Doom, Quake, etc... but like ANYTHING else I'd avoid like the plague. Makes no sense, but I eventually got over it. Still far from my favorite genre, but very open to it at least.

 

[Mini_Man.XW]

Simulation games