Can a sports and racing gamer change his stripes?

I’ve been a video gamer since the advent of the technology. We’re talking Magnavox Odyssey here, which actually pre-dated Pong. It used the same moving light sources as Pong and came with overlays that adhered to your TV by static electricity. Each overlay represented a different "game" (shooting gallery, haunted mansion), but they were all essentially light gun shooters. After the Odyssey came a Radio Shack Pong unit that proved to be great bang for the buck at $14.99. Next up was the Mattel Intellivision, to this day, one of my favorite consoles ever. I still have two of them and a box of games. Believe it or not, I never owned an Atari, NES or Super NES. There was a brief dalliance with a Colecovision (impulsively purchased after playing baseball at a party), but it was the Intellivision that kept me going right up until I bought a Sega Genesis, specifically for the NHL series. In fact, I only ever owned two games for the Genesis – Road Rash, and every release of NHL Hockey. Then came the Playstation, and all hell broke loose. There was a period during the PSX/N64 years when my game library topped out at over 100 current generation titles, the proceeds of my sideline gig as a game reviewer. Insanity. I finally came to my senses and sold most of them while they still retained some value.

As the next generation of systems arrived on the scene (Sega Dreamcast, an ever so brief experience with the PS2, Xbox), I kept my obsession under control, accumulating only a handful of games for each console, almost exclusively sports and racing games. At a certain point, it dawned on me that those were the genres that drew me to video gaming in the first place, and kept me coming back for more on every system from the Intellivision onward. Of course there were exceptions, arcade games on the Intellivision, Donkey Kong on the Colecovision, Wolfenstein 3D on the PC, Bejeweled 2 on the 360, heck, I even B.S.’d my way through a pretty credible review of Turok 2 for the N64. But I eventually accepted that third person action games and first person shooters simply weren’t my thing, sports titles and racers were all it took to satisfy my gaming needs. Periodically, I’d take a flyer on a high profile action title, only to sell it off after completing a level or two (or not). I’ve obviously missed out on scores of great games over the years as a result, and that’s always bothered me a little.

During our visit to the Schmaltz household in Sept., Jim took the opportunity to provide in-depth demos of some of his favorite games: Uncharted, Arkham Asylum, IL2 Sturmovik, Fallout 3, Rockband 2 and, most impressively, Bioshock. It was quite the eye opener. I came home with three of those games (and bought RB2 soon after), completely re-energized about gaming. More specifically, I’ve become determined to take the time to finally master games in genres that I’ve given up on too easily in the past – FPS’s, air combat, action games, etc. I’m tired of missing out.

The downside to this is that, with all the great games I’ve discovered in the past few months, I’m like a fat kid at a buffet, gorging myself but never finishing one course before anxiously moving on to the next. Not the ideal way to approach things, but I’m gradually becoming more comfortable with first and third person character control. While I still pretty much suck at it, I’m having a lot more fun in the process of sucking. I’m beginning to feel like there’s hope for me yet, at least until the next great sports or racing game comes along to monopolize my gaming time.