What game genre kicks your ass?

[Schuyler Colfax]

For me it would have to be platforming, I honestly can't do it. For one, I walk around really slow and if I'm high up in the air and I'm just a couple of platforms away and I miss and have to start from the bottom again, fuck that. I don't mind if a different genre has a little platforming in it mostly because it's not that difficult.

[Adrian Laguna]

Computer Multiplayer First Person Shooters, especially the ones where you die with few hits. Often I will not even see the enemy before I get shot. When I do see the enemy, I can't make a positive ID before I get shot. If I decide not to make an ID and just open up, the guy I'm shooting is guaranteed to be on my side, and then I get shot. When I see an enemy and am sure it's an enemy, he reacts first and I get shot. If I react first, it's because I panicked and started spraying like crazy, the enemy just calmly aims and I get shot. Then there are the times when I accidentally ambush someone from behind at point blank range, then I panic, miss, bring attention to myself, and get shot.

Strangely enough, I do not suck nearly as hard if it's a console game. I'm not good, but I sometimes manage to be more of an asset than a liability. Also, I'm good at single player in both computer and console, but I hear so's everyone else.

[Schuyler Colfax]

Computer Multiplayer First Person Shooters, especially the ones where you die with few hits. Often I will not even see the enemy before I get shot. When I do see the enemy, I can't make a positive ID before I get shot. If I decide not to make an ID and just open up, the guy I'm shooting is guaranteed to be on my side, and then I get shot. When I see an enemy and am sure it's an enemy, he reacts first and I get shot. If I react first, it's because I panicked and started spraying like crazy, the enemy just calmly aims and I get shot. Then there are the times when I accidentally ambush someone from behind at point blank range, then I panic, miss, bring attention to myself, and get shot.

Strangely enough, I do not suck nearly as hard if it's a console game. I'm not good, but I sometimes manage to be more of an asset than a liability. Also, I'm good at single player in both computer and console, but I hear so's everyone else.

I can relate to pretty much everything you've just said, though I am getting better at them. What makes it worse for me is that my computer sucks so, I have to deal with the lag issue plus all of that.

[Gandalf]

Rhythm.

I don't have any.

[Praxis]

Realistic sports games. I just can't get into them. Madden, FIFA, etc. I'm useless. I can't even understand why people enjoy these. It's a game that simulates another game? Generally you can't place near the amount of strategy of the actual game into the console versions, because there's no way a human can control all of those individual characters so the team stuff ends up you being frustrated at the AIs.

I've got pinpoint accuracy with keyboard and mouse, so I'm usually pretty good at FPS- though the genre feels so stale these days that I don't enjoy them that much anymore.

RTS, I don't play a lot of, but I'm generally pretty good at them once I've spent enough time to learn the rules and strategies.

Platformers I'm very good at.

Puzzle games...I'm pretty good at the few I play, I suppose. I can play Tetris DS at infinite speed if that counts?

Rhythm games I also play very few of. Guitar Hero, I can beat almost anything on hard mode (barring Through the Fire and Flames) and about half of the songs on expert. I suck horribly at DDR but have only played it twice.

RPGs, I have a head for numbers so I'm usually great at them. Love Pokemon.

Fighters, I only get into a small number but when I do I get very, very in to it. Case in point: Smash Bros.

[Phillip Hone]

Rhythm. I'm probably "tone deaf", or something. I could never really understand real guitar, and Guitar Hero is only slightly less impossible for me to do.

[PREDATOR490]

I can easily relate to the FPS kind of game. I recently got COD4 and BF2142 before that.

I lasted a few minutes in COD4 before I got pissed off with other players shooting me through the fucking wall or grenades landing at my feet before I had finished spawning at some points.

BF2142 is much easier for me but this is mostly because I play the Titan mode exclusively. I get to sit on an untouchable flight deck and rain down Artilery fire from the guns when I can get into one of the slots. If not, I just wait for the shields to drop then camp the corridors when the enemy team starts boarding.
The times when I end up going for capture points usually has me choosing the wrong profession for the target.
I go an Anti-Armor dude and I get shot to death by snipers or infantry.
I go something else only to stare down the barrel of a hostile tank as I fire my shitty rifle at him in a final act of defiance. Dosent help when the majority of the team seem to be doing their own thing most of the time.

[Darth Raptor]

I can understand being disinterested in RPGs, but finding them difficult?

Sports, puzzles, rhythm. I don't play them. Of those that I do enjoy and do play, I fail hardest at fighting games.

[Joviwan]

RTS. Any game where resource managment is a significant factor of playstyle punches me in the cut, puts a knee into my teeth, then bends me over a table and grabs the nearby stick of butter. I have absolutely no head for construction priorities, resource or unit management. I'm either richer than God, with an enormous city and all the tech and industry in the world, and yet a crew of enemy peasants will steamroll over me without even thinking, or I've got a huge, massive army that would make China think twice about getting involved with, yet their so undeveloped and poorly equiped that one enemy mid-range unit will cut a swath through my forces like they were playing Dynasty Warriors on easy mode.

RTS games I've personally experienced these phenomena:
Warcraft II & III
Command And Conquer (All of them)
Total Annihilation
Masters of Orion II
Spellforce 2
Natural Selection
Starcraft

In addition, there are plenty of other games where this is generally the case that may or not be RTS. If it's got resource management beyond "What are you going to take with you", I'm always going to be left in the dust.

[Aquatain]

FPS games, i suck at them because i get bored like 30 secs after i start playing, it happens every time -it's really weird but my eyes start drifting and i stop paying attention.

[pucky18]

Any RTS with any emphasis on resource management. I'm usually pretty good at the combat parts, but fucking hate dealing with resources, mostly because I'm awful with multitasking. Add to this that the resource gathering is invariably mind-numbingly boring and adds nothing fun to any game, and you can see why I absolutely suck at most RTS's.

[Feil]

I can't do adventure games. It just never occurs to me that I am supposed to use the banana on the bagel to create a sandwich to give to the ice monster so that it will give me a hamster which I can then use on a wheel to generate electricity to power the doors so that I can move on to the next room....

Fortunately, they don't exist any more, having been eaten by cRPGs, so this is of no concern to me.

[Stark]

RTS. Any game where resource managment is a significant factor of playstyle punches me in the cut, puts a knee into my teeth, then bends me over a table and grabs the nearby stick of butter. I have absolutely no head for construction priorities, resource or unit management. I'm either richer than God, with an enormous city and all the tech and industry in the world, and yet a crew of enemy peasants will steamroll over me without even thinking, or I've got a huge, massive army that would make China think twice about getting involved with, yet their so undeveloped and poorly equiped that one enemy mid-range unit will cut a swath through my forces like they were playing Dynasty Warriors on easy mode.

I had a similar thing with RTSs, but you can skill up enough to get by. Avoiding the shit RTSs helps too.

It's annoying there isn't more 'shared command' games, because I'm interested in raiding, resource capturing, battles, etc. I'm pretty flash at WiC for instance. But I fucking hate base building, and constantly refilling build queues and shit. I know plenty of people who love it, though, so sharing woudl be nice.

I suck at econ games, like Capitalism etc, and I usually suck at the econ side of strategy games like HoI2 and Galciv2 etc. I'm not awful at it, but my focus is very much on research and military rather than economy. My old mate Flash is Lord of Econ, so after a turn he'll be all 'lol how much you makin per turn now lol'. And then I'll try to blow him up and he'll bribe/fastbuild his way out of it.

Like Feil I sucked at bad adventure games, the ones with the stupid chains of dumb illogical shit you're supposed to do. Good ones I enjoyed, even if I wasn't very good at them.

[Qwerty 42]

I voted Fighting, but Rhythm would be more accurate. I don't do twitch gaming well.

[Dark Lord of the Bith]

I can't play computer RTS or FPS games, especially the RTSes that end up playing just like an FPS. Starcraft and Warcraft end up just being micromanaging clickfests, where the player that can click the fastest and most accurately wins, just like an FPS. I much prefer those games on a console, where it feels more natural to play a twitch game. There's very little actual strategy involved in those games.

Maybe I never got the hang of playing keyboard and mouse games, since I was born and raised with a controller in my hands.

[Twoyboy]

RTS. I tend to think slowly due to my tendency to get sidetracked and also I'm an extrovert, so not being able to bounce ideas off of others limits my creativity and focus. Hence, I'm usually focused on one thing and getting my arse kicked somewhere else.

[Master_Baerne]

Any RTS with any emphasis on resource management. I'm usually pretty good at the combat parts, but fucking hate dealing with resources, mostly because I'm awful with multitasking. Add to this that the resource gathering is invariably mind-numbingly boring and adds nothing fun to any game, and you can see why I absolutely suck at most RTS's.

After you get a self-sustaining operation going, you can pretty much concentrate on the military stuff. The problem is getting said operation, which can take forever.

[Ohma]

For some reason, I have a very limited memory for fighting game moves, and can't for the life of me get blocking down, needless to say I have trouble in any fighting game once I pass the first two super easy opponents.

*kick**block*
*punch**block*
*kickkickkickpunchkickjumpjump**block*
"STOP BLOCKING YOU ASS!!"
*kick**throwpunchkickhighkickpowerslam*
*P2 Wins!*
"ARRRG, you cheating DICK!!

[Stark]

That's probably not your fault: most fighting games have gravitated towards the 'fighting game nut' market rather than casual players, because SF2 etc was quite simple and easy. Thus, the learning curve to get any good is quite steep, so most people don't bother.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

I voted sports, though perhaps I should have said adventure.

Some sports games I am pretty good at - usually baseball games, and I can usually handle myself well enough in football. Soccer, hockey, and other such things both hold little interest to me, and I'm not very good at them. More obscure/boring sports are even worse.

Now, I loved old adventure games like The Dig and Day of the Tentacle, but admittedly, I always sucked quite a bit. Pixel-hunting was not really my thing, and I hated how often you had to get x item and use it for y task at exactly the right place and time or else the game would get stuck and you'd have to start over. It often felt completely arbitrary, and while the two afore-mentioned games were very good and very fun, on the whole I just prefer RPGs because they're much less anal about that sort of thing.

[Ohma]

That's probably not your fault: most fighting games have gravitated towards the 'fighting game nut' market rather than casual players, because SF2 etc was quite simple and easy. Thus, the learning curve to get any good is quite steep, so most people don't bother.

Yeah, I guess the same could be said of RTSs, platformers, sims, RPGs, or FPSs, but fighting games seem much more outwardly difficult just because developers cling to weirdly anachronistic things. (like not listing commands using the buttons found on the console controller, but what you'd find if it were in a traditional arcade cabinet setup, or CPU difficulty that would be ideal if the game's objective were to milk as much money out of arcade patron's pockets as possible)

[aerius]

Everything except realistic driving games and the first couple Grand Theft Auto games. I can't play computer games for shit unless I load up on the cheat codes.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

Fighting. Anything more complex than the early SF or Mortal Kombat gets nothing but hatred and a complete lack of skill from me.

Basically, if I want to memorize button combinations, I'll play a puzzle game. And I'm not varied enough to play an effective button-spammer and win that way.

So either way, I regularly get my ass kicked by fighting games.

[Exonerate]

I've never been able to do rhythm games. At all. Like, I'll start on the easiest song in DDR and die half a minute into it. I think part of it is because I need to concentrate on predicting, instead of just reacting. I've never been very good at platformers either, although I guess I'm not terrible by most people's standards.

I'm good at FPSes. I can pretty much pick up any casual FPS and top the scoreboard my first time playing. I just have good aim, positioning, situational awareness, etc. In DMs, if the other person's general game sense/experience and map knowledge isn't vastly superior to mine, I can usually fight on an even footing. I played Natural Selection for a long, long time (FPS/RTS, although Joviwan seems to have put it under RTS), so my aim is described by the average person as somewhere between robot-like and perfect.

I'm a bit above average in RTSes, I guess. I do feel the need to contend the assertion that Starcraft is just a "clickfest" though - there IS a lot of strategy in the game. In the end, your APM is just a ceiling of your skill.

I'm probably average in fighting games. I could probably become decent at them, but after I reach a certain level of competency, I just lose interest in winning and instead opt to do stunts. The thing a lot of people don't realize about fighting games is that it's a lot like rock-paper-scissors - the game isn't centered around making the hardest-to-execute moves, it's about forcing your opponent into disadvantageous situations and keeping yourself out of them.

Unless you're playing Super Smash Bros.

[Stark]

I should mention Condemned. It's a first-person bash-em-up, but I had the stupid idea of playing on Hard (because I'm good, natch). Turns out fuck nobody plays on hard: even FAQs etc only have stats for easy and normal. It's taken me months to get to the end, because I kept getting stuck on various battles due to checkpointing (ie cross checkpoint with no bullets in a broken shotgun with 4 guys right behind me = fuck) and abandoning it for ages. I recently started playing again on normal to grab the stuff I missed first time, and it's laughably easy: 25% through in less than an hour and I haven't died once.