Same here.....it was one of few genres that I completely ignored. I'm lucky enough to have a PS3 and in the last couple of years am buying all the early PS3 FPS'. The added benefit is that I'm picking them up for £5 tops. Absolutely love a standard, linear fps and am now pretty good by my standards. The only FPS' I can't bring myself to play and the realistic simulations of current or past war-zones.

Ok, I should mention that Halo is one of the games that showed that consoles can do FPS games alongside Goldeneye and Perfect Dark. Though I will admit, Halo did take some influence from what PC FPS games did as opposed to Rare's duo of shooters that had a bit more of an arcade feel to it all. Not saying those games sucked, but just saying how they feel to me at least.

Same here, on both accounts. ;)

Morrowind broke with a lot of conventions that RPGs had at that time, and it took a while until I actually realized this. With my first character, I just dabbled around a bit, and found that my character was rather weak - not surprising in hindsight since I kept doing things that his class wasn't good at.

I then started another character and played in the way that many RPGs of that time _had_ to be played - meaning, I tried to game the system in every way possible. I ran and jumped around for hours because I noticed that this was a seemingly risk-free way to increase my level, and I assumed that increasing my level was a good thing (what it really did, though, was causing the game to spawn enemies that I wasn't in any way prepared for because because I never trained a single useful combat skill). I systematically stole every single movable item in every settlement, spending hours hauling the stuff to the merchants and selling it for pennies, because I assumed that I would have to stockpile money for some outrageously expensive late-game purchases. In short, I played the game in a thoroughly unenjoyable way because I expected it to have the same flaws as other RPGs at that time.

I shelved the game for several months, and at some time I picked it up again and just let it flow. Instead of trying to game the system, I actually role-played my character - a playing style that most computer RPGs did not allow, or did allow only to a very limited extent. And that was when Morrowind started to unfold its beauty. The immense freedom of choice, the rich background, the lack of any forced progression - it all clicked into place once I started to treat Morrowind as an actual role-playing game, and not just as a set of numbers that I would need to min-max in order to achieve some pre-determined end goal.

Since then, Morrowind has become the game that I probably spent the most time with. :)

You can also argue that, due to Halo's popularity it was the catalyst to the consolization of PC shooters, along with CoD. Since Halo was the game that popularized the regenerating shield and the two weapons concept unlike previous PC shooters that had health packs and a whole mess of weapons. Even later PC shooters still carried on the tradition of having more than two weapons, but the "Big Budget AAA Titles" will almost always follow the Halo method of short campaign, multiplayer focus (mostly after 2), regenerating shields, and two guns with the ability for melee at any opportunity. Were all these changes bad? No. Is Halo a bad game? No. But it still had in my opinion a negative affect on the PC shooter market.

Such an interesting question!

for me it has been Civ V. I was all excited when it came out and then just couldn't play it. It felt wrong, I didn't like the one unit per tile thing. i was confused about happiness... the usual.

Then a conversation with one of my favorite modders turned me on to the new balances of the new systems. i went back to it and it wasn't even hard to get into. I was off and running.

Cheers.

Civ. III was a game I really had to make myself play before I had any fun with it, as much as I like the game now it seems to not like me. Fallout 2 was a similar case with the annoying temple at the beginning and constantly dying in want of a firearm for the first couple of hours. Certain older games are kinda like that like Sim City, Street Fighter II, and Zelda II count as well. I know there are better examples, I just can't think of them right now.

I don't know that I have outright disliked something and changed my mind, or had something grow on me. I have had games that took a while to hook me if that is close enough. For example I played baldur's gate 1 for about an hour and didn't really have any strong feelings about it one way or the other. A friend got way into it and suggested I keep going and after giving it another try I got to where I was hurrying off of work to keep going. I think that is more of theme with me where I need to be ready for a game, than it is me aquiring a taste for it. Even with as much as I enjoyed BG1 I still have get to get in the mood to play BG2 for more than 10 minutes.

The closest I think I have come to actually turning my opinion around was recently with Dark Souls. The same friend recommended it to me, and at first I was having a very hard time with it. It seemed excessively hard, and I was having a hard time getting a feel for the combat, while trying to go the wrong way. I was getting annoyed at the difficulty, but then I started getting into the flow of the combat, and hit up youtube to explain what the heck stuff was. (why is there a green thing where I died? There is something called humanity? What is it?) 40 hours in I tossed my game and started over on the right foot and it was so, so much easier. I'm now another 40 hours in. In this case I would say I was "unsure" about it at first, but then it could be argued that it did indeed grow on me.

Definitely Anachronox. At first I disliked the controls, hated the endless backtracking through the huge city and its districts, and wondered why the developers had opted for the strange JRPG-style combat. The game's humour also didn't really take off until after the beginning stages, and from that point onward each joke was more outlandish than the last. Once I went to the Sender Station and beyond, it was all pure fun and lots of good laugs all the way to the end. That game really is something.

Your right, but X6 is Special.
This guy explains things better than I could.

Thanks!

Civilization IV. I didn't enjoy playing it before i tried out the Fall to Heaven 2 mod. Mainly because of the 'stacks of doom' combat though I think i had other minor complains of the game too, but i haven't played the game in forever so can't really remember what those where.

Civilization III was quite the opposite experience though. Loved the game when it first came out because of the new cultural borders and the ability to take over enemy cities with it. (this was the vanilla game btw) Started to not like it as much after some time and went back to playing Civ 2 again. From what i've heard Civ III got a lot better with all the expansions though, but i haven't actually tried play the game with them. Some day i'll go back and try it out again.