At first I'd play everything, even though there wasn't anything particular that qualified as addictive game. It was just a general fascination for the medium video games, I would say.
Super Mario Bros. really had a big impact on me, because that game was on a whole nother level in comparison to second generation games. Naturally, platformers became my favorite genre and the NES really had a lot of them, and good ones and that.
I didn't have much interest in The Legend of Zelda or other games like it, because the objectives weren't as clear and the games were in English. The game-changer here was A Link to the Past, because not only was its game design more welcoming to the player, it also had a German translation. It's a similar story for Metroid, minus the translation, where Super Metroid really changed things for me. So the SNES era established action-adventures, action-RPGs and RPGs as additional favorite genres for me, and made me go back to revisit NES games that I hadn't given much time.
Since then my preferences have been mostly set to this day: Platformers, action-adventure, action-RPG, RPG (preferably J), racing games. I used to play sports games too, but nowadays I just watch them (the sports, not someone playing sports video games). The Fire Emblem series added the subcategory strategy RPG. Outside of these genres, I play the most interesting bunch of many other genres, so I don't limit myself to only a few types.
When it comes to cutscenes and the length of games, my preferences haven't really changed, but games have changed. It's still perfectly okay for an RPG to clock in between 30-40 hours for the first playthrough, but unfortunately many game developers cram in a lot more than that. Their attitude is at fault here, because they design the game with the approach of "the player will play this game only once" instead of going for something that will provide incentives to play the game more than once; to be perfectly clear here, this does not necessarily mean new game+ features, it can also be as simple as making the game actually fun to play with no additional features for a second playthrough whatsoever.
This is the reason why I am looking forward to the Paper Mario game in May. Yes, I already own it on the GC, and yes, I've played through it at least a dozen times already, and yes, there's no new game+. But this is a fun RPG that allows you to play it a bit different every time and it can be fully completed in under 25 hours after the first playthrough.
Legend11 correctly predicted that GTA IV will outsell Super Smash Bros. Brawl. I was wrong.
