What game genres are there and what are the definitions of them?

[Emperor Demonking]

What game genres are there and what are the definitions of them?

Please don't mention RPG.

[Xenogears]

Sports Games: Games that are all about a sport.
Puzzle Games: Games that are all about puzzles.
FPS: Take the role of a (usually) faceless killer and shoot stuff.
Adventure: Explore a giant world. Tends to have some overlap with RPG's.
Beat'M'Up: Run around punching the crap out of everything.
Shooters: Take control of something like a ship and shoot waves of other ships.

[Oregano]

Platformer: Sometimes a form of adventure game, concentrating on timed jumps and a lot of running, sometimes doesn't have many enemies.
RTS: You control a bunch of units on a map(usually large) and command them in well...real time.

[Winterwind]

Turn-based Strategy (TBS): You control a bunch of units on a map and command them in turns. :smallwink:

Potentially divided into two sub-genres, turn-based strategy and turn-based tactics, with the former involving a much larger amount of units and potentially some kind of economical aspect (example: Battle for Wesnoth), and the latter having much less units, with the individual units having more possibilities (example: X-Com/UFO).


And then there are all those building/management simulations - the Sim City line, the various Tycoon games, stuff like that. I'm not sure how one would label this genre though, nor am I certain to which degree it is still present on the modern market.

[Siosilvar]

Third Person Shooters: Usually Star Wars games, you run around shooting things and hitting them with your lightsaber.

[Dairun Cates]

Actually, Genre descriptions are getting insanely inaccurate nowadays. There's so much genre bending going and so many sub-genres emerging that at times, it's just faster to explain the gameplay than to call it by its "genre" to avoid confusion.

That's not to say there aren't obvious ones that are essentially the very essence of their genre (JRPGS are notorious for this), but it gets a bit silly after a while. For instance...

Turn-based Strategy RPG: Final Fantasy Tactics

Action Adventure RPG Platformer: Kingdom Hearts

Top Down Action Puzzle Shooter: Bangai-O Spirits

On Rails Shooter Rhythm Game: Rez

Action Adventure Side-Scrolling Platformer God Sim Game: Actraiser

Side-Scrolling Platforming Puzzle Adventure Role-playing Game with a Lemony Twist of Pokemon Style Character Collecting: Super Paper Mario

Spore: Spore

The real issue is that there's as many genres as people want to define. There's actually a joke that if you pick a number from 1-100 you can find someone arguing that that's how many basic narrative plots there are. Genres are defined and redefined so quickly and often that it's almost impossible to keep up with the corporate jargon.

So, I guess before I go out of my way to list what I can remember, I'd be curious to know why you need to know all the genres.

Of course, if you want a really lame answer...
http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/ps2/

Gamefaqs seems to think all games are one of the following categories:
Action | Action Adventure | Adventure | Driving | Miscellaneous | Role-Playing | Simulation | Sports | Strategy

[warty goblin]

Actually, Genre descriptions are getting insanely inaccurate nowadays. There's so much genre bending going and so many sub-genres emerging that at times, it's just faster to explain the gameplay than to call it by its "genre" to avoid confusion.



I am reminded of this every time I try to sort my games collection by genre. Some are easy, Starcraft goes in RTS, Halo in FPS, Tomb Raider in 3rd person action, and so on. But then you get some hard ones. Is Overlord 3rd person action or RTS? Well, it's closer to 3rd person, so I'll put it there. What about the Total War games? I mean, there's real time and turn based, so I better put them between the two sections, which can then segue into RPG with Spellforce, then from there into FPS with Mass Effect, then, aw dawn. Where the hell do you put Spore??

[Siosilvar]

Where the hell do you put Spore??

Spore Cell Stage: No idea.
Creature Stage: Action/Adventure?
Tribal: RTS
Civilization: RTS
Space: RTRPG

[warty goblin]

Spore Cell Stage: No idea.
Creature Stage: Action/Adventure?
Tribal: RTS
Civilization: RTS
Space: RTRPG

Great, I'll go buy another couple copies so my filing system is perfect. And then Fallout 3 is gonna come out and screw up everything again.

[Selrahc]

What about the Total War games? I mean, there's real time and turn based, so I better put them between the two sections,

Total war games are much more about the turn based stuff. Considering I've played many a game where I didn't even do a single thing in real time, just letting the autoresolve handle things. The battles are fun, but the game is turn based.

[warty goblin]

Total war games are much more about the turn based stuff. Considering I've played many a game where I didn't even do a single thing in real time, just letting the autoresolve handle things. The battles are fun, but the game is turn based.

Not the way I play 'em. I've never gotten the hang of the TBS part particularly well, so most of the time I have a crappy economy redlined to support a massive yet out of date army which, due to my sage leadership, slaughters everything the enemy can throw at it. Also, I never build cavalry, just infantry and archers. This can lead to some strange results, such as one battle where I actuallly lost more men to friendly fire than enemy action. I think the losses were about 70 of mine to 700 of the enemy.

[Selrahc]

Not the way I play 'em. I've never gotten the hang of the TBS part particularly well, so most of the time I have a crappy economy redlined to support a massive yet out of date army which, due to my sage leadership, slaughters everything the enemy can throw at it. Also, I never build cavalry, just infantry and archers. This can lead to some strange results, such as one battle where I actuallly lost more men to friendly fire than enemy action. I think the losses were about 70 of mine to 700 of the enemy.

You play the game wierd :smalltongue:

[warty goblin]

You play the game wierd :smalltongue:

Indeed, my nation has strange recruiting posters- "Sign up in the only army so good you need to be more afraid of the guy next to you then the enemy!"

[Forderz]

Total war games can go either way, which is why I like them so much. Sometimes all you want to do it auto resolve because there's so much you want to do in one turn, other times you'll be praying for a fight.

[Kaihaku]

Strategy
o Turn-Based
o Real Time
o Tactical
Action
o First Person Shooter
o Shooters
o Hack n' Slash
Puzzle
Hybrids
o Platformer (Puzzle + Action)

Meh.


Gamefaqs seems to think all games are one of the following categories:
Action | Action Adventure | Adventure | Driving | Miscellaneous | Role-Playing | Simulation | Sports | Strategy

That one sounds a lot more interesting than it really is. :smallfrown: