To me, a gamer is someone that plays many different types of games. So if all you play is WoW or CoD, I would call you a fan of those particular games, but not a true gamer (that's not to say people that only play one type of game are inferior or anything).

Mario Galaxy 2. The weird part there is that lives in that game are basically meaningless, as death simply puts you back on the map screen where you hit A to go right back into the level. Why they didn't abolish them entirely, I have no idea. Maybe they think people still like lives counters in this day and age. Just...it's 2011 now, not 1990.DJ_Lae

I think Nintendo keeps them in for tradition; it would be weird for the green mushroom to be absent in a Mario game.

The first 3 Spyro games are definitely great, and they've probably held up better than some other platformers of that era, but I wouldn't call them some of the best games of all time. They just weren't innovative or noteworthy enough.

one of things that i could live without is the idea that rpg's are about statistical attributes LoG-Sacrament

Isn't that what an RPG is at its core, though? I know it stands for role-playing game, but since that's such a broad term, RPG usually refers to DnD inspired games with statistical attributes.

When I was young I would play the same games over and over again, but now that I actually have money to buy new games, I don't often play the same one twice.

Civilization V. I know it got rave reviews, but most of the Civ community agrees that it's actually not very good. All of its features look good on paper, but after playing through a few times, you realize that they weren't very well thought out after all.

I usually do a lot of research before playing a game, so I'm usually pleased, but when I do play a game I don't like, I'll criticize everything about it.

Eternal Sonata has pretty much everything I hate about RPGS besides a bad battle system. Your party consists of mostly children with a few pedophiles mixed in, there are tons of filler quests (you have to go through a whole a dungeon to fetch some water for a little girl), and there is hardly any enemy variety.

A game doesn't necessarily have to be innovative to be enjoyable, but it does have to be innovative to be game of the year material. Games that win that award are generally the ones that push the medium forward. Notice that the game that Gamespot gave GOTY last year (and the year before, IIRC) was not just the game that got the highest score that year.

Spyro. The first 3 games were some of my favorites when I was young, but then I bought Enter the Dragonfly...