I'm with you guys on the shoot em ups. Hate them (except for battlefield II). The other ones like World at War are just kids running around shooting everything in sight. So unrealistic.
The first multiplayer in our office was a flight sim game - we would all man a bomber - it was brilliant. One person would pilot and be bombadier while the others manned all the machine guns. We then moved onto 4 player Doom, where, like you say, the youngest programmer in our organisation would kick all our butts.
The good thing about the RTS was that you normally played with a team of guys you knew, against faceless online foes you didn't. Also, picking a standard time normally ensured you wouldn't be disturbed.
It was interesting when my 83 year old Dad went online with Battlefield II. The irony was that he had been a sniper in World War II (he was wounded on Crete), and here he was on a virtual battlefield in the 2000s - we could only let him play the modern warfare ones, not ones with Germans.
Unfortunately he didn't grasp the concept of teams, and HE would shoot anything that moved, and kept getting kicked for team kills
James
