I hated shooters.  All of them. First person, third person, action shooters, stealth shooters.
They all sucked and I couldn't play them.

For the longest time, my hatred for shooting games affected my enjoyment of some of the biggest games to be released in recent years.  Halo fad? Skipped it. Bioshock? Missed it. Mass Effect? It's a shooter, not a goddamn RPG! I'm not playing it anymore! Gears of War, Left 4 Dead, Metroid Prime, Army of Two. I skipped all of them because I hated shooting games. I even skipped Oblivion at first because of the whole first person aspect (everybody knows that game looks stupid in third person mode).

Most of the hatred was based on the aiming.  I am not good at fine tuning my aiming and the reticule always seemed to move much faster than I was comfortable with.  I tried my hand at a few FPS's in party settings so that perhaps I could seem like I was cool enough to hang out, but I'd always come in last. I'd get shot in the face before I could even line up my cross hairs to even attempt to score a hit.  I was mocked, ridiculed. I'd go home and cry alone in my room while playing another JRPG.
More hatred was directed at the first person games.  I always got lost.  I never remembered where the hell I was going. Granted, a lot of this hatred is based on older FPS games where everything looked the same and getting lost was occasionally a feature on the back of the box that extended playtime.  Motion sickness was yet another issue that haunted me.  I got nauseous just WATCHING a friend of mine play The Darkness for two hours.  Spinning, up and down, bouncing.  Just couldn't do it.
My hatred for shooters ran deep into my soul.  Gangs of friends would play Horde mode together and I would play Rock Band alone while they teamed up to kill beasties together.  Reviewers touted Mass Effect as the best RPG of the year and I couldn't enjoy it. I tried, dammit, I tried. I even bought the limited edition! Played for about 20 minutes and stopped because this was NOT an RPG I was playing. This was a shooter with a lot of talking.  I wasn't selecting spells and hitting monsters with swords, I was trying to aim at their head to shoot them before they killed me AGAIN.  I got lost over and over and over trying to play Oblivion. I think I circled the castle for about a hour not knowing what the hell to do. 

So what happened?  How did I overcome this hatred I had for shooters?
I guess it all comes down to baby steps.

A few years prior to all of this nonsense, I actually had a little hands on time (re: shitloads of hands on) time with a horror/shooter.  Resident Evil 4.  I was never a fan of the RE series mainly due to the controls, the camera, and the lack of ammo. I don't want to run away from the thing trying to kill me. I want to kill IT first.  Resident Evil 4 obviously changed the way the Evil games were played and I was quite a fan of it.  The aiming was easy to get down, and I can credit the fantastic WaveBird controller for that. Knock the Cube and it's lackluster game lineup all you want, it's controller was FANTASTIC.  PS2 version can't hold a candle to the awesome that was the Cube version of RE4.
But anyways, Nintendo fanboyism aside, that was apparently the first step towards recovery long before I knew there was even a problem.  The next step came quite recently, actually.  E3 2008 I saw video footage and hands on gameplay with a game I knew I needed. That game was Fallout 3. It was gritty, it was dark, it was open ended and it was... shit.  It was a first person shooter.  I watched more, I learned more.  It seemed that at least one of my problems with the game would be resolved. No more aiming, thanks to the VATS targeting system in the game.
Time passes and the game releases.  This was my final chance at learning to love shooters.  I even went all out and preordered the Collector's Edition with the lunchbox and bobblehead.  I get home, fire up the game and start the escape from the vault. Problems already.  VATS is helping, but the first person element is killing me.  I refuse to give up and keep trying. I escape the vault and step out into Washington DC.  It's like a new world opened to me there.  I spent the next 4 hours just wandering the Capitol Wastelands killing marauders, looting corpses, busting into random homes and ENJOYING MYSELF.  The VATS targeting helped a lot in my enjoyment. No longer did I have to worry about actually aiming and getting my ass kicked when I couldn't pull it off. I could just sort of aim, hit the VATS trigger and let the game play out in glorious high definition blood and gore.  I spent hours upon hours playing this game.  It was my life for a long time.  Downloaded all 5 expansion packs (yet to play Mothership, I'm shamed to admit) and got nearly every achievement possible except for all of the "level up with this level karma" ones.  I'd rather continue one journey than start over with a new one.  
After that I tried to branch out.  I tried some Gears of War, co-op, of course, to carry my worthless ass, I thoroughly enjoyed Fitty Cent: Blood on the Sand, I dabbled in a little Halo, which was still hard for me.  Then it came.  The game that would finally convert me and change everything.  It reminded me of Fallout at first, the visuals were outstanding, the looting, the online co-op!
Borderlands had come and changed my world.  I started it up and immediately realized there was no VATS system to save me this time.  It was time to learn to shoot.  Hours passed and I kept going.  Learning, shooting, killing, improving, winning, living, destroying, conquering.  My aim improved to where I was taking down more monsters than a number of my companions.  Sniping was fun, assault rifles were a blast, in your face shotguns were heaven.  I was hooked and I was never going to look back.  I destroyed Borderlands, conquered Zombie Island and started up Mad Moxxi's Underdome (seriously, anybody wanna play this? It takes FOREVER...)

Then I branched out once again.  I finally got to enjoy some of Mass Effect, which would later blossom into true love with Mass Effect 2. One day  I will go back and actually complete the first game. I killed a ton of Nazis and saw a ton of titties in The Saboteur. I picked up Army of Two: The 40th Day and loved it. Played online with a buddy quite a bit, beat it on the hardest difficulty too!  Even went back and picked up the first AO2 game, which honestly, plays like ass compared to 40th Day.  Bioshock 2 was coming up on release, so what the hell? Let's try the first Bioshock all by myself!  Beat the hell out of it!  Now I'm currently going through Bioshock 2 and tried out Aliens vs. Predator.
The shooter addiction has struck. The fear of aiming is gone, the motion sickness may still drop by, but I'll just take a break and come back later on!  No getting lost, no getting my ass handed to me, no more crying in my room playing a JRPG.  Oh don't worry, I still love my RPGs!  Magna Carta 2 was great, Tales of Vesperia was incredible, Final Fantasy XIII is already preordered too!  But so is Splinter Cell. And I'm just counting the days until I get to kill some sumbitches in THAT game.

My name is Joe Cammisa, and I now love shooting games.  And I'm done writing this crap because Bioshock 2 is more important than you guys.