My father, my brother and I all play real-time-strategy games. However, each of us has different tastes in the genre:
My father: he loves Total Annihilation. I've played against him several times... and won't challenge him anytime soon. He's unbeatable with the Arm. Any small crack in your defenses, and you are history. While you're trying to walk in and erase his base, he's already in your's, and almost done.
My brother: he's a dedicated WarCraft/StarCraft fan. I've watched him go from game-start to ready-for-attack in very short order. I'm not sure how he does it, but I don't challenge him at all... he's too good.
Myself: C&C all the way! My brother and father won't take me on, simply because I am a defensive wizard at the game. No wall, no gate... I'm totally open, and still fight off wave after wave.
We don't agree on which is the "better game" simply because not one of the three of us can match the other two at our chosen game. I can almost play TA, but just cannot get the hang of it, and refuse to put any more time into learning it. My brother almost gets TA, but can't seem to get through the simplest single-player missions on C&C or RA. My father has tried to get into our games (I would kill for his PC... not him, though :) ; it just rocks, period) and has the same problems we have getting into TA.
My point? The three of us are intelligent people (my father is a mechanical engineer; my brother is a biochemist; I'm just months from a programming degree) with very different personalities, and very different tastes in games. However, we don't push our games on each other, and we don't get together on holidays and scream insults at each other over our differences in taste.
...which is more than I can say for many others I've come across. If you so much as hint that SC2 will be less than stellar, a lot of the more rabid fans will try to beat some "sense" into you. "If you don't like SC, you're a [expletive deleted] idiot!" is the tamest comment I've heard; most are so unprintable they'd lose sense if I tried to censor them.
Whatever happened to respecting others' opinions? I tried to explain to a friend of mine why C&C3 is an incredible gaming experience. Another student overheard us talking, and MY GOD! you'd think I just admitted to being a Teletubbies fan! "That game is garbage! All you do is spam tanks and stuff, and you can win! EA is horrible! The game is so buggy you can't play it!" (I've paraphrased the preceeding comments; just replace and insert some extremely foul language and you'll get close to the original.)"StarCraft is so much better!"
Being the calm and rational person I am, I asked him the obvious: Did you update this, that and the other thing? Did you get the patches? He didn't want to hear it. "I spent *insert obscene dollar amount* on my PC, and it should have run fine!" he screams at me... but he's looking around like he just realized his fly was unzipped. "Anyway, I uninstalled it and..." (what he did to it was absolutely unprintable).
Needless to say, my friend is not inclined to play SC anytime soon.
Seriously, though: they are games, right? The whole point, as I understand it, is to play a game, enjoy it, and recommend it to your friends, not hold it up as the Ultimate Avatar of Truth, Goodness, and Cookies! If I like a game you don't, what's the harm? Are you going to win a huge prize for talking people out of buying the competitors' products?
Another thing is, you're not doing your game's developers any favors. If you come across as a rabid, frothing cultist, chances are the person you're trying to "convert" will be so turned off they'll never buy it... and they'll talk their friends out of buying it too. If on the off chance they do buy it, you'll have cranked their expectations so high, that the game will seem flat compared to the description you give them. Finally, your expectations for the inevitable sequel/expansion will be so high, you may become disenchanted by the product ("WHAT? No super-intelligent AI? No particle effects? No DX10 support? *&^%!!!"
My friend bought C&C:TFD the next week. He's having problems playing C&C, and has asked me for my advice on several occasions. When I ask him if he likes it, he says it's a lot better than the lunatic made it out to be, and is looking forward to upgrading his PC to handle C&C3.
Yes, people: reasonable sells.