I prefer shooter as well, although i usually go the extra mile and say the vertical, horizontal, isometric, etc as well. Games like smash TV / robotron i'll call twin sticks most the time. I prefer "brawler" for side-scrolling beat em up games like battletoads or double dragon or battletoads and double dragon. FPS / TPS for those genres, RTS and RPG of course...I don't mind Sandbox as a term, the only real alternative would be things like "free roaming" or "GTA clone" which i'm not too fond of. A more recent internet trend is to refer to FPS type games as "SHOOTAN GAEMS", which amuses me to no end.

The British "SNES" pronunciation is crazy weird to hear if you grew up in the states where most people would pronounce the letters separately or just say "super". NEC and SNK I will say as letters, not as a word, FAQ I will usually say as "fack". NES is also letters, or of course the classic "regular nintendo". 16 bit Sega stuff I'll usually just call Genny unless I'm talking about a CD or 32x game specifically.

Oh, and for the record, there ARE remotes that come corded, I've seen LD players with them. But I too prefer "controller" greatly over other words like "remote" or "pad"/"paddle".