Tonberry

Probably a rare pick, when I was at a friend's house (who played much more M-rated games than me) I was so traumatized by the introduction in Max Payne 1 when his family gets murdered that I immediately ran home completely shattered and just started crying.

Fair enough, but it's a relatively common way to refer to games with "fetch quests" and grindy number-based progression. Most people refer to games as "Singleplayer MMOs" in a derogatory way though since people who don't play MMOs tend to call out the skinnerbox-aspects harder, but I don't mind it. I think it's a perfectly fine description for a very small subset of games with a very particular design structure. Extra interesting with Amalur as there are some speculation and datamined files that might suggest that the game was originally supposed to be an actual MMO, but that two projects on the same studio got mashed together to create the final game. Of course, there's nothing wrong with having different perspectives either :)

In recent years it's probably Assassin's Creed: Valhalla or Dragon Quest 11. I'm not done with either but I remember clocking in on something like 80 hours in Valhalla and I'm probably only a bit over halfway. It's a big game with a lot of distractions though, but even then the story mode is insanely long. I heard about that game. It supposedly plays alot like a singleplayer MMO, right? In that it's got quests and leveling typical for that subgenre and stuff. Always wanted to try it out for myself, since it sounds like something I'd enjoy to play through during a whole summer or something.

8/10 The Skyrim theme is great, but I personally prefer the version from Morrowind! It doesn't have as much narrative but I like the mysterious "sunrise" kind of feel it has. This isn't Morrowind haha, it would be boring of me to link something so similar, but I recently delved back into this game after not really giving it a chance when it released on Wii U and have had a blast so far, so much cool music! Especially love how this one sort of evolves and lets every instrument have its own time to shine.

Final Fantasy Souls Street Fighter Zelda Elder Scrolls Megaman Those are my very favourites off the top of my head at least!

I like watching the occasional Let's Play or VoD stream of a person playing a game, but in 99.9% of the cases it's more to do with me enjoying listening to the particular person playing as the format is often comedic in nature, but if it's a game I haven't played in a long time or something new I'd like to see but I know I'll probably not get myself I tend to be more invested in the actual video, else I treat it more like a podcast. Though of course it happens from time to time that I just open a video of an old game and watch, but I've emulated games since I was a kid so if there's something I don't have my in my physical collection anymore I'll usually find a way to give it a whirl, even if only for like a night or something.

Seconding this. I'd sooner use dynamite as a currency.

Yeah I was about to reply with this aswell. I like being by myself, and playing games solo gives me peace of mind and time to think (or not think if that's what I need at the moment haha). Though I wouldn't call myself lonely because of that, since I enjoy it and have other outlets to be with friends and family :)

I'm going to be on the lookout for Mario Party Superstars, but knowing my luck and the fact that it's a Nintendo game, I probably won't find the kind of deal I'm looking for haha

Narrative-driven games have become better at this, but like a decade ago it was really stupid how the "Good" choice in a conversation would be to hand a sick guy a potion to help him maybe feel a little better, and the "Bad" option would be to insult him profusely, then shoot him in the head, steal his credit card, wire his entire family's savings to yourself, kick his dog and take a bite of his lunch. This was for like EVERY game that had a "Your choices matter!!!" bullet point lol

What a stupid thing to say. Or at least the way he implies it makes it sound like he's the first person on Earth to come up with the idea. But it's been done lots of times, from your example in Walking Dead, to Metal Gear Solid 5 where the missions start with credits and the like. The hypothesis you're providing aswell ("We'll probably get seasons, and episodes to coincide with said seasons") is even more alarming to me since that might give them leeway to release bits of a full game while charging a premium for every single entry (since games take way longer to produce than a season of a TV show generally). I have nothing against Naughty Dog's games, they make super high quality stuff, but Druckmann just seems to be completely full of himself and super pretentious at all times lol.

Hahaha holy shit, I had no idea, that's amazing. I've never seen that one but in case you didn't know it's a spoof of the old 1984 Apple commercial, which makes it even funnier.

Ooooh yeah, completely forgot about that one. Great stuff!

There have been a plethora of commercials for video games over the decades, ranging from informative, to whacky, to funny, and to outright stupid and bizarre. What are some of your favourites you remember? My all-time favourite is probably the Japanese ad for Zelda: A Link to the Past. It's just a crazy live-action dance number, and once it's over you realize it didn't have a single second of actual game in it, but it sure had crazy staying power, and a funky beat to top it all off: Another classic is the ad for Super Smash Bros. on N64. I always laugh at how they're just people in suits fighting drunkedly in real-life: This was the only commercial I managed to see for myself on TV, one time. I was blown away and actually kept searching for it on other channels, but alas it only appeared once. I thought it lookd insanely cool: There was something special about seeing your favourite hobby on the TV back then. (It's much more common to see ads for games nowadays, but they're usually quick showcases or straight up trailers, since TV and ads work differently now), even as a commercial. It kind of made it feel even "bigger" when you were little and only knew Zelda from bleeps and bloops on your Gameboy. What do you all think?

I'm not sure. I know that my first own Playstation game was Kingdom Hearts, which I got for christmas exactly 20 years ago, along with our PS2. I touched upon it in another post somewhere but I was completely blown away by how it looked and played, since everything I had seen prior had been N64 and PS1 games, and only from when I was at friends' houses. I'm fairly certain I've at least seen something like Spyro or Final Fantasy 7 or like Tony Hawk at a neighbours house before that though, not knowing what they were I'll keep Kingdom Hearts as my choice here to further make the memory stand out. Man, my parents knew from nothing but the box art that it'd be something me and my brother would love, and it's probably what made me delve deeper into my biggest video game love, which is Final Fantasy. <3