Asklemmy

The last of us 1 & 2, strong emotions with a lot of empathy

Kicking a window through because my brother beat me at Pipemania.

Night in the Woods. Start to finish. It has so many moments where you just pause and go "....shit." It's the most perfect game ever made.

Also FF7. White teenage boy complex with Aeris for sure, but also blowing up oil facilities, killing CEOs, and Red XIII's story. It's wild to me the themes that this game gets across in Discs 1-2.

It was meeting the other players in real life. One lives in Europe.

When I started playing Horizon zero dawn, for first dozen hours I was in the state that fears the machines and sneaks everywhere.

Aloy's voice still terrifies me, I wish there was an option to turn off her random monologues.

Modern Warfare 2 (the first one). When you're climbing the ice wall and you fall and get caught, the level of detail on the face was astounding to kid me. It was like watching something in real life to me.

Probably helped that it was off of my sister's high def TV.

I encountered a rogue AI in Starfield that was kind of a trip. I ended up letting it go to be its own person.

During the game awards last year, there was a virtual concert announced in the game Sky: Children of the Light. It started immediately after the awards ended. I'd never played this game before that night. I loaded it up and joined something like 1000 other people in a virtual stadium around the artist in the center. It then teleported you outside where you followed her around, floating through landscapes, the clouds, etc while the concert continued. It was a surreal moment and I've experienced nothing like it before or since. It was way different from an IRL concert or a simple video streamed to my computer. It's hard to describe.

Tackling a hard Souls' boss is always a roller coaster of emotion. Usually it's a bunch of anger, some despair, some hope, and ultimately victory. So cathartic.

Showing my age here, but I'd pick Ocarina of Time as the first game I feel like I had a profound reaction to. At the end of the game, when you defeat Ganon and save the princess, how does she reward you? by sending you back in time to be a kid again. I mean, I understand that it was supposed to be a gift, but it just felt like it was erasing the heroics that you had done for her and the entire kingdom of Hyrule.

Second, I would pick God of War (2018). As a father, that game knew exactly what to do to reel me in and make me care about the characters.

I think it was playing Golden Sun 2, when it is revealed that the world is slowly ending and that Saturas and Menardi were trying to save it.

It made me realise that real villains are just people doing what they believe to be right, whose priorities are different than your own. We're all trying to live a "good" life in the end, and a lot of things are more easily forgiven in that light, but that doesn't mean we'll all get along either, because we're all the villain in someone's story!

There was nothing quite as intense as a ServerSmash in Planetside 2. Which means ~800 people doing joint ops on a single map and everything is highly coordinated.
I think blob fights in EVE are even larger, but this was a first person shooter and also rather arcadey, not a thousand spreadsheets fighting at a server tick rate of 1 ^^

Two come to mind. The first was when I was about 6 years old and walked in on my older brother playing Sim City 2000 on our family computer. It was the first time I had seen a video game of any kind. Before that, I thought computers were just boring machines for doing adult work. Seeing him playing a game on there changed my life, I've been a PC gamer ever since.

The second was when I beat Super Mario Bros on GameBoy. It was the first game I've ever beat fully and it was an incredible feeling. Took me almost a year to do, incredible grind at that age.

Genshin Impact had an event where you had to deliver food to customers. The customers would be in the most out of the way places, and if you managed to find them, they would reject the food for the stupidest reasons. Many players complained about the difficulty, but maybe it was a commentary on how delivery ~~boys~~ partners are treated.

Destiny 2, the death of Caide-6. I was pissed and wanted to avenge him so much.

He was such a beloved character by the whole community that Bungie is bringing him back from the dead (somehow) for the final chapter of the game story.

Any round of Space Station 13 or 14

The Stanley Parable was a great exploration of the nature of free will. It was a game that made me think about the nature of the relationship between me and the creator of the game.