I prefer the likes of Oblivion (I ride through the whole trip, picking flowers and loot) and I do have a major obsession with San Andreas (great therapy), but Valve's Portal was a new benchmark for whatever I thought about the capabilities of video games to put a player through.

The game quickly introduces you the big concept of the game, the engine allows portals within a room, or a small area, and the engine has this rule-structure that you bend and abuse to get yourself to the next level. At some point, I began to play with my ability, I felt as if I'm probably doing something that would crash the game or just won't 'work', but the engine was fine with it. And I remember that for the last thirty minutes of the game, I was running away from something and the whole portal thing was part of my instincts, and I was teasing it.

And that was really far from the reality I had to wake up to, the game is about two hours constant. I couldn't take my head off it, I started thinking that most of the games I played weren't really taking things to extremes, so I searched for more concept-based game engines, and I found TimeShift, which was a total hardship, time shifting in time shift is a gimmick.

So it is a fair scale.

I like to look at it as parallel to film or literature + user interference (which usually and unfortunately is there just to replace the luck factor, Rambo wouldn't die in any scene, the movie must go on, but you could die, and you didn't.)

A film can take the role of the story teller, and bore the viewer with some of his morals, or it could realize the new potential experiences, utterly.

First it was MarioKart 64. Now, its MarioKart Wii!!

PS - Tag your arguments with the video game name!

Portal, and, in fact, everything Valve's made. The Half-Life games and the Source engine they're built on raised standards for games everything, Team Fortress is funny and original, and all their games work well and are interesting and clever. But Portal neatly demonstrated that video games don't need violence to be awesome, so it gets my vote. (Not to mention, it has delicious cake!)

Best game evar I would say is Heroes of Might and Magic II. I like turn-based strategy games and pixel art and fantasy, so this is pretty much the perfect game for me. It's up there with Final Fantasy Tactics, which I mentioned in the other thread.

MarioKart is the sickest game ever made! It takes a classic character and puts him into a game that has something for everyone. It has car chases, total animation violence, and its multiplayer! How much better can it be? Its classic, starting with the N64, yet has been updated with added on features like the steering wheel for the Wii! [:

I didn't really get the discussion I was looking for in my last debate about fav role-playing games. What I really meant was action-adventure. Or what-ever. So this debate's less restricted by semantics: Your bestest video game please, and why.

Mad Planets by Gottlieb - mid-eighties. In the arcade cabinet incarnation, the control system made the game. It was a top-down shooter where a joystick moved your spaceship about and fired at increasingly angry 'mad planets' and there was also a dial/spinner so you could quite fluidly rotate your craft. The combination of deft control and time pressure made it utterly addictive. pic

Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. The Zelda series is always fun, but the Ocarina of time was the first game that felt big and had that youthful fun to it.

Call of Duty 4. Seriously, i thought Counter Strike until i played this awesomeness.

Ocarina of Time on Nintendo 64 is the bestest video game of all times. It is challenging, elaborate, and totally stimulating. I challenge anyone to come up with a higher quality all-around game.

There has been no other game that has dominated my soul longer than starcraft. Starcraft is one of those games that you never truly stop playing -- sure, you may stop for a week, or a month, or even a couple of years, but you always come back to zergling rushes and awesome caster tech that you see pro Korean players do on Youtube videos.

Best video game of all time? It has to be Super Mario World, doesn't it? Dynamic gameplay, brilliant SNES graphics, tons of unlockable levels and a soundtrack that I still whistle to this very day. It turned out that Super Mario World would be the last greatest 2D Mario platformer as the next proper Mario game would be Mario 64 (an amazing, genre defining game in it's own right).

Wizardry for the Apple II c, Meridian 57, Yserbius on INN

Call of Duty 4

Age of Empires

Battlefield