A great thing about having kids is gettting to watch their minds be blown. My 4 year old daughter and I play a lot of minecraft together. When the patch that allowed local networking of the worlds I set up to play on my wife's computer with her on mine. Soon after we started she called me over to help fix something. Frustrated that I had not physically come to her aid she came over to me. DADDY! My house is on your computer too! She spent the rest of our little session looking at me build through a window on her house and then looking over her shoulder at my screen.
I loved the arcades, as most kids in the '70s did, and I payed my share of quarters to play Pong (Pong, for god's sake!), and I loved some of those early, primitive TRS-80 text adventure games, but probably the first game(s) that enchanted me were Ultima 2 and Ultima 3. I hadn't been blessed with a home computer as a kid, so when one of my roommates in college freshman year (1984) and I would go down to the computer lab and play his copies of those games on an Apple IIe, I thought they were the most amazing, immersive, and downright huge games that had ever been made. I can still remember parts of those games quite clearly, even though I haven't looked at them since that year. Those games opened my eyes to what was possible.
I have to agree with Andrew regarding Dark Souls. I have not played the game nearly as much as him, but I did finish it (and not easily - I had to grind, and die many, many times on some of the bosses). His remark about nerves and adrenaline rush are so right on. I played competitive chess when I was younger, and I still play sometimes on internet servers, and the nerves and tension I experience playing chess (especially blitz chess) are the only comparison that I have to Dark Souls. I would literally have to sit for a few minutes to psyche myself up to try a boss that had been killing me again and again. I have never felt that sort of stress when playing a game, outside of chess. I think it's one of the best video/ computer games ever made, and I love the world.
I also bought the strategy guide (or tome, rather), and it is a real work of art.
I hope the game you're talking about for next week starts with an R and ends with an R. :) If so, I share your excitement. :)
Drew has not attempted to trick me into giving him all of my steam badges yet... But I'm glad to hear that Steam users have an equivalent to collecting nail polish... perhaps now my own habbit will not be so maligned by certain Steam badge owners... As for my first game, I too was not allowed to have games till I was around 10... so I played Frogger whenever I got my hands on it. Then I graduated to Age of Empires for the exact reason Drew explained. I still prefer strategy games so I am working on playing Sins of a Solar Empire, but there are a lot of new variables introduced by that game- like the concept that space is three dimensional (nice!).
Um, there have been Sniper only servers in FPS games for years now, it's nothing new so there's definitively people that want to play that kind of mode/game.