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What games do you think were most revolutionary when they came out, changing the way that developers made games in the future? Half-Life springs to mind immediately for me. When I played that game, I was really blown away by the fact that the game play and the narrative were so well woven together. I don’t remember that really being a common feature of FPS games before that.

I think a lot of people play video games to get some kind of psychological release. Obviously you see this a lot with FPS games. Games give us a chance to do what we can’t do in real life. What gives you some form of catharsis while gaming? For me, it is games which allow me to take action against social ills I can’t do anything about in real life (i.e. striking out against bigotry). Even though nothing real is accomplished (obviously), there is still a sense of emotional satisfaction I can't experience IRL.

Better title would be When The Giants Get Dumb

I never even heard of the term catharsis before. This is a really good topic. I'm not sure what role games play for me. I have so many deep seeded problems that I can't really pin point one where I get an 'emotional release' through gaming. I started gaming in my last few months of drinking alcohol. But while drinking I couldn't play because my concentration and memory were shot to hell. So I wouldn't remember what happened n the game the next day. In a way, gaming has kept my mind focused on better things. On more beautiful things. On more interesting things. I always told myself that boredom is what made me drink. Gaming has taken that boredom away for the most part. And I have found better feelings in games that I haven't felt in years. I guess I'm an awakened zombie. That's my 'emotional release.' But it's more to it than that, I know there is. As time goes on, maybe I'll uncover more emotional burdens I kept bottled over the years. But it is amazing to be alive again and to explore all the beautiful environments brings me more pleasure without even grasping why. But there is a reason there for playing the games I play. And I can probably go on and on but I'll stop for now and think more on this for a while.

One rule is to be myself & not let peer pressure get in there. I also don't eat for 13 hours during the night (intermittent fasting). I exercise daily, even if it's walking & stretches. Take time for my furbabies & husband. I don't take crap from others.

@DarthVanity I never realized that! You are right though! lol I love how Leeloo says "Multipass" with her accent. Anybody use IMDB.com & look at the trivia, goofs there? Another trivia: The "Divine Language" was created by Luc Besson & he & Milla Jovovich talked to each other & wrote notes back & forth.

The brains behind The Fifth Element would have been better off adding a sixth element - common sense - to the plot, and allowing it to form a bridge between the film's fantastic visual appeal and its ramshackle plot. Bruce Willis was good back then in most great films that people like, not like now. I do not know why he's going down a hole right now with films in the last two years. Bruce Willis has been doing acting in cheap and crap films.

Loved this movie! Watched it a lot growing up. We used to quote probably everything Milla Jovovich's character said. I enjoy it. It has charm and is incredibly different compared to a lot of sci-fi which is what I find endearing about it. I wanted more Gary Oldman though. Not sure if you knew this OP but in this movie the good guy Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis) never once runs into the badguy Jean-Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg (Gary Oldman). I thought that was a fun fact. I also really loved the opera scene/Leeloo kicking butt. "Leeloo Dallas multipass!"

I hovered my mouse pointer over it and it just says you joined recently. So it seems to be a tag for new members. How long it will be there, however, only @Shagger or @DC can tell you that.

Welcome to the forum, glad you joined us.

I've watched it several times. I have the DVD somewhere around here. It's not bad. Willis did a pretty good job in it. Not his best work, but definitely not his worst either. My vote for his worst would be a tie between The Sixth Sense, and the entire Die Hard series, as all those movies were simply god awful. My vote for his best would be Armageddon. The Last Boy Scout was a damn good movie too.

Some have photographic equipment in their telescopes, and others simply hold their phone up to the lens and use its camera. This one however, if I remember correctly, was taken by someone that had camera equipment installed in their telescope. I would have to go back to reddit and find the post to be sure. But that would take forever and a day to do.

Awesome answer. Playing MMOs when I was young did a lot to open my eyes to a world beyond the demographic lines that other people in society have drawn. I wrote a number of papers on gaming in college and how it can help us see past social constructs and explore different aspects of our identities which might be suppressed in our day-to-day lives.

Doom It is impossible to imagine the modern gaming landscape without Doom. The game popularized the first person shooter genre, greatly expanding upon the blueprint that was set with id's previous Hovertank 3D, Catacomb 3D, Wolfenstein 3D and Spear Of Destiny games. It also was the first FPS that truly invented multiplayer modes such as deathmatch and team deathmatch. Its importance cannot be understated. Without Doom a few of the other games on this list would not exist. Most importantly, Doom was also a game to popularize modding as people eventually got to work on modding the game, a practice that nowadays is commonplace. Quake Up until Quake, most shooters relied on 2.5D engines that used tricks to simulate a 3D environment, and often relied on 2D sprites for objects in the game world (the exception being games like Blood and Shadow Warrior which used voxels to simulate 3D objects). Quake brought the FPS genre firmly into true 3D with fully 3D environments and objects. Its codebase was used for a ton of other games, and parts of it is even used in games we play today. Like Doom before it, Quake also became a popular platform for modding and creating custom content. Team Fortress started out as a Quake mod as the most popular example. Half-Life Half-Life wasn't groundbreaking in its story or gameplay. In fact, it wasn't much more than a rethread of Doom and Quake. Rather, it was groundbreaking in the way it told its story. Unlike previous games that would present the story in cutscenes or, in the case of Doom and Quake, barely have any story at all, it presented the story through the eyes of its protagonist. Half-Life never left the perspective of Gordon Freeman. Every second of the game was experienced through him with the events unfolding around you as you played. This way of storytelling went on to become the norm in FPS's and its reliance on scripted events became the basis for stuff like Call Of Duty and Battlefield. Half-Life also presented a seamless narrative in that levels were interconnected, making you feel like you were exploring a larger world and not just single levels. While still fairly linear, this approach gave the game some scope similar to games like Super Metroid. Deus Ex Games like Thief, System Shock and System Shock 2 were critical darlings but never really mainstream hits. Warren Spector definitely changed this trend with Deus Ex, a cyberpunk amalgamation of his previous ideas. Deus Ex was like nothing before it. It mixed the RPG elements and environmental storytelling of System Shock with a fairly epic cyberpunk story that blended real life conspiracies with a fictional near future. The most groundbreaking idea in Deus Ex however was consequences. Everything you did in Deus Ex had a consequence later on, affecting how people reacted to you and how missions played out. It also featured entirely open ended gameplay, giving the player tools to tackle missions how they saw fit. It was a huge hit, becoming Game of the Year when it released. To this day it remains a favourite among gamers. Command & Conquer The RTS genre undoubtedly reached its peak in the 90's with the release of Command & Conquer, a strategy game taking place in a near future where united nations ally against the Brotherhood of NOD, both aiming to seize control over a new alien resource, Tiberium. C&C featured some extremely high polish for its time, telling its story through FMV's that utilized real actors and featuring some of the best music of the decade. The modern combat setting undoubtedly went on to influence a lot of other games such as the Call of Duty Modern Warfare series. System Shock While not any mainstream success, System Shock was so ahead of its time that playing it nowadays feels almost anachronistic. It was undoubtedly one of the first FPS's that utilized environmental storytelling, telling its story through terminals and videos you'd find exploring the environment. It also was more of a survival horror game, before Resident Evil was even a thing, in that resources were sparse and you're often outnumbered and facing a terrifying enemy. Space Invaders A simple concept, you move from left to right, taking cover and shooting badguys. Even today most shooters still rely on concepts that Space Invaders invented. Its gameplay also inspired games like Galaga and had numerous arcade clones in the 80's. Easily one of the most groundbreaking arcade games of the space age. Legend Of Zelda A lot of modern games would probably not exist without Zelda. While it did not exactly invent the idea of exploring an open world (games like Adventure on Atari 2600 and several DND games on PC more or less did that years before it), it did help bring that open ended gameplay to the mainstream in a bigger way and popularized it. It's not so much fun to play today without a guide, with all the cryptic shit going on but it's needless to say it was an important game.