Shooting out of a cannon with the wings hat and flying around in Mario 64 was such a pure fun experience for my kid brain. The switch in music and just soaring around a 3d level was really something special at the time.

I love to boot up Red Dead Redemption 2 and go on little hunting / fishing trips as Arthur. I play it as close to real life as I can, meaning I don’t just sprint across the map on horseback and get to my destination in five minutes or less. I have Arthur eat breakfast, ride the trails for a few in game hours, eat lunch, ride until dark, set up camp, eat dinner, brush / feed the horse, sleep, repeat. If I go through a town on my way, I’ll usually stop for a day to experience some entertainment or do a bit of gambling. It can take multiple in game days to reach a hunting / fishing spot. I’ll set up a camp once there, do some hunting / fishing for a few days, and then ride back home. It’s just super relaxing for me and helps me appreciate the little details in the game even more.

Cyberpunk 2077 is purely an escapist game for me. The game itself sort of sucks, the side missions are mostly "go and kill this dude" or "go and steal this thing", nothing you do has an effect on anything and it's generally pretty uninspired and blah, but I bought it because I got it for under 20€ so I figured why the hell not.

It looks damn purdy though, and Night City is intricately built and has lots of small fun details. I love just wandering around the city, stopping at hole-in-the-wall noodle places (even though they might just be "window dressing", and even if they're not the restaurants in the game are totally pointless), or browsing the stuff at some market, etc. etc. etc. So even though I don't like it as a game, I like the environment it provides (although honestly the constant in-your-face sexism gets pretty old…)

Man, I have a buncha people giving me shit on my thread for BG3 asking if one of the encounters can be cheesed because the way it would be cheesed is hilarious. It's a clone fight and I was curious if you could make the clone spawn naked and make the fight a non-issue. Now some people are upset and tell me I should just "play the game." Is that not what I am doing? I was gonna do it anyway, I just wanted to know if I should save before hand if it fucked me over completely.

I like breaking games. It's fun. I'll play them the way they were "intended" once or twice; but after that I'm doing everything but that. Just to see what I can actually get away with. I thought that was the point of an interactive experience. Why the hell would I want to just do the canned 'canon' shit? I want to do all the things you can't do in reality because they would hurt yourself or others. I want to test the limits of the game designer's imagination. If I can think of it and they missed it or if they actually put that little detail in.

Riding around in GTA San Andreas. Like taking a truck and making long trips while listening to K-DST radio.

In Minecraft I run in one direction for half an hour and build little forts. I don't sleep in the bed and when I die I die. There's a neat sense of satisfaction finding all the little things I've left behind.

I used to do pixel art too so I've run into giant glowstone Pikachus in the past

I would always play AVP2 as an Alien. I loved the mobility of being able to traverse walls and the unique challenges/opportunities it presented. I played it a lot and got quite good at it (would easily be the top player in most games I played), but would more often focus on making use of those unique mechanics for novelty situations.

One map (the forge, or something similar) had high ceilings with ridges built in to it, perfect for hiding an Alien. Instead of running around the map tearing up victims and moving up the leaderboard, I would cling up on that ceiling and wait for an unsuspecting human to pass underneath. I would drop down like a spider, paralyze them with my tail, and immediately headbite them. The glee that I would get from perfectly executing that surpassed any MVP received from high scores. It was fun to just play an Alien like an Alien.

Drive all around the map in GTA V’s multiplayer (invite only session, of course) when the weather is nice. Or just walk around the city. Browsing tattoos or clothes etc. Just doing ordinary things instead of riding around on a flying motorcycle and whatnot.

Risk of Rain 2: Get 5 to 10 movement items and just zoooooooom around.

Deep Rock Galactic: Drill thru the walls even when it's not the best idea, because I just like the idea of destructible terrain and navigating in 3d.

So long as you don't care for graphics, Driver still holds up in the feel department. Get a PSX emulator, rip/"acquire" the game and you're good to go.

For me, it's any game moment where the player is given manual control over a function that is usually automated or simply blocked off. For example: any game that gives you control over sheathing/holstering your weapon instead of waiting for your character to do it for you (a boon for RP in RPG games) or in GTA V when the right d-pad(?) button gives control over the gun's flashlight or a car's headlights and convertible roof. I'm not sure about earlier games in the series but Test Drive Unlimited even let the player roll down the individual front side windows of the car you were driving.

Edit: screw ups.

I used to like to get gently stoned, fire up GTA 5, put on FlyLo FM in the car and just drive around. My brother and I would sit for hours, and it was basically like we were in a real car. I didn't drive super fast, took most reasonable precautions against wrecking and killing people. It was just...nice. A sort of cut-rate flow state where the thing I'm doing is something that I have to pay attention to, but not something I'm occupied by to the point of not being able to bs with somebody.

With the spiderman games, I almost always swing around instead of using fast travel. I'll do the little tricks and stuff too.

They did such a good job making the basic traversal mechanism satisfying that it's almost weird they included fast travel.

Saving the animals in super Metroid comes to mind. There it little to no benefit from saving them, but it feels good to me to do so

Red Dead Redemption 2. The guy in St Dennis selling his white supremacy books... The police look the other way. Just sayin.

YOU COULD JUST LEAVE????? WE HAD TWO RENT IT THREE TIMES IN A ROW TO BEAT THAT TUTORIAL!!

In the game Crackdown - you had to increase your agility and strength, and weapons proficiencies to be strong enough to move onto the next area.

You could get the xp by doing things like killing guys while jumping or whatever, or you could find "agility orbs" at the tops of a lot of buildings (and smokestacks, billboards, factories, etc.) and get extra xp from finding them. As you level up your agility, you can get to taller places. Eventually I'd just climb places because I could not because I saw an orb.

That and blowing shit up with a rocket launcher, getting a faction really pissed at me, and then quietly leaving the scene after I get ran out of rockets. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I enjoyed the ship battles in Assassin's Creed 4 way more than the platforming and main story. I probably spent twice as much time at sea as I did on land.

Flying around in the birdsuit in Pilotwings 64. I could do that for hours. Except I usually eventually try to fly through a cave and crash. Gosh I'd love a new Pilotwings

Anyone else play Airblade? It was like a Tony Hawk game but with a hoverboard.

With only six levels, it was quite short, but really fun. Eventually I started speed running it before I knew what speed running was.

If I recall correctly I was able to finish it in under twenty minutes.

Noita: building wands with horrendous recoil. I know it's going to get me killed when I launch myself in to something dangerous, but it's just funny to be able to fly by the power of destroying everything in a given direction

In Diablo 3, I always saved the NPCs in Act 2 while doing bounties, even though there was no incentive to do so. Dunno if it counts as feeling good, but could never bring myself to ignore their cries.

Activating the Super Sheep in Worms DC. It was always "argh, I can't control this, kaboom I've blown up one of my own worms", but it was fun to try!

Running over pedestrians and crashing motorcycles in Sleeping Dogs.

I completed every mission with an insanely low cop score because I killed so many civillians. This game is the poster child of ludonarrative dissonance in 7th gen AAA games.

The game tracks how many people you run over in a “combo” and assigns a high score. Mine is 647.

Threads of Fate. Shape shifting into the cool creature forms (esp the gargoyle) and running around.

Okami. Literally, the whole ass game lol.

WoW. Exploring, collecting herbs, and skinning mobs in druid forms.

LOTRO. Just riding around.

Witcher 3. Just riding around, taking in the views - and possibly being waylaid by random wolf packs and bandits, but then the cool music starts playing and Geralt says hilarious random shit while chopping heads so that's also fine.

Genshin Impact. Just running around doing random shit as Klee.

When I was young (probably too young) I would always play as Kabal on UMK3. That spin attack plus the easy combos was great.