If you could only suggest someone play one video game, what would it be?

[tr0nic]

So I'm a bit more out there with the games that I dump hundreds of hours into. I enjoy a wide variety of genres, but I find myself spending the most amount of time on incredibly immersive, simulator-level experiences, so if I had to recommend just one game to someone, my opinion is certainly not one that would appeal to the average person, I don't think.

I gotta go with the mod Antistasi Ultimate for ArmA 3. Not ArmA 3 as a whole, because it's just a big sandbox to create experiences like Antistasi Ultimate.

Describing how the game works doesn't sell anybody on why I have sunk so much time into AU so I'll just relay one of my favorite experiences while playing this game.

I was playing a Vietnam War-era campaign (big surprise) playing as the Viet Cong, and had begun a campaign to take over a part of the map that was incredibly dense jungle. The area was a small airbase surrounded by three smaller outposts. Each outpost has 2-3 enemy squads, and each one would be a massive fight to take over. The airbase itself had 4-5 squads, many emplaced weapons, and armor support.

Dead of night, I drive my AI squad up until the road ends and then we start trekking on foot into the jungle. Moonlight is barely making it through the trees. It takes almost ten minutes to get us to where I want to flank the outpost. I set my squad to stealth mode and to hold fire while we begin getting in close. We move from cover to cover, slowly closing in on the outpost. I pause for a second to check my map, sitting in a bush. As I close the map, an enemy South Vietnamese soldier walks right by the barrel of my M16, literally as close to me as I am to my computer monitor right now. Absolute point blank. He doesn't see me. My radio is going off, my squadmates saying they are ready to fire. An entire 12-man squad is right in front of me, patrolling about 100 meters from the outpost. I give the order to open fire. The entire jungle lights up instantly. Tracer rounds flying everywhere, flares shooting up into the sky. I'm just unloading my M16 into the darkness. Used half my magazines, not sure if I hit anything at all. At some point I get incapacitated, and my medic drags me out of there. I give the order to retreat. I lost over half of my 10 man squad.

None of that was scripted in any way, besides the enemy patrol patterns. Eventually I took the outpost, every raid entirely different from the last. Many veterans of the Vietnam War, from both sides, described firefights where they ended up "aiming with their tracers" because they were fighting so close to each other. This is the only game where that happened to me, in a split second, entirely without thinking. Organic, simulated warfare that maintains historical accuracy purely because all the numbers were in place--The factions, the setting, the equipment used, all of it. And it has ruined any kind of military-themed video game for me since. CoD, BF, they're all empty shams of games to me now that I've experienced Antistasi.

When I play Antistasi, all I can think about is playing something simpler. Then when I play something simpler, all I can think about is getting back into the jungle.

Now the reason I keep coming back to this game is because of the sheer amount of different factions, maps, weapons, and combinations of all of them that I can use. Nazi Germany vs. the Galactic Empire from Star Wars. Modern day US Army versus Vietnam era US Army. The Covenant from Halo versus the Imperium from Warhammer 40K. It never ends, and there's always something that surprises me.