
Flower is the only video game I've played that made me feel relaxed, peaceful, and happy - pchristensen
http://www.slate.com/id/2212231/pagenum/all
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dimitar
You have to be pretty relaxed to be good at Quake for example - otherwise you
cannot get into "the zone" and think clearly (there IS actually room for
thought in Quake).

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bitwize
Quake by its very nature amps you up. There's kind of like a magical point of
the graph where your relaxation and your amped-upness meet; if I can find that
point I'm in "the zone" become virtually unstoppable in-game.

I've found that Rez is designed to make that point relatively easy to find,
which is exactly why it's the best game ever.

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thwarted
I've found the thing that helps me get into the zone with first-person-
shooters, especially with CTF varieties, is knowing the map well enough to be
able to predict where everyone is on the map based on where you last saw them
-- how long a flag run takes, what the major routes are through the map,
getting hit from that angle at that location means someone is sneaking around
over there... and it doesn't even need to be exact, not "it takes 18 seconds
to cap if you can run at full speed" (which is useful in its own right), but
rather "the flag was picked up just as I respawned, and I'm here, and that's
when a cap occurs..." or "I saw that guy when I died on that side of the map,
and he should be crossing this area just as I respawn..." or "when I'm holding
the flag here waiting for our flag to return, attacks usually come from that
location, so let's pop a few grenades over there to keep it clear...".

Unfortunately, many FPS maps are created to be simple and _fair_ in the
extreme, which ends up severely limiting the kinds of routes you can take
(everyone's instinct is always to take the shortest/fastest one, or all routes
are roughly the same length), or where the serious choke points are, so if you
spend _merely_ weeks playing the same map, you can get a really good feel for
the basic attributes.

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jfornear
In junior high, I used to play Counter-Strike competitively, and awareness
(knowing the probable locations of opponents in any given scenario for any
map) was the name of the game (apart from accuracy and overall competence). It
was fascinating how teams would watch opponents' videos to pick up strategies
and patterns much how high school football teams study scout tapes.

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sugaku
I see you've never been to <http://www.orisinal.com/>

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nazgulnarsil
I really liked the little flourish in Okami where when you ran a trail of
blooming flowers would follow your characters. And of course it was immensely
satisfying to purify an area and watch the cut scene of all the evil being
washed away.

...I want Okami 2 damn it. _hates capcom_

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derefr
Another game that fits this exact description, at least for me, is Tranquility
(<http://www.tqworld.com/>). It's ten years older (and the basic graphics
model shows it), but it's still actively maintained and looks pretty neat even
on modern hardware.

A warning, though: unless you've been in microgravity before, or at least read
the passages in Ender's Game dealing with reorienting "down" and altering
rotational momentum to match targets, the controls might frustrate before they
relax :)

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joshu
Really? I found it quite stressful. It mostly feels like a driving game.

~~~
patio11
Sort of like Pixeljunk Eden. Don't let the flowery decor, trippy music, and
effortless videos of floating through space deceive you: it masks a brutally
hard platformer which if my friends were not so committed to each other would
probably have caused a divorce after failing to properly catch somebody at the
top of the last level, which causes BOTH players to fall all the way to the
bottom. And its a long way down, with plenty of time for bitter
recriminations.

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kirubakaran
This game made me relaxed, peaceful and happy :
[http://www.kongregate.com/games/Trickysheep/anikas-
odyssey#g...](http://www.kongregate.com/games/Trickysheep/anikas-
odyssey#game_instructions)

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DTrejo
Crayon Physics is another relaxing game.

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Rod
More info on Flower:

[http://playstation.joystiq.com/2008/07/16/its-awesome-
flower...](http://playstation.joystiq.com/2008/07/16/its-awesome-flower-ps3/)

<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122972605155122665.html>

