Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread! At time of writing, it’s late and cold here in the United States, so hopefully we’ll be able to warm up with some fun discussion.

I’ve been on and off a Super Mario Galaxy kick lately. This is technically for an article, but it’s one of those games I can get into again and again. Naturally, it’s fertile ground for prompts and suggestions, but I’m gonna start off with possibly the single most important part of the game: gravity. Galaxy was not the first game to have 3D objects you can walk around, but its use of gravity was crucial to making it a masterpiece. Mario can dive into stable orbits around planetoids. He can walk around the inside of a sphere. He can move through obstacle courses where the gravity itself constantly shifts, leading to absolutely incredible and beguiling challenges. And the game really, really pushes this all the time. You see black holes everywhere, only avoided with improbable sections of ground.

So I’d like to ask you all: what is your favorite use of gravity in a video game? And what’s great about this prompt is it doesn’t only include the showy, almost operatic forms that Galaxy exemplifies. This can include pretty much anything with physics, simply because gravity is a required element. I can also imagine plenty of immersive sims using similar things. The problem is that… it’s very late, I’m still pretty tired, the snow is thick and cruel, and my mind is less able. Like, I know you can use gravity in Prey, but I can’t really express that in words now. Fortunately, that’s where you come in! Whether or not the game you want to talk about is Prey.

And, as always, what did you play this weekend?