Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 35

Mostly video games of course.

First when he was really young, about 5, Ciro played a lot of NES, but he doesn't remember things from that era very well. Contra, Ninja Turtles, Battle Tanks, Duck Hunt, and some modern "real world jet" top to bottom rail shooter (TODO identify) are definitely some of the games he clearly remembers playing, see also: Figure "Five year old Ciro Santilli playing NES on a joystick". Nintendo hard was truly a thing back then.

As an honorable mention, Ciro remembers his teenage/young adult neighbours in Jundiaí playing some DOS games on their computer, notably there was a 3D racing one. This must have been around 1995/1997, so using some of the very earliest GPUs. Those games felt so incredibly advanced, including the required setup to play them, which required some command-line commands. It felt like some kind of black magic! But Ciro didn't really play them however.

Ciro then skipped the SNES and handhelds, which he played only through friends because he was cheap (but also because Brazil is a poor country remember, and imports are pretty expensive). He clearly remembers playing Super Mario World for the SNES and Pokemon on friends' Gameboys of course.

Ciro then went straight to 5th generation with the Nintendo 64 in 1994 which his parents bought for him during a trip to the United States. Once again, because he was cheap, the only game he bought was Super Mario 64, which likely came with the console? He played that game to death.

Then came Ocarina of Time, which blew everyone's minds, and Ciro would go to Blockbuster to rent it for the weekend, and again play to death with his friends. You had to arrive early at Blockbuster to rent it, otherwise other people would rent all copies!!!

The only time Ciro got robbed as of 2020 was when an older teenager stopped his bicycle in front of Ciro and took his rented Golden Eye 64 copy away from his hand, and run off. Poor drug addict.

Ciro always felt that the PS1 had a much uglier aesthetics than the N64, and didn't like the console. Playing a bit of Final Fantasy VI on his memory did stick deeply to his mind however. Ciro later played all good PS1 RPGs on emulation during University of São Paulo during amazing solitary nights.

And on the PC, Ciro was particularly touched by Age of Empires II and Diablo II.

As a young teenager Ciro would also play Counter-Strike with his friends at LAN houses. Playing that game would make Ciro extremely anxious, his hands got all cold, and it was a lot of fun.

After this Ciro grew up and notice that the only fun game is that of becoming become rich and famous in the real world.

This explains however Ciro's tool-assisted speedrun interests.

Outside of video games, Ciro got midly addicted to Magic: The Gathering in his early teens.

To some extent, the ultimate achievement of a TAS is to achieve arbitrary code execution (ACE) on a game, although this has been becoming rarer and rarer in newer consoles. The Nintendo 64 is the current interesting ACE discovery frontier as of 2020.

Post ACE, you then get into more subtle categories which tend to be more geometric clipping through wall glitches, but those can still be fun.

The most beautiful TAS content ever made are:

It is also amusing to see console verification of emulations, e.g.: Video 1. "Super Mario 64 '120 Stars' in 1:20:41.52 Console Verified by Soul Umbreon (2012)".

Ciro Santilli used to play video games when he was young. But after he reached 18 he got bored of them.

The problem is that no matter how you look at, the how to become famous in the real world game is just always more interesting and fulfilling.

Therefore adult Ciro enjoys only the following types of video game content in video form, so that other people waste their lives playing the games while you only see the highlights:

The aspect Ciro enjoys about non-PvP games is atmosphere. Not as conveyed by useless story telling, but as conveyed by music and graphics, and the context deep idea. Legend of Zelda and Metroid come to mind.

And too many games commit the sins of dependency of dexterity, no save states, how do I skip this boring part, or jump straight to the beautiful one?

Another important point is; the perfect video game is an infinitely hard one.

It also doesn't help if you are already typing on a computer all day long on your job. Hands get tired. Eyes have an infinite capacity to consume useless YouTube videos however. Medically proved.

As a result, Ciro just watches videos about video games. Notably games he played when he was a teenager and already understand the rules for.

And things got even worse as after Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment, and he started to feel bad about playing any game that is not open source.