Maybe you see a plant you have to collect in game or a rock wall that looks different. What items have you caught out of the corner of your eye that you realized was just your brain so focused on looking for things in a game that you saw it IRL and made you double take?
Waaaaay back, almost two decades ago, I was super into the Spider-Man 2 movie tie-in. Played it almost every day. The only game I’ve actually fully 100% completed, which was a bit more difficult back then because walkthroughs weren’t as easily available. There were a lot of great cheat/guide sites that popped up around that time, and also physical cheat/guide books from before, but those were a bit harder to find where I lived.
(Speaking of physical cheat books, I used them a lot for for GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas. The cheats these days don’t even remotely compare to the variety and fun of the ones back then.)
Anyway, Spider-Man 2 had legitimately the best swinging mechanics in a Spider-Man game (IMO). Not that the Insomniac games are bad at all, but I consider them to be the best since Spider-Man 2, which is still pretty high praise, honestly. Ultimate Spider-Man which was released around the same time was also pretty good, actually. The others were just less fun or completely dumbed down to the point where you didn’t even need to connect your webs to buildings.
I don’t live in a city with skyscrapers. So every time I’d either see second unit camera pans on TV or movies with a lot of skyscrapers in frame, or find myself in an area with a lot of high rise buildings, all I could imagine was swinging around through the area.
It was kind of like the Tetris effect (not the game, the phenomenon), but more of like… I guess I’d call it the “Spider-Man swinging effect”.
I loved that game. It’s really nice to come across people who share my feelings about it so many years on.