Gamers won't get teary recalling Mario rescuing Paulina at the end of Donkey Kong, and QBert certainly won't win any awards for best drama.

But I remember the first time I shed a tear over a pixelated character. It was while playing Chrono Trigger on Super Nintendo. I was time-traveling to save the future from an alien parasite that had burrowed into the planet’s crust hundreds of years earlier. As the alien prepares its final attack, my character – whom up until now I controlled through the entire game -- jumps in front of the blast and is blown to smithereens. I was stunned.

Super Nintendo also throws great drama at players. Take Final Fantasy 6 for example: You're stranded on a deserted island with a father figure whom you watch die a slow, painful death; you're forced to leave a friend die so that you can survive. And I can't forget the legendary “opera” scene, one of the most famous sequences in video game history. Experience it here with a re-done audio track featuring actual opera singers.

Here's that scene's context: The young aria singer is a really a magic knight known as General Celes who lures a sky pirate to her in hopes of stealing his ship. But you don’t just watch the 20-minute scene -- you actually perform the opera, read the script, choose the correct lines. While this scene might not be epic by today's standards, it was groundbreaking when it was first released and left players literally breathless.

Final Fantasy also pulls no emotional punches. Final Fantasy 4 forces you to see virtual friends getting killed in brutal fashion, with an entire village of civilians being tricked into slaughter. And we can't forget the scene that crippled most gamers’ hearts: The death of Aerith from Final Fantasy 7. You spent hours protecting her only to witness a mad man drop from the sky and impale her. Gamers around the world burst into tears seeing her slump down. I remember sitting in my room stunned trying to understand what I had just witnessed. Never before had a movie, or TV show, or even a book left me that dumbfounded.

I wasn't angry that the developers murdered such a sweet character. It worked for the story and I continued to play the game. To this day I still play through Final Fantasy 7 and feel the same way I did during my first playthrough. Few movies can elicit that sort of response from me.

Among the current generation of games, Lost Odyssey for Xbox 360 is especially emotionally evocative, based around an immortal man who's lost his memories and his ability to feel happiness and love. But as the game ends, the depressed warrior remembers his past through dreams. The first of these is called Hannah's Departure, and if you aren't crying by the end of it then consider yourself dead on the inside. The tale is so bittersweet and allows you to completely empathize with the main character. Most Hollywood producers would kill to get that kind of emotional response out of its viewers.

Emotional moments aren’t limited to role-playing games. The entire video game spectrum has moments that provoke raw emotions: the amazing "nuke explosion" in Call Of Duty 4; your partner's ultimate sacrifice in Prince of Persia. And for a real taste of fear, watch Fatal Frame for the PS2 with the lights off and the volume maxed out. I have never seen a movie that scary.

To make this long story shorter, I'll come to my point: Video games get a bad rap in part because their main audience happens to be socially awkward. Movies and TV often wring emotion from their audiences, but they just don't haunt you the way some of these classic game scenes do.

Marc Sakol understands the kindness in strangers, which is why he abandons hope of actually getting to know people. He spends his time falling head first into video games, watching every movie ever made and writing for his blog Sarcasm Not Included