What's your favorite personal gaming memory?
Maybe beating a certain dungeon or winning a particular game, or something deeply emotionnal for you.
What is yours?
I have two and they are both in WoW because I played for 10 years.
- Amber Shaper Un'sok. I decided to join a hardcore guild before MoP because I had ambition and wanted to know what it felt like to raid with capable people. It was an awesome 4 years journey that I will never forget.
When you raid in WoW, it's very rare that the kill relies mostly on 1-2 people, it's always a group effort. That boss was different because there was a mechanic that allowed one random person every ~1min to get transformed and you had specific duties to do and dealt A LOT more damage.
We kept wiping and wiping because people kept fucking up when they got transformed and I kept thinking "if only it could get back to me, I know what to do, just transform me!" Lo and behold, we got an attempt where I got transformed first and last (before the phase switch).
We killed that boss on that attempt. It felt so good to "carry" the group!
- Last one is with my brother, doing a duo run of MC back in WotLK. It was super easy to do as a raid, but doing it with 1-2 people was definitely still hard.
See, I almost never played with my brother, ever. But WoW was the first game we played together for real. It was an awesome time.
Anyways, we had decided to start a guild together, just to have the guild bank lol so one day we decided to run MC to try to get some old stuff that maybe we could sell. We had an absolute blast that night, wiping, having fun, just playing together.
...it was 15 years ago and I still haven't had a moment with my brother like that. He ended up quitting WoW a couple months after and I just kept playing. We grew apart and that was that. I still think about that MC run with him from time to time.
Stepping out of the crashed evac pod onto Halo for the first time. Something
about that vista -- not just the Halo ring arcing into the sky, but the incredibly sparkly and shimmery quality of the water -- was so visually striking and unlike any of the older games I had played to that point, even on a mediocre CRT monitor.
FFXI was my first MMORPG, and just plain experiencing the world is so memorable. First loading into the game and exploring the starting city of San d'Oria (with heavy overlap of Smashing Pumpkins Siamese Dream, as I got both the game and that CD for Christmas that year); first time exiting the city and killing mobs; getting a group together to make the impossible trek to Jeuno; taking an airship to Kazham; getting to Sky; so on and so forth. Every new area was just so special and came with it's own hardships to conquer.
There was also then having awesome accomplishments in the game; I joined the top NA guild of the server (and one of the top in the world) and eventually became the main tank as a Warrior - which was considering the worst class at the time, but then us OGs showed how it was actually one of the best because it could be a tank taking barely any damage (using Ninja as a sub) with comparable damage output to the DPSes (previously the meta focused on Paladin's being pure meat shields, which meant harder to keep alive, taking longer to the kill HNMs [more likely to wipe], and harder to keep hate). Was also a huge deal when I got all the rarest equipment in the game, though that was really the start of me falling out of love for the game - had nothing else to strive for, and in the end getting the rare stuff didn't really change anything.
The world was just so big and so cool, and just such an amazing place to escape too. And the fact you couldn't do anything by yourself, everything had to be done with a party, meant there was such a heavy social aspect to the game. I understand why the WoW model changed things, but I do think there was a lot benefits to the old MMORPG style of needing other people to do even simple things. Though what the WoW model DEFINITELY got right was instances, holy shit having to wait around in a 6 hour window waiting for a mob to spawn was so dumb in retrospect. But then again, going back to the social aspect, it's hard to call it a waste of time...it was hanging out with friends for hours on end.
I can't ever play a MMORPG again - I only found it fun as an escape, and now can't help but feel it's wasted time. But it was still special. Not just gaming wise, life wise. Definitely a reason MMORPGs lead to so many of people favorite memories of gaming lol
Man, I've got a lot I can think of. I've been writing a review of Melee for Backloggd, so I'm gonna post the first half of it because that game is my fucking moment generator for decades.
Melee
It's Christmas. I'm, what, eight? My dad gives up on trying to connect the GameCube my parents got me. I point out that the "in" RCA ports of the VCR, the "out" RCA ports to the TV, and the "IN" screen on the VCR setting all probably have something to do with this. He sighs lets me set it up instead. I get it on the first try.My reward is, literally, a chorus heralding the most impressive computer graphics I've ever seen. I already liked technology, but this single-handedly may explain how a lifelong positive feedback of solving technical problems burrowed deep into my skull.
Dude. This fucking rules. It must be the coolest game I'll ever play in my life. I play it nonstop.
I'm 10 hours in. I futz with the c-stick. The menus still react at an angle??
Dude. This fucking rules. It must be the slickest game I'll ever play in my life. I play it nonstop.
I read about the Resident Evil remake in a gaming magazine. I'm nine, I'm not playing it for another eight years. (Then, with REMake and RE4 at checkout on my 17th birthday, Gamestop forgets to card me. I could've got away with it this whole time?? Anyway.) What is a 3rd grader to do? I boot up Melee, I go into Adventure mode, pick Fox and Falco, and shoot ReDeads only using neutral B. Shooty zombies. That works. I'm happy.
Dude. This fucking rules. You must be able to do anything with this game. I play it nonstop.
My friend's over. We're goofing around in multiplayer. WEE WOO WEE WOO. Get the door, it's Mewtwo. My last barrier to Game & Watch and All-Star mode. My friend won the last match, but he wordlessly hands me his controller. He gets it, it's my fight. I lock in. I worry I'm going to have to play another 20 hours if I lose. (That's stupid, but man, who knows?) I almost lose, because my heart is pounding and I suck at Melee. But at like 140% I knock Mewtwo out. We cheer.
Dude. This fucking rules. It must be the most exciting game I'll ever play in my life. We play it nonstop.
I'm visiting some internet friends for the first time in college. We get along already, of course, but I am halfway across the country trying to assimilate into an IRL friend group and I'm already a bit socially anxious.
We get to one of their houses and they have something prepared to completely shatter the ice. A GameCube is on. Melee is running. It's on slow-mo mode. There are four Ganondorfs already selected.
They want me to play their goofy ruleset where people can only use his DAir and Warlock Punch.
This is so dumb. You can just tech the stomp. It doesn't matter. We're cackling over the stupid antics. The rest of the week is just as wonderful.
Dude. This fucking rules. This may be the most fun I've ever have in a video game. We play it nonstop.
I'm in Pittsburgh. Fight Pitt IV is going on, so I drop by to root for Abate. Because, like, c'mon. I'm just roaming around. It's crazy watching a room full of people casually push this game so hard.
My attention shifts on the floor. I see Mew2King, so I stand by and watch. He's playing Beanwolf. Beanwolf was trying to bait him into Bowser vs Bowser... But M2K changed to Sheik at the last second.
This is potentially the worst match-up in the game. Everyone buckles in for something.
Obviously, M2K is trouncing Beanwolf. One stock. No hit. Two stocks. No hit. Three stocks. He's on track to the JV5. Beanwolf stands on the opposite side of FD - nope, M2K eggs him to come to him, peppering him with needles. Bowser has to engage or he's dead anyway.
Beanwolf just wants this one fucking hit. He's jumping in with Bowser's neutral B. Despite the impressive amount of coverage from Bowser flame, M2K is styling so hard that he poofs above and below it. Swats him. Beanwolf plays Bowser's slow, clunky, tank-like footsies, moving back and forth. Back and forth.
Did he see the line? Did he hypnotize M2K? Maybe he just wanted the meme exit. Either way, he takes the initiative. He runs to the side, and... Down-B. Bowser bombs. Aiming right off the edge.
M2K was off guard. Bowser's ass smacks Shiek once on its way out. Beanwolf hurtles to his death, but no one cares who won or lost. That one hit is redemption. We all erupt in applause. The announcers cheer, Beanwolf gets high fives, M2K almost falls out of his chair laughing.
I'm standing behind this the whole time, barking and clapping like a seal lost in the hype. Also, turns out I'm on video. People have watched me turn into an animal 400,000 times.
Dude.
I'm in Japan with one of the friends who made me play Slow-Mo Ganondorfs. We're at a gaming bar. I'm playing Splatoon a couple days after it came out, trying to convince myself to get a Wii U. (I left Japan with $24 USD in my bank account and 12¥ in pocket change. That wasn't happening.)
My friend gently interrupts me. He says something like, "Hey, I accidentally picked up a controller that paused these two guys playing Smash 4. They're challenging us for drinks. It's not optional." Whoops. We go over and exchange trash talk in broken Japanese and English.
Somehow we hold our own - trade a couple games back and forth. But a few games later, my friend has an idea. "You know what we do in America?"
Yeah, baby. We switch over to Melee. One of the other guys declares that whoever loses takes a shot of tequila. But we're doing pretty well.
Three games in, in probably the most fluent Japanese I speak all trip, I dramatically reveal I like tequila. They crack up. We do fuckin Slo-Mo Ganondorfs while we're all plastered. We switch to fast mode with Captain Falcon. We all go Jigglypuff.
I don't know these people, we're from opposite sides of the world, and we can barely communicate with each other.
Smash, tho?
Dude. This fuckin rules. Melee must be the most universal game of all time. Well, alright, maybe it's not. But it certainly helps, doesn't it? We play it nonstop.
We cheer to each other at like 4:00 AM, then part ways. My friend and I walk to our hotel, basking in the early morning sunrise glow through the quiet streets of Kyoto.
Some others I can think of:
Random list
A particular final boss from Undertale.
Beating Mega Man Battle Network 3 with a friend at like 1:00 in the morning when we were supposed to be sleeping.
Using the glue gun in Prey (2017) and realizing I can just... Go anywhere.
Learning Ganon's Tower skip to end an Ocarina of Time Archipelago run because I'd never actually beat the game before and I wanted to just finish already.
Getting the flag in TF2 CTF for the first tie as a Scout and somehow running past everyone without a scratch.
Do you know what you've just done? You've taken your first steps into Kanto!
Initiating the end of Outer Wilds. Felt like all the gears clicked together in my head and I started moving like a motor.
There's dozens of "wow!" moments for me, but one of my all time favourite memories was about 25 or so years ago huddled around a 21" CRT in my best friend's living room playing Goldeneye 007 with his two brothers.
We were playing rockets only (honour system) with max health on Facility, ensuring you basically had to get a direct hit to kill each other. I forget the win condition - but it was tense in these moments. There was lots of yelling and shrieking, frantic jumping, cursing when parents weren't within earshot, all around hilarity for early adolescence boys. Since we all suspected each other of screen cheating, we aimed our cameras up at the ceiling or down at the floor and navigated mostly blindly. Suddenly all four of us turned a corner at the same time (well three technically, one was just down the hall) and all screamed as we launched multiple rockets into each other's faces and/or feet. The orange pixelated glow of explosions filled each player square on the CRT and... stayed there with a horrid crunching coming out of the tinny TV speakers.
That was the day we learned the N64 can crash. After we calmed down from that intense screamfest, we went outside and threw rocks at trees or something. Core memory right there.
I'm gonna cheat and name two from the PS2 era. I played video games as a kid but I'd never ventured much beyond the occasional N64 titles with friends. When I was a started university in 2006, I decided to treat myself to a console and bought a used PS2 with a handful of games off Craigslist
Final Fantasy X - Yuna dancing on the water
I had rented a copy of the original Final Fantasy on NES a few times (still havent beaten that one), so I figured I'd give it a shot. I had no idea what I was in for. The opening scene with Sin attacking Zanarkand was something but the scene that completely blew my mind is when Yuna is asked to send souls to the Farplane. This isn't gameplay, it's a cut scene but the animation and presentation level were so far beyond anything I had ever experienced in a vaideo game, it may as well have been from another dimension. The scene is beautifully animated with a classic theme by Nobuo Uematsu and, while it may sound crazy, I think it validated for me the idea of video games as an art form. "People die and Yuna dances" is one of the lines I immediately think of whenever that game comes up
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty - Crazy Colonel
While I was playing FFX, I was also playing MGS2. I had watched my friend play MGS1 on PSX and didnt really get the story but the Psycho Mantis battle always stuck out. There are so many amazing part to this game but the Colonel and his crazy codecs is my pick for the most memorable. It's a meme now but how many of us shut off the console mid-game and lost progress? How many people tried to decipher the Colonels mostly meaningless jibberish? It took a game that felt mostly serious in tone and completely flipped it into that Kojima level of absurdity that was completely alien to me. All of Arsenal Gear is kinda crazy like that. The replacement radar screens, Fission Mailed....all of it blends into an unforgettable gaming experience that I wish I could play again for the first time
Both of these experiences made me realize how much gaming had changed from when I was a kid. Before all that, I might occasionally pick up a controller at a friends house. After ,I started buying my own systems, researching my own purchases and curating my own collection
After I graduated from college, I was thrust into a down job market. I moved back in with my parents as I searched. I would spend my days scouring job boards and managing applications (and the odd interview when it would pop up). At night I was working a retail job at minimum wage. It was a pretty stressful and uncertain time.
Meanwhile, my little brother was going through a pretty tough pre-med program. It was a lot of studying/learning/tests and the campus was a couple hours away from the comfort of our parents' house where he had spent all of his high school years. He would study hard during the week, and then make the trek to our parents' house for weekends and any other breaks that would come up.
We bonded a lot during this time of uncertainty. Lots of anime binge watching and game playing. By far the most memorable, though, was our play through of Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. I had a fully decked out GameCube with all of the accessories, so we would connect my GBA via link cable so that my brother could be player 2. Player 2 in this case amounted to him taking control of the Tingle character, which was pretty hilarious in and of itself. But it actually had some interesting utility that made some of the sea combat and treasure finding easier and more fun. We would play in the evenings, and it was a great way to relax and explore the seas of a sunken Hyrule.
Anyway, we beat the game together, and I eventually found a great job that carried me well into my adult life. I moved to my own place, and started my own family. My brother finished his program, became a doctor, and established himself in a different part of the country. We keep in touch, but have never again been as close as we were during that strange time in our lives. I've since finished Wind Waker several more times. Most recently I played it with my kids and had a great time showing them the Zelda game that carried me through my young adult life. Every time I play though, I find myself in that strange nostalgic calm that I experienced years ago. ❤️
What an awesome memory! Have you shared to your brother how much it meant to you? How did he react?
Oh yeah, we have discussed how fond the memory is. A few years ago I coordinated with his wife and kids to send him on a Tingle themed scavenger hunt for his birthday. :D
I don't really have just one game that stands out in memory but I do attribute a lot of my happy gaming memories to peak 2000s Nintendo with the DS and Wii. I was fortunate enough that my parents bought both and that I was able to share the gaming with my siblings. So many great games like the Gen 4 Pokemon games on the DS, New Super Mario Bros, Mario Kart DS/Wii, Super Mario Galaxy, Wii Sports/Resort.
Even today I very much find myself as a Nintendo adult, basically playing the sequels of the games I played as a kid. There's just something about how Nintendo designs their games for casual couch potatoes like myself that keep me drawn to them. I've dabbled with the Playstation 4/5 and also have some fond memories of the Xbox and Xbox 360, but Nintendo's consoles and games just stick out more in my memory.
If we are speaking about the gamenitself, then it is the ending sequence of Final Fantasy X. The closing of the story is... It is perfect, it is superbly executed. To this day I haven't experienced better story.
Spoilers
When you climb moubt Gagazet before Zanarkand and you learn that the main character is a dream and will vanish once the Sin is defeated... Basically trading his "existence" for eternal peace while leaving Yuna alive but without the one she loves.And then after defeating Sin he actually leaves. There is this charm to endings like that - you expect some miracke to apper but it is nowhere to be found. Ghe story really wraps up on this very very sad note.
And if this wasn't enough, the continuation of outro start by fading-in while Yuna whistles. Tidus told her to whistle and he will come running. And she wistles again and again and nothing happens... If you weren't crying already, you are now.
And the the famous Yuna speech at the blitzball stadium. "The friends we have lost, and the dreams that have faded... Never forget them." And I know I never will. This is such sad and such emotional ending!
Phew, time to move on.
I remember when I first defeated Diablo. My mom helped me in one of tbe last levels where I had to step around the corner to get bombarded by blood wings (or what the name was). I needed my mom to administer drinking mana potion while I killed them. And Diablo was actually quite easy. I have never finished the game again.
I also remember meeting the tank for the first time in Jagged Alliance 2. I couldn't believe there are actual tanks in the game!
I also remember playing the Hidden & Dangerous 2 on hardest difficulty and lone wolf at once. The fourth mission where you bave to get to the enemy submarine... I had to replay it again and again and again (they shot me at the submarine many many times) - I simply knew where and when will each enemy show up and how to deal with them. While going very slow for the first time, I simply went through the whole map in five minutes when I finally finished this mission.
I ahve very fond memories of Earth 2140 multiplayer over serial cable. We enjoyed the game with my friend a lot back in the days and played coop multiplayer only to desync in very late stage in the game and then wiping each others base and then watching it still standing on the other PC. Tbis happened every single time and we had so much fun doing it.
I also remember how I played Baldur's Gate and got to the final battle. It was hard to get there. But it was even harder to admit to myself that I cannot win it with the party I had. I have never finished the game (yet). It's stranve to say, but Baldur's Gate 2 was much easier, including final battle, which was kinda joke, to be honest. Well there is around 15-20 years in between those two battles. I will return to BG1 and I will emerge victorious! One day...
One in the last 10 years is the feeling of awe is seeing my first walking mausoleum in Elden Ring. Leading up to it I could hear the foreboding bell chime and was thinking, "What the hell is this going to be?" I stood there for a while just taking it in. That game in general is the first one since the original Legend of Zelda that has given me such a feeling.
Original Zelda on NES!? Can you describe how it was the first time?
Oh man, I'll have to think on this one (plus I'm on the way to work so I'll try and add more later). One that instantly comes to mind is the first time I beat Genichiro in Sekiro. At the time, he seemed so difficult but I kept going at it and the rush that I got after beating him was unlike anything else.
Yes! I felt it for both Genichiro and also one of the
final bosses.
Glock Saint
Having gamed from a young age, I have generated quite a few of these. I think it's more prudent to set these into categories of what was most impactful.
Game Completion goes to Nier Automata. There are many games that I've beaten and enjoyed, but very few give me goosebumps thinking about the ending even years later. With this game, IYKYK Runner up: Persona 3, I think I have a "type" for a game story
Competitive Glory has plenty of fun hacking accusations and leader board triumphs, but my favorite by far is from FFXIV. They released a minigame called Lords of Verminion that used the little minion characters that follow your player character as game pieces in an RTS arena. The game itself was pretty solid but I was an RTS/MOBA vet coming into an environment where people were nowhere near as experienced. I was a big fish in a small pond. What makes "beating up on noobs" memorable? It wasn't the wins. I was just playing to have fun. It was the fact that I could see in public chat when I was in the room and people were wanting to play for achievements or just not get their face kicked in, they would shout "Oh no, Nono is here!" and then "Oh, he's in a match! Queue now so you don't get him". It was purely memorable for having literally everyone else organize around not having to play you. Runner up: Making day 2 on my first Magic: the Gathering Grand Prix. Quickly washed out, never got that far again.... also getting banned from using Jigglypuff in Smash Bros Melee in college
Finally, to keep this relatively short, I can't go without meeting my wife in FFXIV, that's my favorite memory :)
There are too many, so I'm going to answer a bit tongue in cheek, but...
...beating Bubsy. As a child. Have you any idea how long that took? How much effort? The sweat? The tears? The pain? Get absolutely fucked, Bubsy! You lose, my brother and I win!
I think it has to be the flight into Anor Londo when playing Dark Souls for the first time. I'd played Demon's Souls before that of course, and that had some spectacle, but that Anor Londo flight will stay with me for ever.
I love watching first playthroughs of Dark Souls on YouTube still, just so I can vicariously experience it for the first time again.
Playing Doom Eternal for the first time blew my balls clean off.
A recent one that really stuck was the wrap up of Tears of the Kingdom. A journey dozens of hours long, the musical score so artfully composed and delivered, even working in the UI for completing that quest that'd been in your log the entire game, to save Zelda. I felt elated as I finally did so. I'd planned on going back and doing more stuff after, but I just couldn't.
Between ages 5 and 11 I had a friend from elementary class which I would visit near-daily to just hangout and play video games with. The amount of games we've played and explored was wonderful, from Need for Speed 3 Hot Pursuit to Rollercoaster Tycoon and ATV Simulator on the C64, Skyroads and Fuzzy's World of Miniature Space Golf just to name a few.
Fond memories <3
I used to record game soundtracks off of my TV speaker then listen to them on recorded tapes when I was super young, so I'd say that reliving Chrono Trigger,Phantasy Star IV and Thunder Force soundtracks over and over was mine.
The other kids probably thought I was listening to the Beastie Boys -- jokes on them! I'm weeping internally to To Far Away Times!
Similar story here, but in my case I hooked my NES composite audio out to my Dad's stereo and recorded tracks from Capcom games (Little Nemo and Megaman 3 were my favorites).
Oh man, what an excellent question.
It's really tough for me to pick out just one. Among my earliest memories, is playing Mario World on NES with my dad. I couldn't have been older than 5. Years later, we played Goldeneye on N64 together.
Halo was such an impactful game for my late adolescent and early teenage years. It cemented my interest in space games, science fiction, and first person shooters. Then my friends and I would have sleepovers at a friend's house who had Ethernet drops and multiple TV's, we would do 4v4 over LAN, for hours on hours at a time. I think those "middle school" years may not hold many great memories for most, but those were definitely great memories for mine.
Most recently, I'd save the now dead game Evolve. It was an asymmetric 4v1 "monster hunter" game. The 4 were kitted up sci fi humans in first person POV's (Assault, Medic, Trapper (think tracking skills), Support (buffs and offsets)). The 1 was a giant monster with a third person POV who got a 30 second head start in the match. The monster would (typically) try and sneak around the map, hunting wildlife to "Evolve" and gain more armor/HP/abilities. No two matches were ever the same, it was such a dynamic game and my friends and I were hooked. Not only that, but when we partied up, we were good. We put many, many hours into that game, having a blast along the way.
The Evolve teaser, and launch trailer, for anyone who cares.
I've spoken before about playing Pokémon Moon and how it became my most personal journey in a game thanks to Mulaku, my Muk. I'm a lifelong Pokémon fan and been playing since Gen 2 (and Gen 1, because I did get those games after Gold/Silver), but Pokémon Moon remains the most personal experience—the one time I felt like it was my journey, not some character I was playing—because the developers decided to make Grimer happy about getting any single touch in Pokémon Refresh.
...But since I've told that story before, I'll tell about another fun memories: basically, the entirety of my time playing Mitadake/Pyrce/Misuterii High on BYOND.
Mitadake High is an anime-inspired multiplayer game that looks like an RPG Maker game where up to 16 players are trapped in a school, with one of them being a killer. Your goal is to either survive for twelve in-game hours (with hosts setting hours to usually be 5 or 8 minutes), or to kill everyone if you're the killer. And of course, LOTS of role-playing. It had a normal mode, a Death Note mode, and a "Nanaya" mode based off the Tsukihime visual novel series (which... typically just served as a free-for-all).
Pyrce High and Misuterii High were spiritual successors that expanded on it, with the admins/devs adding more modes and character sprites. And man, was it fun. I wrote up a bunch of guides for the new modes as they were implemented, and remember our excitement the first time players successfully killed a witch in the mode based off Umineko. We had a lot of good times. (I still laugh remembering the line "Drugs lead to cannibalism" after one particular RP.)
Probably my favorite memory of those games came when we were testing out Zombie mode, which was fairly buggy. I think that, at least at the start, the first zombie would be an AI-driven one that would constantly walk towards players and bite them to infect them. Simple but highly effective since ranged attacks weren't really a thing. The very first attempt had a hilarious bug where the initial zombie was just automatically spamming empty text, so we had to quickly end the round since "Zombie says ' '" popped up in bold every three seconds.
In one of the next rounds, I roleplayed a girl who was very early in her pregnancy just to add some drama. So after a point I and the other few survivors (all male) holed up in a classroom, and had been blocking the door with desks when a zombie opened the door and stepped inside with another zombie directly behind it. The desks and door only let it get inside on one tile, so the guys cautiously attacked the zombie from below with hit-and-run tactics while I hung back as the Vulnerable Pregnant Girl who Must Be Protected.
And at this point, for whatever reason the zombie stopped responding. Best we figured, the player must have disconnected, but disconnecting doesn't kill you. So the zombie just stayed there. With another non-responsive zombie directly behind it. Blocking the only entrance.
The position of the zombie and the open door meant we could only interact with them from below or in front of them. While there's a push command that I think works on players, the door and the second zombie blocked off the two directions we could have shoved them. You can also forcibly move players by killing or knocking them out and dragging their bodies, but for whatever reason, the attacks weren't doing either. And the zombie behind them must have been the AI one, because it was not moving or doing anything.
As the guys cycled through attacking the zombie with no response, we quickly realized that the player was offline. The positioning of the two non-responsive zombies created a weird softlock, as even other zombie players couldn't do anything thanks to the AI zombie standing in the door and blocking the other zombie. And sure, the game's all about roleplaying, but there's not much fun in just being stuck in a single room.
We all talked in the meta-chat about the admins possibly force-ending the round while continuing to attack, hoping the player would either come back online or we'd damage them enough to drag their body. The game has stamina/energy so they'd basically take turns attacking the zombie while waiting for the energy to refill.
As the guys cycled through rounds of futile attacks, I was getting a bit bored just standing around, but the Vulnerable Pregnant Girl wouldn't want to risk her and her baby's safety needlessly. And then I got a brilliant stroke of inspiration on how to join in while staying in-character.
"Wait a minute... THAT ZOMBIE LOOKS LIKE THE ASSHOLE THAT GOT ME PREGNANT!"
If we had voice chat, I'm sure the others would have been howling as I charged forward to take my turn attacking the zombie, ranting about him being a good-for-nothing deadbeat who left me behind and had the nerve to then get zombified. I know I was laughing pretty hard, and there were plenty of people laughing over text in the meta chat and cheering me on.
In the end an admin shut down the round because it was deadlocked, but it still stands out as one of the most fun rounds I remember. Makes me sad that the heyday has long passed and the game will likely never achieve that same sort of activity again.