24
votes
What was your most memorable gaming moment?
What moment from your games stands out to you? What was burned permanently into your memory? Is there an interesting story attached to it? Let me know!
What moment from your games stands out to you? What was burned permanently into your memory? Is there an interesting story attached to it? Let me know!
When I met my lady we were both in our early thirties, and had recently bought our first computers. Serious stuff, no gaming. We did end up trying a couple of shareware games that came in the companion CD of PC magazines. She settled on adventure games (Indiana Jones and all that) while I was more into RTS (Age of series).
We eventually connected our computers to play together. It was hard, she hates competing. We did some NFS (Porsche 2000), but it wasn't working. And Age of Mythology was way too violent for her taste.
My most memorable gaming moment was when I figured out we could play as a team against two AI opponents, she would build and grow the economy, which she enjoyed, and I would lay waste to the enemy, my military funded by her. We would even record those games and discuss them afterwards :)
This reminds me of how I used to play Civilisation with my girlfriend, we would always team up against the NPCs too.
This reminds me of archon mode in Star Craft 2
I'm a big ol baby when it comes to scary video games, but I still like playing them all the same. When Amnesia: Dark Descent first came out I swore I wouldn't play it simply based on the hubbub surrounding it. It was supposed to be "THE SCARIEST GAME EVER MADE" and regardless of that statement's veracity I didnt want to test it.
Unfortunately I had also recently finished a playthrough of Doom 3 I'd been playing for my friends to watch. We would all gather at my place, I'd hook up the laptop to my TV in the living room, and then we'd just play through. Because I'm such a scaredy cat they got a bunch of laughs out of it, and decided I should play Amnesia next.
This was of course before Steam's return policy began, but one of my friends gifted me the game and they eventually convinced me to play it, much to my chagrin.
The first level is certainly atmospheric, but barring one dread filled moment where a monster is staring RIGHT AT YOU AND IF YOU MOVE YOU'RE FUCKED it wasn't too bad. Then came the second level.
When you start it, you're walking into a flooded stone hallway. You've just spent an entire level wandering around in the almost-dark trying to avoid this monster, and this hallway is lit so if you've played video games much you get a nice sense of security. You go from a dark place to a lit place; that's supposed to mean you're (temporarily) safe.
As you walk down the hallway, though, theres suddenly the sound of splashing footsteps and from around the corner up ahead comes something COMPLETELY INVISIBLE save for the large splashes it's making in the water and now it's coming right toward you DO SOMETHING QUICK OR IT'S GOING TO GET YOU.
If you weren't aware, Amnesia is a game without weapons. You have a life "bar" and a sanity "bar", and that's basically it. Well, since I was given no weapons in the game, I used the only one I could think of in the spur of the moment: my real life hands. I slammed the laptop lid shut so hard it cracked my screen. But it turned the game off! So I was at least free from the terror of this nonexistent entity.
They all got a big laugh out of it but I was real bitter until I got the screen fixed.
Christ, my blood pressure rose the second you started describing that, I know the exact part you mean. I absolutely hated playing that game but I respect what it did, I never felt true helpless terror like that from a video game before.
It's too bad the puzzles and navigation in that game become a giant pain in the ass later on, it'll just sit in that weird place in my brain of games I respect but will never finish.
This… this is the moment you mean, right? (Obvious Amnesia spoilers)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nisO2iils8
That's definitely an encounter with it. It doesnt look quite like I remember so I cant say if it's the same part, but that's definitely the spooky little bastard.
Portal, at the end of the last test chamber...
SPOILER, I RECOMMEND THIS GAME
where the music picks up, the platform you are on is desending into a flaming room and you have to escape or be incinerated. The back half of going through Aperture's interior is great, but just rounding the bend and suddenly everything is on fire is a very iconic moment.
I think I was watching my brother play when we got to that point, so it didn't have quite as much impact. My most memorable moment from Portal (and one of the most from games in general) is the very first portal, where you see yourself moving around through the portal. I had never seen anything like that in a game before. It was awesome.
Yeah, seeing yourself within the portal is a really interesting moment.
When my brother sat me down, told me "it's time for you to play this," and opened up Half-Life 2. At that point, my background was retro Nintendo stuff, some racing games, and some other stuff that isn't all that noteworthy...it blew that all open and set me permanently on a new path, really opening PC gaming up to me and giving me my longest-standing true passion.
City 17 is fucking horrifying if you're a kid just discovering the first person perspective beyond some trash PSX game you touched once, using your first decent audio setup (or whatever you want to call "gaming headphones" from back then, I doubt I'd say decent now), having never touched something slow and atmospheric before. I was horrified by the police, I wouldn't DARE do anything like throw the can...I picked that shit up! I have the whole speech loop burned into my brain, as well as all of the dialogue from background NPCs. I followed around the guy pacing back and forth for the longest time. I lost myself in City 17, as tiny as it was. Anything happening was a thrill, sometimes too much for me...I was such a scared kid I would frequently pause just to calm down and collect myself. The rest of the game was incredible, of course, but City 17 was life-changing all on its own. To this day I've never felt anything which nails the absolutely oppressive air of dystopia half as well as HL2 did it.
HL2 is no longer my absolute favorite game and I've had games touch me more deeply, but that sense of absolute immersion and fear hit me at the perfect time and made a permanent impression. I'm tearing up remembering this, as it also reminds me of a time when my brother and I were inseparable despite him being about a decade and a half older than me (here's a personal fuck you to gamergate for tearing that apart). Playing that game was something of a rite of passage that he also tried to repeat with younger family members to mixed results. I dunno, it's something special to me and it's too bad that it's starting to lose its status as the default choice for best game ever. Sorry for the rambling.
Oh yes, I can feel you on City 17. Half Life 2 and the episodes knew all too well how to make an atmosphere and maintain it without a single cut scene
This is a tough one. But what first comes to mind is when i came back home from the store and installed Half-Life back when it came out. Me, my dad, my friend and his dad where present, and all our brains where completely blown that day.
Other then that, hitting Legend in Hearthstone my first time made me float on clouds for a few days. Back then only about 10k people per monthly season made it to Legend(0.01% of the player base). This is one of the few games i really went all in on, and after so much hard work over several months it was immensely satisfying. My first month in Legend was quite memorable to, somehow i managed to get top 200 that season and got to play a few pro players and known streamers, it was pretty surreal at first.
Spoilers for FF7:
When Aeris dies. I had run Cloud/Red XIII/Aeris as a party for basically the entire game (long story, got stuck, was grinding for weeks looking for the next place to go) and I was so very attached. Then THUNK motherfucker Sephiroth drops from the roof and puts a goddamn 8 foot odachi sword through her. Spent the rest of the game waiting for a resurrection that never came. XKCD even did a bit on that.
(Note: PAL for life, Aerith sounds like you have a lithp).
I don't know if it's because I liked Tifa better or maybe I had got that plot point spoiled for me somewhere along the way beforehand, but the first time I played it, I really did not understand why everyone made such a big deal out of it. I just went, "Wow, she's dead? Huh." It had next to no emotional impact for me, and reading all the trauma it seemed to cause other players left me baffled.
I keep coming back to the Quake 4, to the moment when your character gets made into a strogg. At the time first person perspective, especially as a story telling device was not very common, and the inevitability combined with brutality of that sequence really made me feel for the man I've been playing for.
The second one comes from Fallout 3 - I've been simply exploring the ruins and I found a robot that cited a sad poem (There Will Come Soft Rains) to me. It was so atmospheric that it burned into my memory permanently.
All of my memorable moments are from multiplayer games.
Quakeworld Teamfortress, playing in regular weekly clan matches in multiple leagues, using different formats (10v10 and 12v12 mostly), where we'd have practices ahead of games on new maps to learn and practice new setups, like which classes to play on defense and where, and new maps especially weird ones like canalzon that was control point based and very assymetric, which my clan specialised in. Binding comms messages to hotkeys since we didn't have voice chat (i.e. flag taken, flag down, watch out for spies). Reading match report writeups from clan websites (gothicterror.com author, I believe he was called Boggs, had a way with words) or the league sites, or the e-sports news sites that posted regular news reports and top 10 rankings voted by community members. Guilds for "elite" players of specific classes, Kaizen for snipers, Paragon for soldiers. US vs. Canada games occasionally set up, somewhat adhoc, I played for Canada in one, went offensive Medic and did a few double conc jumps to get the flag out of the tower and into the water on well6. Realising after an embarrassing amount of time that I could increase the resolution from 320x240. All in a community that ran itself, with no cash or prizes, without any sponsors or third-party support. Seems unthinkable nowadays.
Similar leagues being run in wc3, especially the Warcraft Premier League that I helped run in the leadup to season 3 where we got about 50 applications to join, from all over the world. NC.Dude taking out tons of top players with his unique playstyle, blademaster mass batriders that was so unorthodox nobody knew how to properly deal with it, until he reached the World Cyber Games and got 2-0'd by a Korean pro that had studied his games and fast expanded into Hyppogriphs. Playing in WCG Canada 2005, getting 5th place, even though I was technically terrible. My buddy reaching the finals of the Montreal qualifier for ESWC, 1 game away from qualifying to Paris, hitting the opponent's fast expand hard, but getting surrounded and forgetting he had a town portal to escape, instead losing his hero and army and the game. He still got to go to Singapore for WCG, 1 game short of making it out of groups (rare for NA) beating a Chinese pro, but then psyching himself out of playing standard against the Finnish player and losing. SK.MaDFroG going to the mystical land of Korea to practice at a time when the western scene had nearly no information about them or their playstyles. He returns to western leagues and just doesn't lose anymore, doing things never before seen like stealing creep kills. Moon's humiliating destruction of ToD by charming ToD's workers, building an entire human base, going through the tech tree to tier three, and training 2 human heroes (vod). Qazzi the random god going like 156-0 on ladder. The quirky american random player Axslav 2-0'ing Sky with Brewmaster first in the top clan league the week after Sky won WCG.
Watching every game of the North American Star League when SC2 came out and it was the biggest e-sport on twitch (up to 10k viewers for big tournaments).
After two (three?) weeks training on Nefarian, finally seeing him go down.
WoW vanilla raids are some of my top memories. Killing Vaelastrasz, killing C'Thun, Huhuran, Viscidus, Twin Emperors, Patchwerk, Thaddius…
Nefarian is my strongest memory though. I was still full of adrenaline the day after.
Stormwind, on the eve of the new year, cerca 2008-9 ish.
15 years old, a lowly gnome rogue and I barely knew my way from Goldshire to Duskwood. The fact I'd played that character for close to 2 years (on-and-off) and yet only just hit lvl 16 was telling of my play-style - for me, WoW was best when I was wandering, stopping to converse with random passers by, and discovering new things for the first time.
The night of that new year is still clear in my memory.
Stormwind was alive with the energy of an MMORPG in its heyday; WotLK had just been released, and hundreds of humans, dwarves, gnomes, night elves, and draenei crowded the streets. Armour and mounts of all shapes and sizes, from pauper noobs to elite raiding guilds, everyone was out in unison to celebrate the new year beneath the ceaseless din of fireworks, festive kegs abound, small toy contraptions whizzing about the alleyways, and the laughter brought on by barrages of Wands of Holiday Cheer.
I sat, pants-off, and with a bikini-clad night elf druid for company, atop the Gryphon roost - looking out over a small shimmering blue lake as I watched the flight-path Gryphons carry players in and out, pondering my small life, soaking up the atmosphere and watching the in-game clock tick to 00:00, as the chat went wild with merriment and well-wishes.
For me it was when I was 10-11 and my friend got this fancy new game 'Myst' that had just come out. He had me come over, and we went down into the basement and turned off all the lights, and and cranked the volume on the speakers, and it was like we were actually transported to an entirely new world. I'll always remember how much my mind was blown by the amazing graphics and lifelike sounds. It was such a huge step up from my Sega Genesis and old DOS computer at home in terms of graphics and audio. When his mom came down to check on us and let the light in, I had actually forgotten that we were in his house. I've never quite been that entranced or immersed in a game since.
Did the exact same thing with Ocarina of Time, just messed around and sat in of of Kokiri Forest for five hours.
I had a similar time with Myst. Back then, it was a completely engrossing experience. Nowadays game graphics continue to approach photorealism, but none have the same captivating effect on me that Myst did. Sadly, even though I can still play Myst today (on my phone, no less), the magic is gone. It's tedious, dated, and often feels like a glorified Powerpoint presentation.
It pains me a bit that as time passes, I'm losing the ability to be moved by games like I once was. I'm not sure if that's because of the maturation of the industry, or because I'm getting old. Probably a little of both.
Recently, the last two bosses of Dark Souls 3 DLC, Sister Friede and Gael. The first one for being so hard (I've must I've tried 40 times over a few weeks to beat her), and the second one so cool. I couldn't believe it when I finally finished Sister Friede, and was physically exhausted.
I'd never been interested in FPS games because I thought they were all about walking backwards in narrow corridors shooting demons with shotguns, which never looked fun. When my brother's friend brought over Halo and we played through the first level together, it was immediately different for me with its larger environments and varied gameplay. I'd had some great moments after that, but walking outside at this point during the assault on the control room and seeing a full-pitched battle going on between the marines and the covenant without me was definitely a "Holy shit!" moment. It made the game feel so much bigger than just me.
They still put the Flood into the second half of the game and changed the combat dynamic into exactly what I didn't like, but I digress...
Primary/Elementary school, got my first PC (486 DX2). I think I was the first kid in my class who had both a SoundBlaster and (4x speed) CD-ROM drive in it.
So, after some time, I save up some money and buy the budget CD release of The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge (I think Day of the Tentacle, the CD talkie, was my first bought game, and I love it to bits as well). The CD goes in, I install the game, launch it and am greeted with that unmistakingly beautiful intro music.
Monkey Island has re-defined the whole genre of adventure games and MI2 is said to be the best there ever was (and I tend to agree). For some reason, when playing it for the first time (and oddly enough I played MI2 before MI1), I did have the sense of magic happening. To this very day, that intro music sends shivers down my spine with anticipation every time I hear it.
If you don’t know the importance of The Secret of Monkey Island to the adventure genre, I suggest you see this short-ish documentary. (Hat-tip to @Adys for introducing me to that channel.)
For me, old school WoW consisted of some of my best and worst moments. I only played on my brother’s account in Vanilla but by the time I got my own, TBC had started.
I used to be a dumb teenager playing on Turalyon-EU Horde. Turalyon was a really toxic server, filled with elitist asshats who used to antagonise me. By the end of Wrath I had practically been bullied off the realm. The worst part is that Blizzard didn’t do much about it.
I have a lot of memorable moments, both good and bad:
Landing a player a 24 hour suspension after he typed to me in Trade chat “Do the entire server a favour and fucking kill yourself.” After which he proceeded to make an alt account, pull the whole “my dad works at Blizzard” threats, then told a few other guilds he had connections with to blacklist me. That guy turned out to be an officer for one of the top guilds on the server.
Players inviting me into a Heroic Utgarde Keep group, just to use me for a summon and kick me out of group after all their buddies were ready. The leader rudely put me on block list while his friend proceeded to mock me and call me a dumbass. This crap happened to me a lot, and it’s why I considered later features like Dungeon Finder a godsend.
Being kicked out of a Trial of the Crusader 25 pug after a wipe on Northrend Beasts, all because I had an ungemmed socket on my gear. At the time I was too poor to afford the overpriced agility gems to socket it. What made this memorable was watching everybody flip out in Trade chat three hours later after the same scumbag raid leader that kicked me proceeded to then ninja all the T9 gear tokens and server hop. I guess karma’s a bitch, eh?
Another player on my server called Cheetah was bullied even worse than me That dude had entire Facebook and MySpace pages dedicated to showcasing how much of a “retard” he was. Players treated him worse and I genuinely felt bad for him.
The first time I cleared Karazhan. It was a really good raid night where everything was going well. We cleared the lower half very easily, took down Shade of Aran after one attempt and beat Nightbane in just two really clutch attempts.
After rerolling Holy Paladin on a different realm, I cleared TotC-25 and Onyxia-25 with ease in just item level 187 blues (the lowest quality gear you can get when you first ding 80 and about a full two raid tiers below the recommended gear level for these raids.) After I left Turalyon, I went from being a pariah to a top raider doing ICC Heroic.
Leading a raid group to an almost full clear of Ulduar-10. We only had three bosses to go and struggled on Mimiron, but the other 3 keepers went down. Ulduar is by far my favourite raid.
Unsurprisingly Turalyon’s community died shortly after I left. Many players re-rolled on more popular servers like Stormscale and Tarren Mill. Others just quit because Blizzard were gradually dumbing down the game to a level where even an old granny with dementia could play it.
When I was in college my friends and I linked 4 Xboxes in four dorm bedrooms for a 16-player Halo 2 party. There was something special about that, it was like the swan song of local multiplayer before online play took over and we all returned to solitary gaming in rooms by ourselves.
Leaving the vault in Fallout 3 was pretty neat.
The first time I played through Dragon Age Origins. It was my first experience with BioWare games and that level of depth and characterization BioWare is known for. It was kind of funny because I originally had no interest in the game. I had been primarily a FPS player, almost exclusively Halo/CoD and their respective sequels/prequels.
But a friend of mine hyped up DAO a bit going so far as to tell me that if I didn't like it, he'd buy it off me in lieu of his own copy, and I started checking it out. I'm a big fan of the Stargate franchise so I started getting a little into the game when I learned that Claudia Black was voicing one of the primary party members.
Despite the graphics looking a tad dated and not being used to the third person RPG gameplay, it didn't take long to hook me.
For the first time while playing a video game, I legitimately cared about the characters. I legitimately enjoyed listening to the banter between party members. BioWare did such a good job making those characters and their interactions with each other feel and sound like real friendships. When I reached the end of the game, and it was time to decide the fate of my Warden, I actually felt like I had to take the sacrifice route. I wasn't going to let Alistair do it, especially in light of the truth of his parentage, and Morrigans "Old God Baby" plan was entirely too suspicious for me.
After playing through the first time, I almost immediately started a fresh playthrough, ready to keep "hanging" out with those characters and switching party composition to get all the banter possible.
When Mass Effect 2 came out, I jumped head first into it, and the rest is history. I dive headlong into the Dragon Age and Mass Effect games and have been meaning to go back and play the Baldur's Gate and Jade Empire games. I wanted to play Anthem but quite frankly, I just couldn't. It just seemed like too much of EA's greed had sunk in. I don't hate Mass Effect Andromeda as much as many BioWare fans but the decline was noticeable and a primary reason was EA's insistence on Live Services in their IPs.
I hope BioWare is one day able to follow Bungies footsteps and break from EA and get back to the quality and depth they were once known for.
Other memorable moments include my first "rare" mount drop in WoW, the Ashes of Al'ar, dropping for me after just my 2nd or 3rd Tempest Keep run. I didn't start playing WoW until close to the end of the Legion content. Some of my closest friends are Vanilla veterans who still hadn't gotten that to drop. They were just a tad salty with me.
Racing, and beating, my brother to all Gold Medals in Star Wars Rogue Squadron on the N64.
Long sessions of Age of Empires 1 and 2 with my brothers and now, as adults, we all play together.
Halo parties with my friends in high school, especially at my rich friends house because his step mom would lay out a table to snacks and drinks.
I had a similar situation in the Viridian Gym, with me having accidentally brought my Underleveled Fly Pidgey into the Gym with me, having the rest of my team knocked out, and finishing off Giovanni with Peck over and over again because his Rhydon had nothing that could hit a flying type. Pidgey went from Level 3 to 16 some by the time he was done, so that was cool.
I can think of two especially memorable moments - the first was upon playing the Doom demo for the first time. I'd previously been playing Star Control, Designasaurus and other such games, and Doom was such a more intense visual experience that it seemed like something that other, more special people should be able to play.
The second was playing Fallout 2 for the first time. I had a terrible time killing the radscorpions at the beginning, and when I made it to the first town I did... something. Stole a gun from someone? Picked a lock? Anyway, that I was able to obtain an impressive improvement in an obviously unscripted way pleased me immensely, and I went to tell the rest of my family who could not have cared less. I don't blame them for that.
I imagine this thread partially boils down to 'guess how old we are!'
Playing Gran Turismo 1 or 2, racing my suped up Mitsubishi 3000GT on Trial Mountain and on the last lap cutting over the grass and accidentally LAUNCHING OVER the first place car to win the race.
I will never forget this. My 12 or whatever year old self was absolutely pumped.
I remember I was playing a Stuntman game on PlayStation with my friend, and we had to do a run quickly and we hit a jump in such a way that it pulled the car into a corkscrew that he landed with no momentum lost. It was kinda amazing. Also the flying car cheats in GTA was the best part of the series, bar none.
Edit: It was Stuntman for PS2.
Ah yes. Hadn't played Stuntman but GTA was a blast for doing the most insane things you could. The cheat codes were hilarious, agreed on the flying cars.
Spoilers for Star Wars: KOTOR
The moment it is revealed that you are actually Revan him/herself, whom you have been hearing about the whole game.
Getting into World of Warcraft late and being like god this interface is ugly. Then much later on entering my first raid instance, and being like oohhhh I get it. This is why nothing else quite compares.
Leaving the vault in Fallout 3. Dead Money from Fallout: New Vegas, the entire xpak. Dark Brotherhood (and Thieves Guild to a lesser extent) questlines from The Elder Scrolls.
Riding into Mexico in RDR1, as well as the insane ending. The final heist and then end-game scenario of GTA5.
Watching my brothers play Goldeneye. Getting destroyed by my brothers in HALO multiplayer. Absolutely shitcanning them finally in Call of Duty. Knifing in gun game and tomahawking in SnS like a cruel son of a bitch.
I would have to say the most memorable is World of Warcraft, multiple times over. It's hard to choose a single thing. The first raid is always impressive, but when I really enjoyed was my first 40 man raid (MC anniversary edition) and the 40v40 SS vs TM PvP mode. There is so much going on, the server is literally breaking under the pressure, and it feels amazing.
Spoiler for Final Fantasy VI
During first playthrough I wasn't really paying attention to Celes.
My main party was most of the time Terra, Sabin, Cyan and Shadow. I was an early teenager back then and my command of English wasn't so good, so her runic skill seemed so much lame compared to the fighting skills of Sabin, the Sword tech of Cyan or the whole ninja thing if Shadow. The opera scene was cool and goofy (dont forget that you fight a giant squid on scene for real at the end), and she seemed a strong character, but again you cannot beat the appeal of a mysterious girl with green hair that is a magical powerhouse, a samurai Knight whose whole kingdom was murdered, a freaking ninja, and a freaking kamehameha (Sabin aura beam is a kamehameha, no discussion).
Until the World of Ruin.
Just after some epic fights on an epic place (a floating continent!), the bad guy wins and everything fade to black...
And we then switch to that boring Celes. Oh, how convenient she was saved by her dad. However, everything feels wrong: the dad is dying, the color a wrong the enemy weak and decaying. I was not a very good player back then and I cannot catch those damn fishes. Surely I will miss some pointless reward like an elixir. Wait. He's... Dead ? Did I just royally screw up? Oh and that cutscene is continuing, and what are you doing on that cliff! Fffffff!!!
That day I learnt that :
It was a completely random moment in Divinity Orginal Sin 2
NON STORY SPOILERS WARNING
Silent Monks are an enemy type that only targets you if there is another enemy type there. They only join fights, they can't start them, except if they take damage. Every npc in the game fights if you attack them.
So, I was trying to get the drop on a group with a silent monk, and I had the idea to teleport them away from their party. It was kinda of a pain, but I got it to work. I hit the monk and no response. I hit it again and still nothing. For some reason it glitched; the monk never fought back and I just hit until it died.
I have never felt that visceral shame from a video game. It felt like a kicked a puppy. I had to stop playing for that session.