Great Moments in Videogames

Cafe Society
21

Killer Instinct
Boss ending. Pretty much speaks for itself.

[Eyedol is leaving the site of his triumph. Suddenly, an unfamiliar woman appears behind him.]
Stranger: Billy? Is that you, Billy?
[Eyedol turns around.]
Eyedol: Who are you calling Billy? My name’s Eyedol.
Stranger: We were separated many years ago. I’ve been searching for you all this time. I gave you that bracelet for your birthday…
[Eyedol pounds her into the floor]
Narration: Somehow…we don’t think so.

World Heroes 2
Shura’s ending. Best fighting game ending EVER. Little background…Shura’s this kickboxing champ, and his stated reason for entering the World Heroes 2 competition was to avenge the death of his brother. He’s just beaten Dio (an absolute killing machine, BTW) and is standing in the middle of the arena with his arms raised, tears flowing.

Shura: Big brother, at long last I’ve avenged your foul murder. Rest tranquilly, my dear brother…
[Pause on this touching moment for a while…and then someone who looks suspiciously like Shura flies in from the right and boots him completely off the screen. Guess who it is.]
Brother: What in blazes are you talking about, Shura? I’m not dead, never was dead, and won’t be dead for a long time. What under the azure skies have you been doing all this time.
Shura: Er, ah…just fighting my way to #1 in the world, heh heh, heh heh…
[Shura now being dragged across the screen]
Brother: Oh, stop these childish games and get back home. Mom is having babies worrying where you are!

Ring King
Three words: super flying uppercut. The first time I saw it, I was watching someone take on Blue Warker (the champ). Worked him pretty good, but took a few shots as well, so both boxers were pretty worn down. Player takes the offensive…Warker is fading badly. But just when the player’s about to seal the deal…
Whap BooEEEEEEOOOOwwwww [player’s boxer flies completely off the top of the screen] thud [long pause]
Wa wa wa-wa wa, wa wa! Game over!

I was just watching, and I felt that I just got slugged.

The Secret of Monkey Island
The one scene that perfectly encapsulates Lucasarts’ philosophy toward graphic adventure gaming happens on the big plateau on Monkey Island. If Guybrush walks to a certain part of the plateau…one that’s not marked, labelled or even hinted at at any way…it breaks off, and the hero plummets to his apparent death. You even see a parody of Sierra’s restore ‘n restart screen…until Guybrush catapults back onto the plateau, completely unhurt. (“Rubber tree!”) The point being, of course, that you should have the freedom to explore without worrying about dying stupidly ever ten seconds…which, of course, is the best part about their games.

Riven
The marble board. ‘Nuff said. A plain board with six-hundred twenty five holes and six marbles, and you have to put five of the marbles…no more, no fewer!..in the exact right holes. I tell you, the first time I saw this, it was like getting shot. How the hell are you even supposed to start solving this? This is by far the most ridiculous, unsolvable puzzle in any computer game I’ve ever played, and, in a sense, tells you everything about what’s wrong with this game.

Super Ghouls and Ghosts
Fight through an army of incredibly deadly monsters. Die about three million times (yes, I had a Game Genie). Curse the hero’s woefully inadequate abilities. Miss about THIRTY million jumps. Get thrown back to some incredibly distant outpost every time I die. Stumble again. Fight for each and every painful inch.

Then, about several days after I started, it’s done. I’ve beaten the last boss before the big bad Lucifer. Finally, I’m ready to close the deal.

Princess (who’s butt I’m trying to save, remember) informs me that I can’t beat Lucifer without the “Goddess Bracelet”, and have to go back and use the sword’s special power blah blah blah etc.

Game over.

Sometimes I wish the whole stupid 16-bit era just never happened.

Mortal Kombat
The finishing moves…all of them. No other company had even dared to do something this bold before. It’s almost a shame how much “fatalities” have been cheapened over the years.

Castlevania
This one’s been with me for years, partly because it drove me absolutely crazy in the days before cheat codes and save states, and partly because it’s a perfect example of “sacrificing everything for the sake of challenge, challenge, CHALLENGE” mentality that’s infected too many games, including more than a few Konami games.

Final boss, The Count (who’s nameless in this game, BTW). Tough one. Attacks by appearing, tossing three fireballs, and vanishing. Can be hurt only by hitting him in the head while he’s completely solid (and attacking). Sometimes appears right on top of you, meaning you automatically take a hit unless you’re moving away at that time. At this stage, you can only take four hits before dying. Tough, tough battle.

Well, one day, through a combination of iron nerves, judicious use of the boomerang, and plenty of sheer dumb luck, I did it. As the final blow landed, his head went flying off the screen. Final boss…beaten. Done.

And then his body exploded. Even better.

And then THIS WHITE MONSTER THAT WASN’T EVEN IN THE INSTRUCTIONS appears in his place…at full health…and attacks. I went down in about five seconds.

It would be a long time before I’d finally beat this rotten bastard once and for all…and a much longer time before I could even look at a Konami logo.

A double boss at the end of Castlevania. Good effin’ lord. Probably the biggest shot-to-the-heart I ever had with that old system.

22

The Secret of Monkey Island: When Guybrush fell into the water near the dock, I remembered him saying (near the beginning of the game) that he could hold his breath for ten minutes. Naturally, instead of using that ten minutes to think up a way out of the water, I just stood there; ten minutes later he changed color and became a floating corpse, with the regular verbs replaced by “Rot”, “Float”, “Bob”, etc.

(Yes, you can die in a LucasArts adventure!)

23

I borrowed a PlayStation to play Metal Gear: Solid with a friend. We rented it, but didn’t have a memory card; we resolved to sit down and beat the game in a day. It really added to the game experience. We tag-teamed from beginning to end, no breaks. We really jumped when Psycho Mantis first moved the controller, but worse was the interrogation scenes. Revolver Ocelot (I believe) comes in and is going to torture the main character – and says, “If your bar reaches zero, the game ends. There are no continues, my friend!” At this point, me and my friend look at each other and scream. The bar got incredibly close to zero, and we nearly shat ourselves trying not to submit but not to lose the game and start all over again. (Keep in mind this was well 2/3 into a 12 hour playing session.) After we got through, I had to pass off the controller because I was shaking too badly to play.
Metal Gear: Solid shares the additional honor of the game that I always had non-game-savvy friends try, because they would invariably scream in terror when the controller jumped as they got shot.

The only other time I got that startled by a game was playing Tunnel Runner on my Atari 2600 as a kid. I got another Atari 2600 with this game for my birthday last year, and holy cow, it still makes me scream. It’s sort of like Pac-Man, only 3-D, and instead of ghosts there are these giant ball things with big teeth. There’s no music until you get close, and when they do, the music gets louder and louder as they get close until they eat you.

What would usually happen is you’ll be negotiating the maze at some of the harder levels, when you can no longer see those things on the map. You’ll hear the music faintly then whip around a corner and nearly run into one. Crud! You turn around, book it at full speed, and not pay enough attention and suddenly you’re facing another one. Oh no! Then you realize, as you scramble to and fro, the other one is chasing you, too, and this is a long straight corridor with no exists… with a giant hungry man-eating ball with huge fangs at each end, rapidly approaching you. No escape! You hope, futilly, that one of them will turn around… The music starts, dip doo doo DOO dip doo doo DOO… A pit of dread fills you as the music gets louder and louder… DIP doo DOO DOO DIP doo DOO DOO… DIP! DOO! DOO! DOO!! AUUGHHHHHHH!

Other times those fickle little balls will head right for you, and you’ll be running for it… then, inexplicably, it will turn away. Zuh? Stupid thing! You’ll go on your merry way, whip around the corner, and start going a little too fast in your confidence… only to see that ball’s big red cousin come around the turn. You realize too late and DOOdooDOOdooDOO!DOO!DOO!DOO! he’s got you!

That freakin’ game freaked me out something awful. I get the shivers just thinking about it. No kidding.

24

For me the one great video game moment that sticks out in my mind is from the original Tomb Raider. This was on one of the jungle levels. At one point Lara climbs up between some rocks and into an opening. Suddenly a raptor appears, but is easily dispatched. Then another appears, and another. After you get by these guys the jungle opens up into a huge clearing. Then you hear a “thud, thud” sound and I’m thinking “no, it’s not…” when a T-Rex appears out of the distant darkness! After that encounter I was shaking and needed a moment to compose myself.

25

The only problem is, I don’t often have the patience to wait that long to see that bit of hilarity.

You can see in it Monkey Island 3 if you try to pick up the water on Blood Island about 40 times or so.

26

The best death scene yet has been in Fallout 2. I was having a boxing match in New Reno. Getting my arse handed to me. When my hitpoints were almost down, I thought stuff it and took off the boxing gloves. Called punch to the guys torso. Message: “You have critically hit Evandear Holyfield for 0 hitpoints. Unfortunatly his spinal cord is now visible from the front.”

27

Ok, this isn’t going to make much sense to anyone who hasn’t played Everquest but this was probably the single most fun I’ve ever had in a good 15+ years of gaming. We were in Highpass Hold fighting another group for control of the Orc spawn and we were losing badly. They were all wizards and we were mostly melee and hybrids, there was no way we could keep up with their firepower. So finally, one of us gets the genius idea to tell these guys we’re having a party and getting drunk. One of our group goes and buys an ungodly amount of liquor and distributes it among our group to distrubute among the wizards (mind you, for those unfamiliar, this is an online game and these wizards were real people.) I could not believe that they actually fell for it. Within a few seconds they were swaying so badly they couldn’t target a single orc and even if they could it wouldn’t matter because the alcohol lowered their intelligence so much they couldn’t cast a spell.

28

In the original Unreal, there was a point where you had to get through a monastery graveyard. It at first appears totally impassable and you have no idea of where to go. Then, out of a grave appears the ghost of one of the local inhabitants, all glowing and transparent, and he summons you over to another grave, which he chants in front of and it opens to reveal a secret passage.

That ghost actually freaked me out when he appeared. I was just not expecting that.

Later I found out that the ghost only appears if you’ve been nice and not killed the locals, only the evil aliens. If you haven’t been nice, you have to blast your way out through the front gate, which is heavily guarded and takes a lot of effort and ammo to get through.

29

There’s a scene in Half-Life where you’re going through a pipe (damn pipes), and suddenly at the oher end you see a Marine tossing a bomb and closing the other end of the pipe! I couldn’t think at the moment, so I was killed with the explosion. After I was dead I realized that I had to go back and crouch in a little gap filled with water. Just brilliant.

There’s one moment were you encounter this huge monsters that can only hear you. So this was one heck of a tense moment for me, because you have to go through a lot to get to the door (and you have to be extra quiet, and of course, very slowly). And in addition, the monster cannot be killed with normal weapons, and it smashs you and kills you with one or two swings.

I could go on, but I guess that some of you have also played the game and can say some other things about it.

Oh, and the final scene of Grim Fandango, I know it’s a pre-cooked scene, but it deserves mentioning.

30

If it wasn’t clear, Grim Fandango is a different game.

It will make the most insensitive person to get tears all over his face.

31

Resident Evil 2:

Me and a bunch of friends were playing this one in the dark late at night. At one point, you go into a police interrogation room with one-way glass. You can’t see into the other room. All of a sudden, a monster jumps through the glass. It’s scary as hell, and even made me jump when I knew it was going to happen. I don’t think any game ever scared me as much as that one.

The dates thing is cool, too. I remember flipping out when Madden 2001 for PS2 wished me Happy Thanksgiving.

My other all-time favorite is in Metal Gear Solid 2. Late in the game, after an important character dies, Snake, Otacon, and Raiden get all serious and walk in slow motion toward the camera, a la The Right Stuff. It finishes off a very poignant scene and just rules.

And for overall awesome storylines, I’d have to go with Sam and Max Hit The Road, Final Fantasy 7, and the original Metal Gear Solid (but I HATED the torture part!).

P.S. I also really enjoyed the very first time I drove a tank in Grand Theft Auto 3.

32

Silent Hill:
The locker room at the school. The first time you go in, you walk around, and you hear noises coming from a small locker. The game is freaking scary enough, so when something like this happens, you don’t quite know what to expect. (I was also playing this in the middle of the night when this first happened to me.) You come around the corner, and the locker pops open, which is where you find out that the scary noises were coming from…
…a cute little kitty cat.
The cat runs out of the room, and you say something like “Whew. It was just a cat.” Then you hear the sound of the cat being killed by some monster in the hall.
Later on, once the school turns “evil” you go into the same locker room, and when you look in the locker that had the cat in it, it’s filled with blood. When nothing jumps out at you, you start to leave, and suddenly a corpse falls out of a locker, right at your feet. Totally unexpected. I jumped, and I was sitting on the floor.

33

Gotta love GPL. A favorite moment of mine was the first time I put my car on pole. Took me completely by surprise :slight_smile:

Another moment: Aces of the Deep - sitting on the bottom with engines off, listening to my hull groan as the sound of the destroyer’s screws passes overhead, hoping his depth charges will be off-target. That was one immersive game (in more ways than one;))

34

Half Life
The first time you hear a scream and see the body being dragged into a ventilation shaft in the hall. I went 'Whaat?".

Battlefield 1942
I’m on the beach in one of the island multiplayer games. I get out of my tank and watch a battle some distance away for a few seconds. I turn around to to get back in my tank and the entire screen is filled with a battleship! I fell out of my chair. Then it starts firing all it’s guns at me. I start to fire back and I’m joined by other guys in tanks. We all start to fire. The ship chickens out and starts to go away. Well, all the tanks follow him down the beach and continue to fire at him. Cool.

System Shock 2
The first time I see a body hanging from the ceiling in one of the ships. Ahhhh…

35

In Star Trek: Borg, there’s a great scene where you basically do something blatantly wrong, thus dooming your ship and the galaxy. Q (played by John DeLancie, no less) appears and tells you what a f*** up you are…and he and all the other actors start walking off the set! (For some reason, I remember seeing a cameraman here as well.)

He decides to be generous and give you another shot, tho.

36

This is another Thief moment.

I’m exploring the basement of an opera house. There’s a guard at the end of the corridor, next to a staircase. I lean around the corner to see if I can slip past him. He spots me, yells and chases me down the hallway. In a room at the end, I stop and skid under a low passageway. In Thief, guards have no crouching animation, so he can’t follow. He stops, shakes his fist at me and says something like “Don’t you worry, I can wait here as long as I need to.”

Neat little AI touches like that really made that game for me.

37

Since the thread’s drifted pretty firmly to talking about scripted moments as well, one of my all-time favorite preset moments is at the very end of Karateka. After kicking and punching your way through umpty guards, that damnable bird, and Head Honch himself, you can finally stride triumphantly into the princess’s cell

If you went to fighting stance in the captive princess’s room, she kicked you [cartman]squaw in the nuts![/cartman] and you dropped instantly.

38

Back in the Commodore 64 days, there was a game called Hacker where you started off trying to “hack” into a computer system. Part of the mystique of the game was that it basically came with no instructions or introduction; you initially loaded the game with no idea what was going on.

The game starts out with a logon screen where after you make a couple failed attempts to logon, the game goes into a scripted mode where you hack into the system, causing a buch of random letters to appear on the screen. The first time I played as a little kid, after failing to logon the first couple times, I randomly punched a bunch of keys on the keyboad. When the game moved into scripted mode and hacked the logon, I thought it was actually me with my random typing, and that I had really broken into some computer system! That whole game was a great example of an early attempt to really draw the player into the game.

39

Mr2001 - I actually tried to do that once. I even got the scene where the two really bad actors had a really, really long discussion about whether or not to throw a knife used to “commit a felony” (that’s how you know they’re bad actors) into the water. I could sweat that more than 10 minutes went by without Guybrush breathing his last. So yeah, you can die, but it takes a tremendous amount of effort to do so, as opposed to a tremendous amount of effort to avoid being whacked.

Drastic - Worse than that…you’re DEAD. No apologies, no begging for mercy, no second chance. That one hit kills you instantly. Which, IMHO, is a lot more serious than any humiliation from being Cartmanned.

(I always try to keep these “kicks in the nuts” in perspective.)

One more:
Smash TV and 19XX: The War Against Destiny
What do both games have in common? Simple, they punish a really common rookie mistake.

The first boss of Smash TV is this “mutant” with a massive humanoid upper body attached to a tank bottom. Like most big bosses in Williams/Midway games, you have to take him apart piece by piece. Okay, start with the arms. This might take a while, and there’s a good chance you’ll lose a bunch of lives, even have to continue. But eventually you get them both. Of course, you realize that losing his arms doesn’t impede his electric eye beams or tank-launched worm creatures in the least, right? You do? Good. Keep at it until you’ve blown the clothes off his torso, not to mention a fair amount of flesh. Pretty good, but he’s still firing eye beams like crazy. Take care of that by blasting his head off. Okay, you can rest a little easier now, since all he has are the worm creatures, which you should handle easily. The rest of him’s helpless. Now, finish him off by destroying the torso.

Torso blowing up! Congratulations, you did it! Mutoid Man’s finally dead! Give a victory shout, pat yourself on the back, turn and wave to the cute…

Oops, almost forgot about the second head attached to the tank body, which just zapped your last man while you were busy patting yourself on the back like the overconfident newbie scrub you were.

All right, let’s go to this other player at 19XX who’s just reached the showdown against the fourth target, the super high-tech attack submarine Grantz. Nothing special, really. Just fires a lot of bullets; no missiles or launched aircraft or mutiple-warhead munitions or anything. Loses a life, but is immediately on it again. After just a few seconds, it’s over. Wow, that was easy! Not too long ago you’d just smashed Karbert Armor, which was a toughie, and Grantz got sunk like nothing. Go ahead and pat yourself on the back, maybe run over to the concession stand and grab a…

What the…the thing TURNED OVER and started attacking you again! And of course, even if you didn’t get promptly smashed because you were staring slack-jawed at the shock of this new development, there wasn’t much you could do anyway, what with you stupidly patting yourself on the back after a battle that seemed to easy and all.

The lesson from both examples is clear: If it’s you first time facing anything…boss, puzzle, song, whatever…never, ever rest easy until you’re ABSOLUTELY SURE you have it beat. Assume nothing, because someday that wrecked tank is going to grow new appendages, the dead boss will reveal his true form, or that tough euro beat song will have three more notes at the very end for no apparent reason, and it’ll spell you’re doom if you start celebrating too early.

40

I remember way back in the DN3D days, there was a 3-level trilogy. All I remember was the name 666. Anyways, the bit that scared me the most was when you enter a totally dark room. When you’re in the center, a bunch of baddies with evil glowing red eyes (and shotguns) attack. Remember, you just went from dead monitor to evil red eyes. Very cool.