I second the ending scene in Grim Fandango (which i just nominated for best story in another thread). I also had tears in my eyes.
And Thief was the single most immersive game I have ever played bar none. Played at night with the lights off and headphones on. AHHHH.
I had a Colecovision as a kid, and there was this game called Venture. You were a large superball with a bow and arrow, and you had to steer around little green monsters to get into treasure rooms, and kill all the monsters in there and get the treasure. If you took too long, the green monsters would appear in the treasure rooms and go after you. The noise they made when they showed up in the treasure rooms scared the crap out of me over and over again.
a great moment in videogames is when i found out that i could have an emulater that is essentially… EVERY arcade game from 1973-2000. Amazing.
This is referenced in The Curse of Monkey Island. Guybrush “kills” himself to get into the Goodsoup tomb. One of the men who buries him comments “I didn’t know you could die in a LucasArts Adventure Game.”
I must agree that the You Don’t Know Jack series is hilarious, the way questions play on other questions. One of the questions in the TV version involved if the writers on Your Show of Shows, got uppity and left, which one of these wouldn’t you hear: “Screw you! I’m Woody Allen!” “Forget this! I’m Milton Berle!”…stuff like that. Berle was the answer. The next question (I forget if I got it wrong or not), the host is like, “That’s it! I’m out of here, like Milton Berle.” “Um, Milton Berle wasn’t a writer on *Your Show of Shows.” Not as funny as the Groundhog Day one, but still a good example of how cleverly programmed these games are.
Metal Gear Solid:
In the prison scene, I went under the bed and the guard asked “What the hell are you doing?!”
During one of the stages, I was using my sniper rifle to shoot guards from a distance and I was shooting what I thought were the guards and it turns out that they were rats. Oppsie. EHEH!
Suikoden/Suikoden 2: The bath effects and the special bath scenes. If you put up Grafitti and Hex Dolls, the room turns dark, the Hex Dolls glow and the Grafitti bleeds. If you use vases and flower paintings, you get flowers.
Those are only a couple of quite a few bath scenes in those two games.
FF7: Managing to date Barret or Yuffie! HEEE!!
The last mission in Warcraft III: The Burning Legion’s unstoppable army is grinding inexorably forward. Their leader wants to get to a powerful magic circle in my territory, but besides my elves, they must come through armies of orcs and humans. And come they do, smashing my allies easily, despite my support. I’ve got to hold him off for forty-five minutes, and I take the time to plant a literal forest of guardian treants around the circle. At least twenty-five, maybe thirty animate trees, in addition to my hordes of griffons, huntresses, druids, and more. But they’re not enough, and I have ten minutes left on the clock. I’m building units as fast as I can, but soon my buildings themselves are under attack, and then destroyed. Five minutes left. The demons chew up my remaining units and spit them out. Two minutes. They come to the edge of my treant forest, and start ripping them out by the roots. One minute. They clear a path. My defenders are dead, my building are destroyed, the arch demon is literally steps away from ultimate, planet-crushing victory… and the time runs out! If he’d had two more seconds, it would have been all over for the good guys.
Miller - Oh my god, that’s just…man. Hell of a job, champ. Hell of a job.
All I’m saying is, if that were me, the tension becomes completely unbearable at the thirty minute mark and I’m exiting the game in a heartbeat.
See, that’s another reason I always have my Gameshark with me. I’ll take “boring triumph” over giving myself a damn heart attack any day.
default - With you on emulators. Fantastic innovation that no arcade fan should do without.
sigh…one more.
Midnight Resistance
Okay, here are a few things you need to know:
Why is all this so important, Darrell?
Because after beating the second-to-last boss, the armory cases don’t have powerups…they have the family you’re trying to rescue. Six members total, one key per case. Which means that if you don’t have all six keys, someone is going to die in the dictator’s base.
And you have to decide who it’s gonna be.
So, unless you don’t mind putting a heavy burden on the heroes’ conscience, in addition to the difficulty of the penultimate boss (and it’s hard enough as it is, believe me), you have to make sure the hero never loses even one key off the edge of the screen.
Never would expect a “mindless” shooter to contain a moral dilemma, would you?
Aliens vs. Predator 2 had some great moments. One bit is where you need to go turn on the security grid to protect your ship. Since beginning the campaign, you see no enemies, but rather disturbing things like skinned bodies hanging from the ceiling, blips on the motion tracker, and mysterious explosions. Then you turn the security grid on and all hell breaks loose, aliens coming out of the floor and everything, which leads to a hellish run out back to the landing pad.
People brought up Half-Life and didn’t even mention Surface Tension? That damned helicopter… Grr!!
Hmm. Deus Ex: it was probably the first FPS that I tried that I actually liked. (I didn’t play Thief until after DE.)
J.C. Denton, the main character, has just finished his fisrt mission, and now I need to take him to UNATCO HQ and get him to his debriefing. Like a good RPGer, I automatically scour every inch I can of UNATCO HQ… including the women’s bathroom. (J.C. is male.) I go in, and hear a ‘gasp! Why I never…!’ Woman walks out of a stall, and walks out by me. I think nothing of it, then go up to the debriefing. All goes like it should until the very end, when the head-honcho dude says something: “Oh, and J.C.? We here at UNATCO have a reputation to uphold, so please try and stay out of the women’s bathoom.” I just about died laughing, I hadn’t expected something seemingly as small as that to trigger a reaction.
<< Do something unusual today. Accomplish work on the computer. >>
How could I have forgotten that???
How could I forget Deus Ex?
Finally escaping the MJ12 facility in which you were inprisoned, and ending up in UNATCO headquarters.
Having bussa-ed a cap in Simons, and while leaving the underwater base, only to run into the aquatic commandos.
When Maggie Chow charges you with a sword, and you pull a RotLA.
Shogun: Total War. There’s a battle going on. I’m losing it. It’s one of those bridge-crossing thingies, and my troops have attempted to cross it. Failing. Badly. All my men are dead or running in the opposite direction. Everyone - except my Shogun. he’s the only one left. One horseman (all others in his unit slayed.) And over the bridge, enemy is coming in number. “What the hell” I think and charge them with my lonely Shogun.
Well, what do you know - he wins! He hacks and slashes the enemy light infantry, and soon, they in turn run away. Then the next light infantry unit. The shogun manages to beat off 200 men - alone! - and win the battle.
Ahh, the golden moment.
Then there’s this one time 2 days ago when my Nethack first-level Samurai, right in the beginning, after 100 moves or so, finds a wand of wishing…
I would say the big honking twist in the middle of System Shock 2 (the one where you finally open the door to meet the nurse that has been guiding you through the lower levels) is one hell of a surprise. Being one that played the first one and hearing the SAME VOICE call me a little insect made me lose my shit.
But for surprise surprises, nothing beats out the special ending of the first Fallout. The script stayed exactly the same…you being outsted even though you saved Vault 13. But if you did a few things a certain way…after the long rambling speech the leader gives before not allowing you to come back in and the cutscene. Your character whips out his gun BLOWS THE LEADER AWAY in a fashionably gory death. I remeber watching this and saying “Hell yea, I would be just as pissed enough to do it.”
Also the random encounters that occasionally would show up with such things as the Tardis from Docter Who, a crashed UFO (with Velvet Elvis Painting), and others hilarious ones. Truly one of the greatest games ever made.
For some reason, Deus Ex had a high chance of producing creepy or unintentionally hilarious situations out of sheer happenstance. For those who don’t know the game, the enemy AI would shout out random “barks”, or sound snippets, depending on the context. This context would shift, so if a couple guards were standing around, they might say idle things your average guys might say while waiting for something to happen. In combat, they would say more combat oriented things, etc. Generally, this system works well, except there’s no grace period or transition contexts, so odd snippets occur at interesting moments.
My favorite: After unsuccessfully attempting to sneak past a few guards, one of them blows me sky high with a rocket. As the “game over” fades in, and the camera pulls back from my crushed and broken body, one of the guards says “hey, anybody hungry?”
Fantastic moment. I was playing all alone at like 4 am when I hit that scene, jumped right outta my skin.
Also from Res Evil 2, My buddy was playing it before I was, and he was showing me this one place where he was stuck. He was walking around the sewers, and then, outta nowhere, this giant crocodile bursts out of a pool of water. I jump, and he hits pause for a sec. he says to me “Every time, I unload on it, chuck grenades, full auto, and nothing, it devours me.” to which I excitedly reply “It’s a giant f-ing crocodile. Run away like a punk a$$!” So he does, and the croc slams into a wall as he lays chase, end of problem. (I found out later that ther is a way to kill the croc, but it was a great experiance in gaming, none the less.)
In FF2 for Supernintendo, when the Twins, Palom and Porom cast stone on each other to save your lives, …choke, sob still gets me…
And the end sequence for FF Tactics made me yell at one of the characters on the screen…out loud…much to my room-mates chagrin. (She wasn’t into video games, and thought I was too into FFT) The plot was that good, and that upsetting.
And there’s that one time, when you finally figure out that the guy’s name is “rumplestiltskin” but spelled backwards, and he gives you the magic beans so you can climb up the beanstalk instead of the rickety stairs. That, my friends, was a great moment.
For those of you who don’t know, this is from King’s Quest I. Actually, the guy’s name isn’t Rumplestiltskin spelled backwards, it’s actually Rumplestiltskin encoded in reverse alphabetic code (A=Z, B=Y, C=X, etc.) I remember this because my friend and I actually had to write a letter to Sierra to solve this back in 1984.
Ultima Online: When we took over someone’s castle in a bloody raid on an online wedding. We killed all wedding party members, stripped them all of castle keys and recall runes and then gated them to a room with doors blocked by chests where they were stuck for who knows how long waiting for a game admin to move them.
btw: Does the OP watch G4.tv much? This was the topic of the day.
So many good moments…Thief, of course, and System Shock, and moments of co-op mayhem in Halo. So great.
In my personal favorite moment I was actually the victim, but it was so damn cool I had to laugh. I was playing action quake 2 and I was chasing my friend around with the sniper rifle (I had no other weapon at the time). In the game, when you jump next to an enemy you “kick” them. He had no other weapon, either–and he turned around and kicked me. The side effect of that was to kick the rifle out of my hands and right into his, wherepon he put a bullet right through my head.