At the end of Metal Gear Solid when you fail to save Meryl…I was off by a few seconds, had saved just before that, and I STILL felt bad like I had let her down.
GTA3 and Vice City: first time I was carjacked for the same reasons Kinbote mentioned. Suddenly I’m just another part of the city. Made me look at the world in a new way; who knows what’s going on in the next street?
New game, War of the Monsters: You can unlock one of the bosses, a flying dragon, and finally seeing that, especially the fourth costume was nice…but just flying, swooping off of skyscrapers and gliding along streets (and unleashing fiery death from above), I love(d) that. Maybe not as huge as the moments you guys mention, but still.
Having first gotten the original ** Resident Evil ** for my Playstation, I began to play it. At night. Alone. The scene were you are slowly walking through a hallway when BAM, these hell hounds jump through the window caused me to jump and drop the controller.
I’ve seen many of those moments. One to add from my own store is playin Final Fantasy 4. When Cecil becomes a paladin. Ooooh… I love that moment.
“The light called me… ‘My son’…”
Computer wise, I’d also like to add “Clive Barker’s Undying.” great game, but not very big on the market. Also, Civilization II, which really captivated me. I was thinking: Awesome! I am the civilization.
Oh, yeah, that reminds me. The first time I played the They Hunger total conversion for Half-Life, I didn’t know what kind of game it was. When the first zombie jumped out at me I nearly jumped out of my skin.
Oh, and the first Silent Hill freaked me out sooo much. I played it at a friend’s house, in the dark, in the middle of a snowstorm. Walking home after that was NOT FUN.
Half-Life: That moment when you encounter the military special forces, who are supposedly there to rescue you. As you round a corner you see them talking to a fellow scientist, and then they mow him down in a hail of machine gun fire!
Final Fantasy X: The whole damn game. I especially loved the ending. I can’t wait for X-2.
For me, it had to be the hardcore mode that was available on Diablo II (if you haven’t played it, it makes death permanent for you character). Took a good game and made it heart pounding…
In Diablo II, the first time I went to Tristram and saw the damage that had been done, the bodies of the NPC’s lying where they had stood for so many games in Diablo I, and then having to kill Griswold… god, was I pissed at Diablo…
I agree, but here is the moment my mind was blown.
You play a charachter who is immortal and who can’t remember who he is/was everytime he is revived. At the beginning of the game, a floating skull is there and he tells you that there are tattoos on your back. He reads them off and they are informative.
Okay, skip about 20 hours into the game. The skull(Morte) has been your ally the whole time. You enter a building built by a previous incarnation of yourself. The same information that was tattooed on your back is written on one of the walls, only there is one more line:
I actually found the townspeople in the original Diablo kind of annoying … so seeing them all dead I was like “Yeah! Thanks, Diablo! … oh, but Deckard Cane’s still alive? Sigh … grumble, grumble … .”
Strangely enough I had the opposite reaction when Link emerges from the Time Temple in Zelda. I had hated those townspeople too but discovering them all (apparently) dead and turned to zombies really made me sad. I actually felt sorry for how much I had disliked them before. And then when they turn up okay in the mountain village I was like “You guys are still alive! That’s great! I won’t think bad thoughts about you anymore!”
One other great moment no one has mentioned … when the cigarette girl dies in Grim Fandango and she turns into flowers and blows away in the wind. Really powerful and sad.
Then again, there was the point in Diablo I where, if you died trying to defeat the Skeleton King, your corpse rises up into a skeleton warrior, archer, or mage…
I was playing Seaman on the Dreamcast, the game where you have to talk (through a microphone on the controller) to a fish with a human head, trying to get it to evolve. The seaman will occasionally swim up to the screen and start a conversation with you to learn the kinds of things you like and don’t like. This time, it swam up and said, “We’ve talked about other things you like. Now what is your favorite movie?” Now, the voice recognition in the game is pretty good, but of course it’s not perfect. And there are so many things it’s been pre-programmed to recognize. I figured I’d give my real answer, and then when it said it didn’t recognize it, I’d say Star Wars, which was sure to be in there.
I said, “Miller’s Crossing.”
The seaman got a smile on its face and said, “Ah, so you’re a Coen brothers fan! I bet you and your friends just sit around and quote lines from Raising Arizona to each other all day long.”
I dropped the controller and backed away slowly from the TV.
DUDE! Seaman was awesome! I said my favorite movie was “Matrix” and while I forget exactly what it said, it said something along the lines of “Yeah, wasn’t it cool how the world was an illusion”? Or something like that, it most certainly pertained only to matrix…so awesome.
No seriously, when I beat the first Zelda (gold cartridge and all) I thought I was King Shit. I think I ran around my room with my arms over my head for an hour.
Civilization Call to Power has a great moment. The mind control computer wonder of the world, allows you to underfeed and under nourish your entire population without them becoming unhappy. This gives you a great advantage…
but the description of the computer is that it was designed to help humanity, this leads to a great little event.
If you ‘evilly’ keep the world artificially happy, without feeding the population properly, the computer will rebel against your evil tyranny, and set itself up as an alternative civilization. Taking many of your cities with it.
The first time this happened, it was a great shock, yet it is totally consistent with what the game tells you about the mind controlling computer and an excellent curb to excessive evilness.
Grim Fandango was great in that it created such a detailed and vivid world around its premise. Instead of getting tattooed, the skeleton characters got “etched”. The dead characters could be killed if they were “sprouted” and flooded with life; then it went on to describe the torment that befell florists in the afterlife when they realized how horrifying their profession was here. But my favorite was how it often laughed at the odd nature of involving puzzles in its world. If you had to gum up the server more than once to solve that puzzle, Manny said the second time, “I really gotta stop doing this.” At the start, a few puzzles require you to go back to a clown and ask for balloons, and you can always go back for more. When you’re then asked to capture eggs for carrier pigeons, Manny says, “Are you sure you don’t want to just send messages on balloons? I can get you tons of balloons.”
And you think Mario walking on the ceiling is breaking the fourth wall? Then try playing X-Men on the Sega Genesis. After fighting through the entire game, you find yourself at the end and the game says, “in order to win, you must reset the computer” and starts a countdown while you still have your character run around helplessly and try to figure out what to do. What it actually wants you to do is get up and hit the reset button on the Genesis. I never figured that one out.
The time I bought my PS2, I asked the guy for some suggestions for games:
“Hey, had you heard about Grand Theft Auto?”
“Well, I played the demo of GTA1 and it was pretty cool - can I get a quick demo of it?”
I fell in love with it the first time I crashed into some people taking your mate back to the hideout
I especially loved the ending. I can’t wait for X-2.