Memorable gaming moments (that are interesting)...

Games
1

So we have all kinds of threads about games and cool stories about those games, but I wanted to start a thread of memorable gaming moments, regardless of if it’s a new hotness game, or old steady friend, or little known 10 year old indie title you just tried.

A few nights ago I was playing Skyrim, a new playthrough. I had picked up Eric the Slayer, which is a red haired nord you can find in Rorikstead, which is named after Old Man Rorik who lives there. Eric is the son of the innkeeper in the town, who is itching to become an adventurer but his father thinks its too dangerous. As part of a small side quest you can agree to buy him armor so he’s protected and his father doesn’t worry so much. So I did that and then next time I come through town, Eric has a new set of iron armor and a new name, Eric the Slayer, Mercenary! So I hired him.

Eric has been with me for weeks of in game time, going on many adventures. I had gotten fond of him as he’s all bright eyed and wondrous, remarking about how different his life is now, quipping about the various dungeons we are in, and in general providing me a tank I can hide behind to riddle enemies with arrows and spells. He has been “downed” many times, by which I mean crawling around hurt, unable to fight. I assumed he was invincible, that he had the “essential” flag on him, which in Skyrim means you can’t be killed, only downed until you recover.

Well, we hit a particularly tough bandit hideout this weekend. These guys hit HARD and were one shotting me all over the place. It was a brutal fight. At one point we are on these narrow walkways over some water, banging away. I had summoned some help and had a vampire follower along as well, so our party was 4 total. We are fighting our way through when 3 tough bandits bum rush us and all hell breaks lose, spells flying everywhere, bows, swinging axes and hammers and swords, oh my! Everyone is on fire, too, as some fire mage bandit was lighting everyone up.

We go to move on and I can’t find Eric. I look around for him, supposing he is crawling towards us as usual after a fight. Nope, Eric is dead, floating face down in the water. Dead as a doornail.

Man, I was surprised. There is no way to “recover” his body either, he’s in the icy water of this cave forever now. This crappy hideout is his tomb. I don’t have the heart to go back to Rorikstead, I don’t want to encounter his father. Bummed me out for a couple of hours, until I found new companions and moved on.

So what are your memorable video game moments?

2

My good friend Brian (RIP) always bought the walkthrough/cheat guide when he bought games. When the PS1 came out and Resident Evil was released, he picked up the game and the guide. He wanted me to read the guide while he played and give him hints along the way. There’s that part near the start where you go into a hallway and two zombie dogs bust through the window. Of course, I saw this in the guide and said nothing to him. The dogs bust through the window and he screams like a 4 year old, throws the controller, and runs out of the room. Hahaha. That was good fun! Even better was that about 15 min later in the game (or maybe sooner), you go into a bedroom and there’s a closet with a zombie in it. When he recovered from the dog fright, he picked up where he left off and again I had the cheat book and saw what was coming. It was pretty much a repeat of the first instance… he opens the closet, the zombie busts out, he screams and throws the controller and then flees the (real life) room.

From that point on, I was banished from being the strategy guide sherpa.

3

My first encounter with the Chrysalids in the original x-com probably ranks as my top memorable gaming moment to this day.

We had just landed for a terror mission, and I rolled my shiny new tank off the ramp (the first mission with one of those). It promptly get killed by a shot from something, covering the entire landing zone with smoke. The rest of the squad piles out and takes up positions. Next thing I know something runs up to one of my squad members and starts making out with him or something, then it happens to another. So I have these zombies walking around, and then they burst and turn into the aliens. It was a complete slaughter. I don’t remember if I was able to get anyone on the transport and escape or not.

4

Yup. That one is up there. A real WTF moment for anyone playing Xcom for the first time.

5

I’d say the Chryssalid mission in the new XCom (where the ship crashes into the dock) is one too. That was a great, tense mission.

6

We are playing 4 man LAN back in the day where the first 3 hours of such a game night was spent troubleshooting the coax network cables. We were playing Total Annihilation. We opted for an island map, with lots of time for turtle build-ups, slow paced, lots of time for good laughs and witty insults. An hour or so in, the first air-raids starts appearing. They are easily defended with anti-aircraft guns. Another 10 minutes pass with a bit of bantering across the huge CRT monitors. Then the air-raid alarm goes off, indicating a nuke launch. One of my mates says, “well, I guess we all have lots of anti-nukes, but I really like the sound of the alarm”, at which point another mate falls completely silent with a face of sheer anguish. Being an island map, the nuke completely obliterates his base and a full hour of careful base planning. Well, not that careful really…

Some 25 years later, we still occasionally laugh about the look on his face when it dawned on him, that he forgot to build nuke defense.

7

There’s so much of that in the original X-Com. I mean, just the first time you land a Skyranger and disembark it’s like you’ve entered a whole new world of entertainment and wonder. Everything is immediately alien to you and now you get to research wtf is going on!

8

Yeah, the lighting at night time was perfect. Made the missions really intense.

9

I had this same experience. I had no idea what was going on. It took me a couple of turns to figure out it was my own guys getting turned. I thought initially it was invisible enemies appearing in my midst.

I have a lot of great memories of my first playthrough of X-Com. I didn’t know anything about it, hadn’t read any reviews, etc. It was completely fresh. I remember seeing a Muton for the first time and how badass they looked.

10

I have many memorable gaming moments, but I guess exactly how interesting they are will be for others to decide …

I don’t remember the very first video game I played, probably Pong or Space Invaders or something like that. I do distinctly remember the first time I saw Pac Man, and how totally blown away I felt. It was like the moment when Dorothy steps on the yellow brick road, and everything is all light and color and music. I had never seen anything like Pac Man before, which is kind of funny looking back on its simplicity now. But I feel like that really set me on a journey that I’m still taking today.

I remember getting the Atari 2600 for Christmas whatever year that was - and my cousin and I just being amazed that we could play Combat and Space Invaders at home! We played for hours, I think a family member probably had to pull the plug on the thing to get us to off to bed.

I remember being completely enraptured by Starflight on the Commodore 64, piecing together its mysteries. I remember discovering and landing on earth. I remember discovering that the fuel I was burning to power my ship was a living entity. It’s still a spacefaring adventure that I judge all others against.

Similarly, playing The Magic Candle on the C64 was a CRPG highlight for me. The fact that you’re wandering the world trying to put together a ritual to keep an elder demon in its prison was so cool to me- you’d never defeat it, if he escaped that was the end of the world. Delving the game’s dungeons and finding all the trinkets and components for the ritual, and in the process growing my party’s power and knowledge, felt very satisfying.

I remember buying a PlayStation just to check out Resident Evil 2 and Final Fantasy VII and getting totally lost in those games. Similarly, getting a PS2 so I could play GTA 3, Jak and Daxter and Metal Gear Solid 2. I haven’t really hung with Sony’s hardware since those days, but I still keep both consoles around just so I can occasionally go back and visit those games.

I guess I am turning into one of those old dudes that sits around bending everyone’s ear about the old days. I could do this all day!

11

Unfortunately I first experienced Starflight through watching a friend play in his pc, before it was available for my c64.

12

The Magic Candle reminds me of The Magic Carpet. I remember playing that and thinking “holy cow, you can deform terrain, and look at the graphics!”. I kinda don’t remember the game very well but some of the spells were awesome, I think there was a meteor storm that was fantastic.

13

My memorable moment:

I made a city in Sim City 2000 with the objective to be the most culturally advanced, with the best education. I don’t remember what happened, a disaster, or a economical crisis … but the whole city was devastated, not having money for roads, they slowly eroded to nothing, so the whole city was a maze of cut roads. Without money to buy a new power station, I relied to green energy (wind), slowly, the whole city used the empty slots that was road to put windmills… it recovered, the whole city turned from a gray collection of abandoned buildings into a city powered entirely with green energy. The city was great and had visible the scars of a huge crisis that lasted generations but that finnaly the citizens managed to beat.

14

We used to fly IL-2 (original) in LAN parties.

Four of us would multi-crew a bomber, manning all machine guns. Our PCs were roughly where the guns would be.

The fifth would jump in a German plane and try to kill us before we could hit the target. Other AI planes were in the mix as well on both sides. We would rotate the “wild-card” player around the group.

Flack bursting all around, calling out targets, hearing the machine guns coming from other stations (we could all turn up speakers for super surround sound). Absolutely incredible.

By far my favorite gaming moments yet to be surpassed.

15

My family had a hand-me-down 486. One of my favorite memories was building my own PC out of TigerDirect parts from mowing money, managing to get a 10-Base-T network going between the two computers on the table in our study room, and playing my first LAN game of Warcraft 2 against my sister. Nothing particularly memorable happened in that game other than a difficult amphibious landing of a bunch of ogres, but it was mind-blowing to be competing in the same room together. We also did a lot of Descent, Red Alert/RA2 and Settlers 3 on that network before my parents asked for their table space back.

16

Oh man I remember the original GTA on LAN. That was glorious. Parking cars at the gap in the bridge so someone would smash it and fall in the drink, leaping out and trying to rocket launch someone while they tried to run you over, ducking into an alley to avoid someone barreling you over. . . that was a great LAN experience.

17

“DIVE! DIVE! DIVE! Hit your burners, pilot!”

As far as narrative moments, that was one of the highlights. But also, I remember playing Wake Island with the folks here, back in the early days of that first Battlefield 1942 demo.

I also have memories, not so much of the games themselves, but of specific people and places, back in the pre-Internet era. Sitting with my dad as we tinkered with an old IBM PC, or with my cousins huddled around a NES while our parents were talking about grown-up things downstairs. And much later, playing multiplayer Rocket Race in Halo before it was an official thing, or countless hours with Mario Kart in my buddy’s tiny apartment. I guess a lot of my “people” memories are from multiplayer, or shared play where we’d huddle over a monitor and bumble our way through some adventure or RPG.

I mean, I also remember a terrifying amount about game stories, probably more through repetition than anything else. And some moments were engineered to be memorable moments, bordering on interactive cutscenes, like that first time you emerge from the vault in Fallout 3, or when choosing who to save during Mass Effect’s Virmire sequence.

18

Huh? What? no, I was just resting my eyes, really!

But when you bring up playing with other folks here, that reminds me of a really fun session that several of us around here had playing RDR on the 360. Sorry, I forget exactly who besides Tom, but we were out assaulting that big ranch house and we noticed that for some reason they had cannons lined up on a ridge facing the ranch, so we went up there and tried arcing the cannon fire to try to plink enemies way far off. It wasn’t the best idea but it sure was fun.

19

Everquest - had several

The days of corpse rotting and raids or just big dungeons, and the first time your group is sitting there waiting for your cavalry to arrive, only for them to get slaughtered, and then the third group shows up, and they get slaughtered… it’s late in the evening, work and school is going to suffer and the Norwegian guild shows up and saves the day.

Of course this lead to me immediately volunteering later when it happened to some other group because yeah i’d been there. When a guild is asking for non-guilded people of approx level to help them out, you know it’s really, really bad.

The first time the clerics drew aggro by spamming healing, they’re all wiped, and you realize it’s over even though only 2-3 are dead. Now you’re getting frantic typing from your group leaders of where to die in the best locations so your corpse can be recovered. Hint: it’s not falling into the lava or water or a pit.

Being chased by werewolf in the middle of the night no one knew was there because we didn’t have wiki, and it’s like gambling if you’re going to make it with Jboots or SOW. Also, when you cross that forest the first dozens or so times, you and your group are no where close to high enough level to take it on.

Rimworld - first time I realized water isn’t really a barrier, and there are bugs that burrow into the base… and both those happen at the same time. The colony, RIP.

Skyrim - the first time you see a dragon flying around and then you realize… it’s headed for you. I don’t know that I’ve ever played a game that was so dragon heavy, so when some dragon just lands in front of me on the road like that, I was pretty darn surprised.

20

In the first Dark Souls game, early in the game, when a simple poorly equipped enemy soldier can kill you, a dragon buzzes you as you enter an area. He doesn’t kill you, doesn’t even do damage, but you are suddenly aware that there is stuff out there you don’t know about and have no idea how to kill.