Best bit of any computer game ever. Spoilers allowed.

Most recent (memory fades) fave - the bit in Metal Gear Solid where you have to become a sniper; blew me away how you had to calm down youself before you could really do this bit - in terms of mood management, that game was simply superb. Your own 'emotional response', fatigue levels brilliantly matched the character's own. magnificent.

My favourite single-event computer game memory might be the first time I played through the raid on the governor's mansion in Monkey Island I.

For repeated satisfaction, being the first civilisation to get armor in Civ II games takes some beating - the moment the first tanks roll out towards those cunting city walls that have been defying you for ages.

That game was full of really good moments though.

Wonderful scene, I agree, but I still prefer the last few paragraphs of Photopia.

Not the best ever bit, but recent and memorable addition to the above lengthy rant, are the moments in Eternal Darkness where you start hallucinating. Principally I recall the hallucination where you delete your saved game! I yelled a lot at that point I can tell you. (Odd that these and the above anecdote both involve events that don't actually happen.)

In the re-enactment of the break-in you are able to access the interrogation room, but you do not do anything there. If you replay the game and try to place the bomb there you get an italicised instruction along the lines of "you really don't want to do that". The point is that this is EXACTLY what you did do, but you don't want to let this fact on to the interrogator. There are other things you lie about too, but this is the first point when you realise that you have been lying. There is also a mysterious package that you carry all the time, but this turns out to be a fiction too. it was invented as part of the lie to explain something else I've forgotten.

Crawling along the ventilation shafts above a room with soldiers in it, you hear one of them hear you, and then 10 feet ahead of you shaft of light start appearing from where they're shooting, and head towards you. Then you drop into the room.

You see a pool of water. You swim into it, over to a pipe by the edge, and start crawling along. When you're ten feet from the hatch at the end, a soldier passes it by, looks at you, tosses in an explosive and closes the hatch. You think "That's ridiculous, the range on those is only five feet. Oh shit, it's got nowhere else to go!" You scrabble backwards, fall into the water, and look up through the surface as a finger of fire comes roaring out of the pipe.

In ICO, in the second-last fight (I'm sorry, I can't really bring myself to spoil this).

every other level is doable — yes yes of course i used cheats to scope stuff out — but this is just like x10000000 impossible

winning the World Cup as England manager in Sensible World Of Soccer's career mode was also pretty fucking special

the first time the soldiers take a shot at you in HalfLife is my favorite. hey wait ow you bastards ohhh I geddit I geddit.

here's what i posted in the Tom Braider thread about one of my fave bits of the first game:

yeah, the first game had one of the few game-related freak-out moments for me; i'd been playing it for hours and Cherry Coke is the only thing keeping me conscious and it's 2AM and i'm in the Valley of the Land of the Lost or Some Shit and OH SNAP A DINOSAUR COMES OUT OF FUCKING NOWHERE JUST LIKE IT'S COMING FOR DADDY TANG

Resident Evil 2, towards the end, you've to return to one of the early rooms to get a key, of course it's all matter of fact cos you've killed everything right? WRONG! Anyway it's set in a police station and the room in question is an interview room with one of those huge mirrors/windows. You walk in fine and then as you leave this gigantic lizard mutant or "licker" as they're called in the game, smashes through the window flinging glass everywhere. It scares the living shit out of you, I remember I flung the controller away. God it was awful.

Championship Manager, loads of moments, from individual goals to signings to beating my brother's Italy side with my Northern Ireland side in Euro 2008.

i loved the fact that Half-Life begins with a tram ride thru the complex as the credits play and you get an overture of sorts of all the places that you'll have to blow up later in the game.

heh. and an appropiate quote from Valve head guy, from their webpage:

His most significant contribution to Half-Life was his statement "C'mon, people, you can't show the player a really big bomb and not let them blow it up."

I am so fucking geeked for Halflife 2.

Half-Life there were loads of great moments but the bit when the soldiers start to attack to is mental. (Saving for a 9800pro for HL2...)

Oh, and Space Invaders... that moment when they hit the edge of the screen and then head back the other way... oh my god... ;o)

but i have a better nomination. the bit in the old Amiga game D/Generation where you finally encounter John Of Maryland who has gone mad but is the only person who can give you security clearance to the next floor of the building or something, then as you pass thru to the final stage your character is wandering thru this room of invisible walls and the floor is just a thousand eyes staring at you - its simple but wonderfully surreal and spooky

also in Flashback, when you have to enter the Death Tower tournament to win enough money to buy a trip to the alien homeworld so you can regain your memory - the whole Death Tower stage is intense and gripping and i nearly had a heart attack trying to complete it.

DESTROY HIM, MY ROBOTS

(etched into my brain forever)

Oh and the reforestation apocalypse in Sam & Max is prolly the funniest game epilogue ever.

heh. playing Summer Games as the USSR so we could sing long with the anthem, just like Nikolai Volkoff useta.

And, Andrew, two words: Half Life II!!! Have you seen the demonstration video? Wow.

ICO is great. I'm not that far in, but should really re-immerse.

1) The game were you played as a little budge who had a bow and arrow (based in New Zealand?) and one of the end level bosses was a big whale who gobbled you up and then the lining of his stomach starting falling on you as you blasted him with your arrows.

2) Realising that the sun is actually setting for the first time in Ocarina of Time; scoping around Gerudo fortress with your bow and arrow; finally getting Big Goron's Unbreakable Sword; so many so many.

3) When you register that Ico is wearing a wooden helmet and has a wooden sword and really runs like that!

4) Terminator 2 on the original GB: the part in the film where T1000 chases Arnie and John in the lorry down the slip on their motorbike - this was totally classic in the game and just reward after the gruelling initial puzzle ('fix my circuits', shut up tool!) levels.

5) Holding down for three seconds while on the White Blocks in Mario 3 then falling through into 'behind' the scenery.

6) The whole of Pikmin.

7) ...

you only had one life and when you were caught by ver bugs they would say—in evil mecha-bug voices—"WEEEEEE GOTCHA!!" (the vocal effect very likely came first, with the bug slant of the game spinning off of that, because it was so surprising and strange and awful, it's like "we gotta make a game that includes that voice!")

remember this was a home computer with 16 kilobytes of RAM

9) Eliding the big dog-beast in Another World right at the start (or was that Flashback?) - I'm sure there were many better moments in this game but it was too hard for me.

10) Walker on the Amiga when the little troopers are trying to parachute and abseil onto the hub of your dreadnought and you're just sitting there shooting their lines with each successive click of the right mouse button.

11) Robocop on the Amiga - OMG the only good Big Film cash in (which is a lie because...)

12) Batman on the Amiga too! (Both made by the same company?)

13) The Amiga's excellent Aliens clone, Alien Breed, which allowed you to buy your arsenal (one of the main attractions of Syndicate, and the only of Dogs of War) and then forced you to run around its mazed level designs as it proceeded to count down to apocalypse at the end of almost every level.

14) OMG, Halo. So many Halo moments: when you get killed by one the Chief guys and you're lying there waiting to respawn and you can hear one of the little pleb aliens saying 'I killed him'; killing the big-ass bad guys on the Legend setting; and even better killing two at once by smartly attaching a plasma grenade sweetly to their domes; coming across pitched battles and wading in etc.

15) The pure fact of Rez.

(Thanks, yeah, it was a total classic, I must have completed it three or four times.)

ISS Pro Ev2 - best game evah! I can watch it with camera setting at far and it looks like real football. ISS - the king of football games.

(Can you get SWOS for the Mac?)

"i wonder if there were any people on that bus...."
"only strangers and people we dont care about"

says it all about that game really. that and the uri geller-alike tourettes sufferer. swearing is funny when youre 12.

Turrican 2: Realizing that when fighting the boss in level 1,you can jump up on his gun and shoot him safely in the face from there. That level had a great wind-effect too, leaves blowing everywhere and and small badguys coming flying helplessly through the air.

Doom 1.
end of world 2, I believe. You're in a room with four buttons, wondering which one you should click next, and suddenly you hear it: "STOMP! STOMP! STOMP! STOMP!" and choke on your heart. Geez, the first time I met that boss was unnerving!
I also remember seeing DOom for the first time when it was brand new. I was an Amiga enthusiast at the time, but finally realized that PCs were the way now. I was absolutely blown away by that game! And when the guy picked up a chainsaw! GEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEz!

Thief: First time I played the demo version, I wasn't really expecting much of the game, and it was just about the tensest experience I've ever ha dplaying a game. You'd sneak through rooms for half an hour, then suddenly hear something like "I see you!" and just jump sky-high out of surprise, and try to high-tail it out of there. A highlight for me was being chased by two guards and shooting a rope arrow up through a window and hauling myself out of harms way.
I still need to play the full thing properly.

Hauling my computer down to a friend's house to play Duke Nukem 3D deathmatch. That game was by far the most fun I'd ever had with multiplayer gaming, as we'd constantly try to set traps for each other A nice one was putting a pipebomb or two in an elevator, then hang around, if you were lucky the other guy would summon the elevator and you'd try to blow up the bomb just as the doors would open, or laser-activated bombs hidden right behind a door, with the last out towards the door so it'd active if someone opened it.
That game was absolutely amazing.

The secret of Monkey Island:
You get thrown into the ocean, your leg tied to a heavy statue with a rope. Everywhere around you there are knives, cleavers, axes etc, but the rope is exactly too short to get any of it.
How do you get out?
Why, you pick up the statue that you're attached to!
Incidentally, Guybrush Threepwood has the greatest superhero-skill of all time: He can hold his breath for more than ten minutes.

Writing things like "Masturbate" in Police Quest etc and getting comments like "Hey man, this isn't Leisure Suit Larry" was pretty cute.
Don't ask me why I actually wrote that in the game though!

Less specifically:
X-Com: UFO was full of great moments, I hated those sort of turn-based action things, but this game was just one huge great moment, as was Dune 2.

Man that was wikkid.

Windows, OSX, Linux versions too. I just loaded it up last night. Works great

lately, i've been thinking how much i liked the design in the first 3 Space Quest games. Even with big-ass pixels, they were able to do a lot.

http://wiw.org/~jess/magic/a_mallard.jpg

http://wiw.org/~jess/replicated.html

Not sure what it's like but I've heard good things.

and find that he was already dead.

he wasn't "sliding on his belly" to hide himself. Some...thing... was dragging the corpse away, probably for food. But by now, you've already fired off a shot...and gotten the critter mad.

That's not embarrassing in any way - though I'd argue they're not as good as the love plots in Planescape: Torment. I'd say just about everything in that game makes it my favorite ever, but the NPC's and especially the girl with the rat tail are unmatched. I was mondo depressed for a few days after I finished that game (the abrupt ending didn't help).

By the way, I bought Grim Fandango - but haven't played it yet. I haven't even started it yet. Kinda makes all you Grim Fandango fans a little jealous, huh?

the voice work on there is stupendous.

My real answer would be the very first scene in Silent Hill 1. Where you run down an alley chasing your daughter, running past all sorts of scum things and the camera angles go all scary and drums start banging and then you get cornered and killed, sort of.

on the first zelda when you pay the witch all your money to give you a secret and she just says "boy you're rich!". i thought that was cool.

The pregnant alley in Planescape is probably second, the moment that world's logic became one I never wanted to leave.

Colonel's Bequest:
The maid's striptease!

Later, shortly after that, you're in a bustling city, and you spend the night in the inn there. You wake up in the middle of the night to realize that the entire city is an illusion conjured up by a small girl who was orphaned by some catastrophe - which killed everybody else. Now they're zombies and the buildings are all revealed to be one step away from rubble.

Then, at the very end, you discover that the helpful spirit who's been encouraging you and explaining the situation to you from the very beginning of the game is actually an agent of a dark power which was trying to use you to gain control over the earth and destroy your whole world.

Terranigma was so fucking great. Time to load that sucker back up.

Especially at the end of the later ones where you join forces with the guys you've been fighting the whole game to battle aliens.

isn't this a standard feature of japanese RPGs, tho? it happens in Xenogears, and multiple FFs, etc

You are carrying:
Tea
No tea

Terranigma was the one where goat lady made me spoon with her and then dine on her dead husband's flesh. I try to block that part out, that's right before you finish the talking-to-animals-and-trees segment of the game.
― TOMBOT, Wednesday, February 16, 2005 11:18 PM (twelve years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://kotaku.com/a-goat-made-me-cry-in-terranigma-1820575518