This was originally going to go up on Sakurahana's blog section that I do work for but they have a character limit over there and I hit it. Worked to hard on this and put too much of myself into it to just cut it down or scrap it so it's going up here. If you read my stuff there, I'll get something else up later. If you read my stuff here, then lucky you I actually posted something!
No offence to the many "most memorable moments in gaming" lists out there, but I rarely see games and memories that impacted me personally. Maybe that means I have really bad taste in games, or maybe that just means I am impressed by weird things. Either way, I like sharing the parts of gaming that make me happy to keep playing games, and I figure, what better way then to talk about the moments that just forced me to glue myself to a chair for hours on end. Why seven instead of a nice round number like ten or five? Because ten seemed to high and there's too many for me to narrow down to just five. That seems criminal. So seven it is.
Oh and uh, *ahem*, there are a few ---> SPOILERS
You can't say I didn't warn you now.
7. Your Dog Dies (Fable II)
Fable II was a solid game, if a little disappointing. One of the features of the game was your dog. Though he was supposed to be so much more of a feature than he was, I still enjoyed having the dog around. The dog is with you from the start of the game, you and your sister rescue him from bullies in the opening hour of the game. From that point on he stays with you for most of the game as your loyal companion. So what better way to up the ante near the end of the story than for your dog to take a bullet for you?
After all of your adventures, your dog saves your life because it's your best friend. From the opening moments of the game, your dog is by your side whenever possible. He fights alongside you, interacts with people you interact with, he even helps you find treasure. While the main villain, Lord Lucien, already took my sister from me at the start of the game. He followed that up by working hundreds of people to death building The Spire, a large tower that Lucien believes will grant him untold power. But when he killed my dog, I had nothing but the thought of killing that sick bastard. When the ending came around my vengeance felt hollow. The ending didn't give me the great battle I sought, nor did it allow me to really kill Lucien myself. But the second the three "epilouge choices" came up, I immediately picked the one that brought my dog back. I may not have saved the thousand or so people Lucien's evil killed, but I got my best friend back.
6. Walking Out Of Vault 101 (Fallout 3)
Bethesda has, in my mind, become the master of drawing you into a game world. Many games have better openings, but few suck me in the way Bethesda's games do. But of all of the memorable "first steps" I've taken, this is the one that never gets old to me. In Fallout 3, your character has spent his (or her) entire life in the subterranean Vault 101, one of the last places human life survives on Earth. Or so you're taught anyhow. You see in Vault 101, no one enters, no one leaves. You live in the vault and you die in the vault. You spend the tutorial section of the game growing up in the vault with your father. Then one day he simply disappears, leaving all sorts of trouble in his wake. Though he tells you not to follow him, it becomes apparent rather quickly that you have little choice in the matter.
After battling your way to the entrance, you finally reach the door to the outside world. A place you have been told is uninhabitable. As you emerge, the sun's brightness blinds you. After all, you have spent your whole life prior to this moment underground with artificial lighting. Then your eyes adjust, and you find yourself looking out over the wasteland that was once Washington DC. Your dad is out there somewhere, but you have no idea where. You've only just stepped foot in a whole new world (to you.) Where oh where might I head first...
5. Wandering New Mombasa Alone (Halo 3: ODST)
A great game? Not really, and probably the worst overall out of all the Halo titles. And yet, it's the one that I felt had the most potential out of all of them save the first. The reason I think that comes from the experience I had wandering the streets of the city of New Mombasa alone. Your character, simply called "The Rookie," is a member of an elite unit of marines whose job is to be be dropped from a planets orbit into the middle of a firefight. Kind of like the future's version of an airbourne division. You get dropped into the middle of a huge battle between the attacking alien species, The Covenant, and humanity. Your drop suddenly goes wrong when one of the Covenant's ships leaves the battle and sends out a shock wave that flings your drop pod off course and into the city. A few hours later you wake up, alone in the middle of the city which is now largely abandoned except for roaming enemy patrols. Your job is to simply find your squad and get out of the city.
That experience is the part of this game that just blew me away. Taking on a large enemy patrol, sneaking by enemies when out of ammo, and just trying to survive. Something about the city itself really immersed me in the game, and the ever present sense of danger meant you could never let your guard down. The other parts of the game where you have to play as your other squad mates felt unnecessary and were more in line with the traditional Halo experience. But when I was in control of the Rookie, the game felt fresh and new. The feeling of being alone in a giant city filled with enemies was something I had never quite had before.
4. Stalingrad (Call of Duty)
Whenever someone asks me why I used to love Call of Duty, this is the moment that pops up immediately. Back before the series was all just over the top set pieces and anger inducing multiplayer, the original Call of Duty has a simple World War II shooter that attempted to bring you into the many different fronts of the war, whether it was the Americans on D-Day, the British trying to covertly blow up a Nazi ship, or the Soviets fighting in the intense Russian winter. The missions in said Russian winter were about the most intense parts of a game I have played. When your first arrive in Stalingrad your taking a nice boat ride. Well as nice as a boat ride can be with German artillery trying to blow you up and you superior officers shooting any survivors trying to swim back to shore. Just as you reach the dock, you step off and then get knocked over as everyone else on your boat gets blown up by an artillery round. You are then shafted by the military supply officer, who gives you a single cartridge of ammo...and no gun to even fire it with.
You spend the next fifteen minutes acting as bait for a sniper to take out targets and generally trying to do as much as you can without a weapon to defend yourself with. The battle itself is spectacular, as you watch wave after wave of Soviet troops try to over run the German position in the city. As tense as the Normandy landings have been in other shooters, the first few Soviet missions in Call of Duty tops them ever so slightly.
3. The View of Palaven (Mass Effect 3)
That shot right there is one of the most chillingly beautiful shots I have ever seen in a game. In the Mass Effect universe, a sentient race of machines called the Reapers comes through the galaxy every 50,000 years or so and harvests all space faring life in the galaxy. The first to games are about Commander Shepherd, the main character, first learning of the threat, and then trying to prepare for it even as the major forces in the galaxy all call the threat a myth. The third and final game of the trilogy is about the war with the Reapers itself. Though watching Earth become overrun with Reaper forces in the first hour of the game was a chilling moment in and of itself, something about seeing the war from an up close and personal perspective really brought it home for me. When your journey brings you to this battlefront, you really get a solid understanding of just how bad things are going.
Seeing all those fires burning on the surface of the planet, and looking around on the moon and seeing all of the enemies ships and forces just drives home how one sided this war is, and how much life is at stake. I always felt like I was Commander Shepherd, but that moment gave me an insight into how much this war must weigh on him (or her) knowing all those lives are riding on him (or her.)
2. John Marston's Death (Red Dead Redemption)
It's not my favourite game of all time, but Red Dead Redemption was an amazing game nonetheless. The characters were varied and felt real, the gameworld was fun to explore, and the story was absolutely gripping (when I got around to playing it). And having a character with a story, yet having the control of who he ultimately is was great. While some people played Mr. Marston as a criminal outlaw, and others played him as an impartial man who cared nothing for the events of the world, I played him as a man truly seeking nothing more than the freedom to live his life away from the sins of his past. Whether he regretted the actions of his past didn't matter. By tracking down and killing his former partners in crime one by one, Marston was cutting himself off from his past, in order to have a future, even if he was being forced to do it.
After he finally kills his former gang leader, John is finally released from his service to the US government and allowed to go home...until the same men who forced him to kill all of his former gang show up with 20 officers to finish the job. It was the saddest and hopeless moment I have ever played. No matter how many of them you take with you, there's no running from his fate. For some this moment was nothing more than Marston getting what was coming to him, but for me it was a shocking and sudden end to a man who truly wished nothing more than to go home and give his family a better life than he had. Through his death, he was redeemed, and gave his family that chance (though the "epilouge" shows it was probably all or naught.) There have been some shocking deaths in gaming, but nothing reduced me to tears the way John Marston's did.
1. Choosing My First Pokemon (Pokemon Games)
Come on, did you expect anything less coming from me? While choosing my first pokemon was a moment in and of itself, I always have the same feeling every time I start up a new game. Some people cast off their starters if they have others they want to bring in from a previous game through trades, but I always reserve a spot for my starting pokemon. No matter how bad things get, and no matter how many others I catch, my starter is my partner in the world of Pokemon. It can be either my first one out, or my ace pokemon, who turns a tough battle around. I don;t really know how better to put it.
These are just my moments though. Obviously we are all influenced by what we play. Obviously there is a lack of some JRPG's on my list, but that'because I was raised on western titles, and that's the bulk of where the games I play today come from. That doesn't mean any other moment is any less significant. I'm curious as to what moments everyone else will never forget, just because it's interesting to see how different games and experiences impact people.
Note: Not sure how this white stuff got here, honest.
These are just my moments though. Obviously we are all influenced by what we play. Obviously there is a lack of some JRPG's on my list, but that'because I was raised on western titles, and that's the bulk of where the games I play today come from. That doesn't mean any other moment is any less significant. I'm curious as to what moments everyone else will never forget, just because it's interesting to see how different games and experiences impact people.
Note: Not sure how this white stuff got here, honest.
