Classic gaming moments ...

What classic gamaing moments can you remember that made you go oh my god! This doesn't seem to happen much any more with me. To start the ball rolling I'll mention the original Tomb Raider (on playstation) and when you first enter the underground cavern with the massive T-Rex in that chases you round. Actually that game had a lot of WOW moments in it, despite the warped textures and low detail.

Another classic moment for me was playing Quake 2 on a Power VR 3D card, it wasn't fast but it looked amazing.

Of course no classic moments list would be complete without saying "playing Doom for the first time".

The first was when I undocked from Lave and gasped at the size of the universe, whilst feeling very small and insignificant :)

The next was when I became Elite :)

Playing Pod (not the Starwars one) on my brand spanking new 3DFX 1 card.

Playing Everquest for the first time, bumbling about until a friendly High Elf Maiden showed me the ropes.... <snigger> :)Been hooked ever since..sigh

There are many more but my ageing brain is having trubble finding em :)

CHeers
Garion
Treehugger

waking up on the beach at the start of Ultima VII Part II Serpent Isle.

Pokemon Stadium. It was just great to see my favourite pokemon in such great detail and to be able to play like that.

Zelda and the Oc[fill in rest as i can't spell it] of time as that was the first console game I ever played (probably first 3D game aswell).

And recently seeing the enterance to Sorrows Furnace in Guild Wars on my new PC with the graphics as good as I could get them made me think 'WOW!'.

MVF: ocarina

just remembered the first time I saw Wipeout, that's what made me buy a Playstation.

I'll never forget launching from the Defiance in my xwing and facing that huge non-textured low-poly Death Star in X-Wing. The hugeness, the I-Muse® music and the hordes of TIEs trying to get me overwhelmed me.

Some years later I lived Return of the Jedi's Death Star Attack in X-Wing Alliance and was like 'omg' again. I can't get tired of that. Wonder when will I do it again (hey Lucas, I want a new xwing sim!)

When I almost cried with some rpg's, Chrono Trigger being one of them, I felt so impressed that a game was making me feeling that way, that I decided "this is what my games will be like - they'll make you feel and think, not only entertain you". Of course still wantint to get there.

Another moments that made me think again that 'wow - a game is making me feel this way!?' are games like Aliens vs Predator (I & II), Obscure or Cold Fear. They scared the hell out of me, and I was half-suffering half-liking it! lol

It's great that a game can make you feel all that, isn't it?

Ferminho: You got an XWing point there. Also in Tie fighter when I finally beat the b*astard (and mission pack), it was so hard. Plus getting accepted into the emperor's inner circle was sooo cool.

Actually, playing Silent Hill 2/3 on PS2 on your own late at night is reasonably scarey. Same with the resident evils, best ones were on the nintendo gamecube imho.

Talking of nearly crying, I like moments and the ends in games like Call of Duty (storming Red square, amazing ... getting off the boat and getting shell shock, amazing). The beginning of MoH: Pacific Assualt when you are in the jeep and pearl harbour starts getting bombed made me tingle and also at the end when you finally win, wow what a game, very emotional, like a great movie.

Another amazing moment was the first time I fired a shotgun at someone in Soldier of Fortune and blew off a limb OMG! I'd never seen that kinda stuff before (hit locations).

Playing the original Virtua Fighter in the arcade for the first time was a big moment for me, and also virtua racing..

Also House Of The Dead for the first time, i remember feeling a bit sicks cos the graphics were so 'realistic and gory'

But the best arcade moment has to be hearing the words.... 'Daytonaaaaaa!' from across the room.... classic!

Hello.

HAAAAIIIIIWWWWAHHHH - Way of the exploding fist

and

'A visitor - stay a while, stay forever' - Impossible Mission

Goodbye.

Aeris being killed in Final Fantasy VII.

Making the trousers fall down with the cheat in IK+.

also IDKFA, nice.

Actually gotta say Final Fantasy X had a pretty amazing intro. So do the 3 Onimusha games. on PS2.

The Trex in tomb raider was pretty good.
I was well impressed by StarGlider on the AtariST, first time i'd ever seen lots of sharp vector graphics all moving smoothly.

FF9 - when the air ship gets blowen up and the black mages fall off.

Playing Dizzy - Any of them, all kool

StarGlider: Gosh I remember that.

Actually I had a wow moment when playing Turrican for the first time.

Trailblazer on the C64!

My first wow was actually seeing jumping jack on the Spectrum 48K (I was 8) at a friends house because I'd NEVER seen any computer games before! My next wow moment was actually owning a 48K about a year later and seeing Horrace Goes Skiing, lol.

I guess you can have wow moments when hearing some music for the first time, this happened a lot on the C64.

Also had some great wow moments when first seeing Amiga demos with copper bars, music modules and plasma effects and basic 3D cubes etc.

What was my first Amiga game I saw? May have been Crystal Hammer or something, maybe not amazing but compareed to a C64 it was WOW.

Playing sonic and becoming supersonic for the first time

I was replaying sonic yesterday on the gamecube with my son and telling my partner (she's so interested ;-)) how Sonic really is a classic game because it has it all and many platformer games have nowhere near the same depth!

yep i brought sonic mega collection + on ps2 because its the only decant platformer on the ps2 IMO & becaused I loved it sooooo much when i played it on the sega.

Another classic gaming moment...
FF7 intro (and just about every other part)
James pond - and that olimpic game thing thing game (can't remember the name)
Sim city - It just kool and classic
Red fraction one - blowing the crap outa everything (and i say 'ONE' because 'TWO' was a huge dissapointment :( )

Oh oh... and Half life - when everything goes wrong.

As already mentioned, playing doom for the first time.

Another one was playing Descent for the first time. I remember that I was dizzy afterwards. Dizzy and speechless.

Setting up the Amiga for the first time on Christmas day and putting in Batman The Movie, hearing the speech and seeing the full colour graphics. That was a wow moment for me :)

The first time I got far enough in Oregon Trail to have to raft down the river.. I was like 8 or something...

When Terra turns into an esper and flys off in FF6, also, when Kefka poisoned Doma, and also when The world is torn apart.


Many moments in ZOoT as well.

Perturbatio: I had the same pack, did it have New Zealand Story and a flight sim too? Did you try to fly under the golden gate bridge?

Diablo: Yeah it's great in Half Life when it all poops up, really atmospheric. I also liked blowing chunks out of the walls in Red Faction. You could actually do this a tiny bit in duke nukem where there were fire exinguishers on the wall, but it was precalculated.

Deps: Yeah Decent, what an amazing game. I even played it coop over a 14.4 modem.

Yup, same pack, and yes I did fly under it several times. I used to practise looping around it as well :)

F/A-18 Interceptor

Dynmaite Heady - The first time I played it.

Perturbatio: "looping around it" lol.

I had a wow moment when playing Sega Rally on a Dreamcast at a rich friend's house who had a projector, so it was 6ft high! This was in 1999.

I'll be back with some more after visiting the dentists, wish me luck.

Resident Evil 2 when that monkey-thing with the long tongue shows itself. First time I ever played a horror game.

Bad Dudes in the arcades.....back in '89 ...... i still remember as a little 2nd grader running back from school to play it....and leaching quarters from the local coffee shop who strangely found me "cute"... :P

WOW! moments for me:

1. Seeing Doom for the first time. Climbing those stairs to the right of the start point and seeing this apprently vast terrain in high detail stretching out before me. Those were simpler times, when one was easily fooled by a skybox. :-)

2. Seeing Mario 64 for the first time in Toys R Us. The first truly free roaming third person 3D game. The minute I saw that I knew games were going to change dramatically over the next few years. And playing it was an absolute blast.

3. Beating the first dungeon in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and being allowed to exit Kokiri Woods and enter Hyrule field. Upon entering the field you saw rolling terrain stretching a mile into the distance, with a castle, and a ranch... And being indecisive about which direction of ANY to explore in! You could go any way you wanted! So what did I do when faced with this wonderful dillema?

I followed the path. :-)

4. Half Life 2 didn't have any one big wow moment, but did have a lot of little ones, like getting in that car and being able to drive around.


I'm sensing a pattern here actually. All the big wow moments I've had have been a result of experiencing a new level of freedom to explore anywhere in a game. The Doom one was partly graphics, but I wanted to explore those mountains, and thought I would be able to later in the game. Ahh how naive I was back then. :-) And Mario 64 has a big field to explore at the start. And Zelda too.

Thaat reminds me. I just thoughtof Grand Theft Auto 3 and then it occured to me that that wasn't as much of a wow moment as the others, because I'd done that before.

5. Harley Davidson and the LA Riders. An arcade game where you ride a motorcycle through LA to reach checkpoints. That was yet another game which allowed you to go absolutely anywhere, but this time in a city! Jumping over an embankment and up onto a runway and then driving under a taxing 747 was awesome, and then you got to drive up on the highway. Sure, your exploration was limited by the timer, but you could still find all sorts of shortcuts if you explored a bit and went off the beaten path... like through the middle of a park. :-)

Half Life - in the basement with the big monster.
Every other game up till then, if you got outside an enemy's pathfinding area you could expect to be safe. So I got past some parked cars and turned around, thinking I could shoot it at my leisure.

Instead it bashed the cars out of the way and came after me.

But the latest wow moments I've had have been with Psychonauts and the creativity it displays.

He he he - I was just reading Swifts Wow moments... the first three, I concur with

The first time I played the original adventure game on the Liverpool University MUD - I was inspired.

DOOM the first time - I had sweaty palms - fantastic moment!

Mario64 and Zelda Ocarina of Time - just seeing them brought an incredible rush of desire to be involved with game development...

Super Mario World also was a Wow game - lots of wow moments.

Burnout - each 1,2,3 progressively more fantastic, especially the impacts.

SSX 3 - I go WOW! everytime I see my kids playing that superlative game - in it's genre it it unbeaten for WOW moments.

Graphically, Myst the first time was a wow moment - especially on a 486 PC!


I'd also agree with Tomb Raider - the original PS game - the music was fabulous.

IPete2.

btw my dentist appointment was fine, phew.

good wow moments sswift and good point.

Seeing Paperboy in the arcade was a bit of a wow, but I think that seeing Golden Axe was even bigger, also Guantlet! oh and Flying Shark.

Gran Tursimo 3 on the PS2 was wow, it was a next gen console with a next gen racing game, very neat.

Getting Ultima VII Serpent Isle to work again in DOSBox in XP after not playing it for 8 years (due to incompatible OS/hardware) and then managing to complete it was wow.

I gotta also say that Quake was wow when it first hit the shelves and I really went wow at Hexen (better game than quake actually). Also the start if Unreal was pretty wow. Outcast was pretty wow, wonder what a modern equivalent voxel game would look like now! An early game, Bioforge was wow, really neat graphics (pre-rendered though), beating up the guard with a severed arm froma cell mate was fairly wow, oh and Blade Runner, just the start wow.

Classic gaming moment: playing 4 player C&C on LAN (or Red Alert) and totally winning, or just storming an enemy's base and winning (or losing horribly lol).

Actually I've had some very funny and classic moments playing early FPS games coop. I wish they'd bring it back more.

Screamer on a P133 made me go wow.

Bullet Time in Max Payne!

Seeing the bomb heads all running over the hill in Serious Sam!

Having the swordfight with tha Japanese assasin in the airbound trailer in No One Lives Forever 2. The first and last levels looked great. Actually seeing people fall down stairs or over balconies (pre-rendered, no live ragdoll) in NOLF 1 was pretty cool.

Playing Rogue Squadron on PC! Also loads of stuff in the Nintendo Gamecube Star Wars games, like the Jet Bike scene in the woods or controlling the AT-ATs.

Oh yeah Forsaken (Descent clone) was great when it first came out.

Me too - well, that and Ridge Racer. 50% of the wow factor of Wipeout was the music. It fitted the game so well and made the hairs on the back of my neck stick up. In fact, I fell in love with the music and actually bought 2 CDs of Wipeout music. Still play them often while driving. :)

Another wow moment was seeing and playing Out Run in the arcades, for the first time. Just amazing.

Hmmm, wait a minute, these are all driving games. Let me think...

3D Ant Attack on the Speccy.

Still thinking...

IPete2: Yeah gotta agree on the burnouts, 2 player mode at parties is great, and SSX Tricky and SSX3, great views from high up whilst doing ridiculous breakdancing moves on your board.

Big10p, yeah the Wipeout music was great and it ECHOED in the tunnels. I bought RR Revolution (is that number 2? that's the one I got) and number 3 (rage racer, graphics went up a notch!), maybe even number 4 as well but it wsan't as amazing then at all.

Just remembered seeing Crash Bandicoot for the first time at ECTS, London.

Gosh nearly missed Tekken 2.

Gotta add: Playing platypus! Oh and on the same subject R-Type in the arcade.

Not a wow moment for a particular game, but discovering MAME for the first time has to get a mention. I felt as giddy as a schoolgirl. :P

SoggyP: Jumping over the bull!

Hearing my C64 go "Ghostbusters", and "Robocop" (did it say that or did I imagine it?)

Docking without crashing for the first time in Elite.

Playing Mercenary on the C64, amazing. Also castle master on the Amiga.

Hearing the footsteps of the mummy at the start of Dungeon Master! Also squashing your first creature (probably worm) in a door, and then eating a slice of it.

1) Doom2 - 8 player LAN death-match (all those rockets flying around...)
2) Duke Nukem3d - Red Light District level
3) Final Fatnasy 3 (SNES-US) - Everything about it
4) X-Wing & Tie-Fighter - Playing them for first time on cousins PC using a joystick
5) Half-Life1 - The scene where you try to access an elevator, just to watch the elevator whip by you with 2 scientists inside screaming for their lives
6) Quake 1 & 2 - after having installed my 2nd-hand 3DFX Voodoo1 card and having the 2 games run silky smooth with bilinear filtering goodness
7) Zelda:OoT - Riding Epona for the first time out in Hyrule Fields
8) StarCraft - First Zerg-rush during Terran campaign
9) Resident Evil2 N64 - Full-length FMVs on an N64 cartridge?
10) Serious Sam 1st/2nd Encounter - The waves of kamikaze soldiers that scream while running at you
11) Silent Hill 1-4 - The graphics & atmosphere
12) Final Fantasy XI : Chains of Promathia - Ending cutscene

playing pool on duke nukem and stuffing money into the dancer's g-string!

surviving the seige of the large house at the end? of CoD mission pack when all the enemy tanks are closing in and you have no bazooka rounds left and then the allied planes flyover and bomb them and the music is playing etc. yeah.

I should really play more games...
But I think the number of WOW's drops while the graphical quality increases. Age probably has something to do with it too.

Me an my mate running our newly designed Rally Speedway track (140 max speed, fast acceleration, wet roads) after a week of solid Rally Speedway playing. Today I wouldn't be able to get around the track. Back then I flew around the the track while fighting my pal in every corner...


Grim Fandango - The great scene where the drunken Glottis, possesed by gambling, stands shouting at the top floor of the casino. There are a number of other great moments in that game. Classic!

As someone mentioned above; Riding Epona in the Ocarina of Time.

A number of great Quake 2 death matches. Me using the Homer player mod and one of my pals as the cow (that fired rockets through the nostrils)

Finishing Fairlight!

Killing someone in SoulCalibur II using Yoshimitsu's Turning Suicide move.

And the entire Head Over Heels! Brilliant!

EDIT: Oh! I forgot!
Wininng a race in Grand Prix Legends

Making an impossible track in Kickstart II and watching your mate fail to complete it over and over haha.

So many "oooooooh" moments for me... Just some I remember.

Zork. The rich storyline had me hooked right from seeing the mailbox. :)

Elite. OMFGBBQ! 3D! Smooth! GAH!!! PIRATES IN THE WORMHOLE!! GAAAH FLEW TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN SCOOPING FUEL!! Just an awesome game and there hasn't been a space sim it's like since.

Dungeon Master. All the little tricks and traps... awesome. Even spent about 20 dollars on their 1-900 tip line in order to finish it. :)

Castle Wolfenstein 3D. Ooh... Raycasting (though I didn't know what it was called at the time). Brought me right back to the days where I was playing the original wolfenstein on the apple // in 2D.

Ultima Underworld. REAL 3D ! ! ! AND SMOOTH ! ! ! AND JUMPING ! ! !

Stardust on the amiga (hope that was it's name) and seeing it in THAT MANY COLORS!!! AND SO SMOOTH!!!

Tomb Raider T-Rex scene...

X-Wing... just the impressive size of the ships.

Duke Nukem 3D... All the great one liners and stuff you didn't see in other games of it's type.


Most recently... And one that'll certainly enter this list in a few years...

<possible spoiler for FEAR so turn away if you are scared of them>







F.E.A.R. - Turning to go down a ladder and having psycho girl in your face and attempting to click madly on the mouse button to shoot and not being able to because you are clinging to a ladder. Only to have her disappear. Giving a huge sigh of relief only to get to the bottom of the ladder and have a shambling "thing" walking towards you that does the same thing... It set the tone for the rest of the game.

Landing on an asteroid in Frontier: First Encounters. Now, that's awesome. Get close (a feat in itself), lower your landing gear, get close, match its speed, slowly land then send out a mining probe. If only I could have got out and walked around.

Can't remember any others but I know they're there somewhere.

Kanati: Ultima Underworld I & II rocked big time, jumping and look up down at the same time as DOOM's more primative movement. Gaming moment,:realising you are in a flying castle populated by humans and talking leopards (the real inhabitants!) lol

Mine was Elite too, the scope of the game seemed immense and totaly immersive. After reading the novella, studying the ship owners manual, and various charts I locked myself in my room for what seems like months looking back.

getting past mostly harmless ranking was a big moment for me, was nothing worse than spending weeks playing a difficult game, and still being mostly harmless.

Then getting my Docking computer.

Getting the ranking of Dangerous, Deadly and then finaly and excrutiatingly Elite were all great achievements for the time.

Spent an age searching for the Raxxla system mentioned in the novella. And can't remember whether I ever found it (I guess not).

I recently started playing X3, which has a lot in common, if only it had a proceduraly generated working model of our solar system with real gravitly like the elite series did. But still a good game if you have the patience and devent vid card.

I liked the later frontier games, with the landing on planets, but on occasion I'd land on a planet and when it came to launch again the gravity would be too high for my thrusters to allow me to take off again :(

That and the fact that my Amiga was too slow, meant it wasn't as much fun as it should have been, but I still hope to someday play a real sequel to those games :)

Afterall those were the ones that got me into gaming in the first place :D

Wing Commander: Privateer was very good too, althoough an obvious Elite rip off it was massive.

Remember in Elite (I think) getting a cargo hold full of slaves without life support and flying to another system and then discovering you hold is only full of fertiliser! YUK who thought that one up (very perceptive)

All this talk makes we want to give up my job go on the dole and just play games all day yay! (that's what I did when I was 18, and boy was it fun) Uh no can do though, not with family and kids unless I was REALLY mean.

In Thief 2, about when you start to explore the pagan underworld, I was bumbling about in this dark wooded area.
I kept hearing growling as I walked, but I couldn't find the source. I eventually stopped by a tree to get a flare out.
I looked up and thought "Wow, those branches kinda look like outstrectched arms, that's kinda frea..." And with a
deafening roar, the tree killed me in one swipe of it's massive limb. Unscripted, and one of the coolest moments in gaming.

drew: lol that's cool. Thief one had these great moments. One was in some kinda level with a big central square portion with a corridor all round the outside and guard patrolling in circle and loads of doors on either side. You had to (quietly) zoom up a corridoor when no guards were in sight and start picking the lock knowing another guard was about to come round the corner at any moment, and then the damn door needs the second lock pick, it springs open, you don't know if you've been seen and you are bricking yourself and you run in and you are still not safe until you closed the door. It was great!

Resident Evil: Dogs smashing through windows and later zombies! Seeing your first giant spider. Running for a door, missing slightly and cursing the lack of a strafe button as you fumble around trying to reach the doorknob! Removing the heads of more than one zombie with a single well-aimed shotgun blast.

I have many gaming moments to share involving the game Trespasser. Anyone heard of it? It's a fps and it's the first game to ever attempt using physics to govern ALL motion in the game. Everything. It was a horrible disaster, but it never stops giving me incredible, unique moments.

-I'm walking through jungle when I come across a destroyed jeep with a mounted machine gun on top, there are a few raptors, one big meat-eater dinosaur and one large vegi-dino, all bumbling about with their physics-based walking, 50 feet away. I hop on the back of the jeep, outstrectch my right arm (you must do this to interact with the world) grab the gun and start awkwardly firing all over the place. It's impossible to aim this thing. I manage to hit the vegi-dino twice in the head and he comes crashing down. And the meat-eater goes to eat the fresh fallen animal, but trips on the carcass when he gets there! He lands directly ontop of a smaller raptor, killing it instantly! Now the mesh of his leg is caught in the carcass of the vegi-dino. He is trying to get up, but he is falling over repreatedly. I take my time and blast him too.

Great stuff.

drew, did those dinosaurs look like this, by any chance? :P

Another trespasser mishap:

A long time ago, while leaving the dockyard section of the game to enter the woods, I saw some scrap metal on the ground and thought "I always use guns. I wonder if I can hit them on the head with stuff" So I reach out with my arm and pick up a large rod of iron rebar. My character holds it awkwardly, pointed forward like a jousting pole. I don't want to hit the complicated ctrl or shift mouse to rotate my wrist, so I leave it. As I'm walking up a road, I hear *thump* *thump* *thump* behind me. Raptor! I turn around to fight him in what I believe will be a futile fight. The end of my rebar jams into the raptors chest and stays there! I'm holding back this raptor with this 10 foot pole! Suddenly, there is a spurting of blood and the raptor falls over. It's dead! It actually pushed so hard, it impaled itself on my piece of rebar!!! I was amazed!

big10p, why yes, yes they did. Have you seen them?


Hehe, good reference. That's what I was thinking too.

drew: sounds pretty cool!

Looking at 'Killer Instinct 1' for the first time (the arcade version).
The graphics, the music, the combos (ultracombos ...),
the fatalities, the Humiliations ,.... all that was so cool that I don't think I will ever feel that again from a videogame :)

Yet another Trespasser happening:

While being chased by another raptor through the abandoned town, I duck into an alleyway. The dino follows....awkwardly. as it runs at me, it falls sideways into the fence on it's left (remember, it's a physics-based walking system too) the physics engine miscalculates and pushes him off the fence with a large force, making him fall to the other side. It happens again! He bounces back and forth a couple of times before he tries to turn his body to leave this awful alleyway! In the process, he gets pushed onto his ass, his tail puncturing the earth.

Now, picture in your head, those cartoons where a tiny mouse grabs a cat by it's tail and whirls it around in circles before launching it away.

That's what happened! With blood spraying in every direction, and him probably already dead, this dino gets flung out of the alleyway with tremendous force and lands about 25 feet away.

No gun or rebar needed.

This game sounds mental, I've never played it. Did it get slated or something which would explain why I didn't buy it?

heh trespasser, all I remember is looking down and seeing a large pair of breasts :P

Check out the health meter bottom left:



I guess that might be considered a gaming moment.

Hehe, yeah that's Trespasser.

When I first booted it up way back in the day, my mother was curious and watching over my shoulder when I inadvertantly checked my health. Hehe.

Hey, I think I know her! :P

I have rich reactions to all good games of the past (I can remember exactly what it felt like to play Super Mario Bros. pn NES or Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy on the PC after playing prequels on ZX-Sinclair), but my biggest reaction was in Max Payne II:
In the end I just cried... really...
Such an emotional ending...

And the beginning of Half-Life II... Beautiful...

And Day of the Tentacle makes me laugh even though I've heard all the jokes a hundred times!

- Xenon II, the first VGA game I played
- Descent, the first 360 degrees of freedom 3D environment I played in
- Descent 3, the first game I played with a hardware 3D accelerator
- The 7th guest, 'full motion' rendered environments

And I forgot which game -- Double Dragon? Ghostbusters? Where they had some digitized voice samples played over the 2-bit PC bleeper

Ah yes, I remeber The Lion King for Snes, when you escape through the thistles and this garbled clip from the movie plays "And if you ever come back, we'll kill ya!"

As a kid, I was amazed. "Wow, they got the game to talk!"

1. Sabotour (spectrum)
2. elite (spectrum)
3. Monkey islands (amiga)
4. trex warrior (amiga) free on cu amiga!
5. Syndicate (amiga)
6. Ik+ (amiga) i had a double pack with Starglider 2 (classic)
7. Street fighter 2 (SNES)
8. Syndicate (PC) suprised at how much better than the amiga version it was
9. Halflife (the experiance started with the mono rail and kept on giving classic moments
10. counterstrike
11. Golden eye! (N64) 4 player one shoot kills with pistols kept me and my friends playing for months
12. halflife 2 ( just class )

Pete

po's GuessMaster 2005 just blew me away with its advanced AI.

A few that spring to mind:

Resident Evil - dogs jumping through the window.

Mario 64 - entering a room with a huge mirrored wall, noticing the reflection of the 'cameraman' ('Lakitu'?) and suddenly realising with a shock that my view is his view and that this has been the case throughout the game. A really clever bit of design.

Silent Hill - coming out of a room in the school, and gradually becoming aware that I'm in a different corridor (one floor up or down if I remember correctly).

Prince of Persia TSOT - being able to rewind time!

JoeGr, yes!
I'd have to say the the first playthroughs of both Mario 64
and Resident Evil 4 were life-changing.

If you guys can find the time and haven't done so yet, play
through resident evil 4 for the Gamecube. It is the
most expertly-created game I have ever come across.
Every aspect of it has been incredibly over-engineered
and thought-out. It is beyond fun - it is the highest form of
the survival horror genre.

Drew:



They had talking games looong before that. :-) I remember on my C64 they has a game called The Last V8, and the game would say at the start "V-8! Return to base, immediately!"

I'm pretty sure there were voices in arcade games even before that too. It's possible Sinistar was the first to have voice. Sinistar was a space shooter where a boss that appeared at the end of each level would say "Be-ware, I LIVE!"

I can't think of any game that might have had voice before that.

I agree with Drew about Resident Evil 4, its a very impressive game. I've played through it several times which is extremely rare for me. I even spent ages saving up for the magic rocket launcher with infinite ammo.

sswift, yeah years after I played that game I learned that
voice wasn't a new thing. But at that time it was my
first experience and I was impressed!

At the university here us New Media students have access to
this special room that houses almost a dozen consoles from
past to present. There are a few voice-enabled games for
one of the Ataris(?) but I've never played them. I play
duck-hunt and Mario 3 alot in between classes though!

The original pc tomb raider. That was sooo pixelly, but still great fun.


The shareware versions of duke nukem/quake 1 were great also.

One of my uni friends got an imported japanese playstation and a jaguar console, back in '95 i think it was and we played aliens vs predator in 3d. absolutley amazing game that was for the time.

I think the other one was called cybermorph and you had to go around in a spacehip picking up crystal thingies

In no particular order:
Hearing Starglider on the Atari ST... thinking Wow! Real music! (ok it had a 10 second sample, but it was cool)
The intro sequence to the Killing Game Show on the Amiga
Oids and Dungeon Master on the ST.
Ultima Underworld on the PC

I'm sure there are loads more!

1) Playing Maniac Mansion on my C64 without any knowledge of the English language.

2) Playing Sensible Soccer, Goal! and Kick Off 2 for 48 hours in a row without sleep.

3) Playing DX-ball for a long time and getting a superduper highscore... when I finished the last level, the game went on at level 1, and did a reset on my score. :(

I still have Oids, Dungeonmaster and both Ultima Underworld and Labyrinth of worlds in the attic. I currently going through them using DOsbox too.

I also remember being WoW'd by Lords of Midnight on the Speccy and C64...

sigh I feel old

Cheers

Garion
The Wrinkly

Maybe I'm just too old... but I remember the intellivision talking (was it B27 bomber???)

The TI-99 4A computer had a speech module. I had a speech module for the C64...

And the first arcade games I remember talking were faaaaar older than sinistar. :) How about Wizards of Wor... Gorf ("I DEVOUR COINS!!!") hehe... Tempest; That one eyed bastich freaked me out as a kid...

I had Speech Chess on the Speccy. It had several phrases but the ones I heard the most were "I expected that move" and "Checkmate! Ha. Ha. Ha." :(

All that and a chess engine in under 48k. Makes you think.

My first introduction to 3d games was a WOW moment. It was a combat jet sim on a 486 with flatshaded graphics, and i was amazed at the way in which you could watch the missile fly over land and sea (green and blue parts of the screen). The fact that it was 3D totally immersed me.

Then, i was impressed by beautiful interactive cartoons (Monkey Island) and that was a WOW moment, especially because i watched cartoons all day. I was younger.

And now recently, after switching graphics cards from 5600 to 6800GT, first time i got into Battlefield 2 was a WOW moment.

Open ended games always impressed me...
Accolades "Test Drive III" was very impressive - you can drive off the road and go whereever! Wow!
The graphics - Max Payne 2 holds the mark - when I've seen the new Max's face I though - wow! Photorealistic graphics!
Half-Life II has the best animation I've seen so far...

Hunter for the Amiga totally blew me away, and nothing has actually taken its place since..

biggest fright must have been when I met the big dino in the first Tomb Raider game.. that was heartstopping!

Ghostbusters on the speccy was a memorable thing for me, it was the first game I remember having speech in it (although there were likely others before it).

GHOSTBUSTERS!!! HAHAHAHAHAHHAHA! *crackle* *Cue dodgy music*

God i feel old reading this. Football Manager on the speccy was a definite WOW moment. It had moving graphics! After playing it on the ZX81 (with a massive 16K RAM) the speccy version was like gaming Nirvana.

Lords of Midnight/Doomdark's Revenge, also on the Speccy. The first time you moved your army and came face to face with Shareth was always a spooky moment, especially if it was the last move of the day. You always had a sense of dread as you hit the 'Night' button to move to the next day.

Populous & Powermonger on the Amiga. And Sim City. They were just so different. Unfortunately there aren't many on the PC. The nearest would probably be Medieval:Total War when you play that first full sized battle.

1) Castle Wolftenstien on the apple ][ (2D and scarey as hell)
2) Aztec on the apple ][
3) Defender at the Kepa Rd fish and chip shop
4) Tempest
5) Starglider on Amiga
6) Elite on Amiga
7) Mario 64
8) Zelda (OOT)
9) Dune (PC)
10) The incredible machine (PC)
11) Sam 'n Max (CD version - PC)
12) Wolfenstien 3D (PC)
13) Doom
14) Magic Carpet
15) Splinter Cell (XBox)
16) Ninja Gaiden (XBox)

Oh and that sensible populous type game on the Amiga, much funnier though.

1) 7th Guest -- scared the unholy hell out of me.
2) Seeing the Cyber Demon in Doom. Duh.
3) First playing Tekken 1 on the Playstation and thinking how cool it was. I'd shoot anyone playing that now.
4) Super Metroid. Rented it and after about 4 years I bought it and it was awesome once again.
5) This isn't video gaming, but it is gaming... getting my first laser tag set and running around outside shooting my brother. I'm getting one of the new ones since laser tag is and always will be cool. Especially when I get real lasers.
6) Playing Quake 1 for the first time.

Ultima 2 on the Atari 800 (circa 1984)

Mercenary on C64. Such a large playing area.

Castlemaster on C64, such a detailed playing area.

Marble Madness on Amiga. The first Amiga game I ever played. Wonderful graphics and the right balance of frustration and enjoyment.

SubLogic Flight Simulator II on the Amiga... That's when I became a Flight Sim buff... Landing on Liberty Island in a small Cessna, to taking a Lear Jet for a spin. I still take it out for a spin some times.

F/A-18 Interceptor. A masterpiece of weird and wonderful issues. Landing on your back on a carrier, shooting down Air Force One or sinking a nuclear carrier.

Lotus Turbo Challenge on Amiga. Total fun, great music and the sensation of speed. Loved it.

Cannon Fodder. Hilarious, Killing has never been so much fun!

TFX on PC. Such a detailed and large playing area. The physics had problems, but the missions were interesting. A lot of care had gone into night ops, an area that other sims hadn't really done much for.

No One Lives Forever. The first game was a fun game. Linear, but very fun to play. I'm not sure I like killing being so much fun, but then again!


Andy

Arcade: Ninja Baseball Batman - despite being terrible at most arcade coin-op games I could play for 40 minutes for a single coin, it had the most bizarre enemies and bosses including a minotaur/(cow?) who threw kitchen implements including fridges at you..from memory. (same era game as the Simpsons Arcade game) It was also the first game that I injured myself playing - blistered my thumb quite badly on the bonus levels where the best way to press the buttons repeatedly is to glide your hand over them really fast.

Playing morrowind for the first time with a computer that could handle it. (The first attemts was with a computer that wasn't happy at all)
The worldmap was huge, I could run in any direction I wanted. Stuff to steal everywhere. If it wasn't nailed down I had it in my backpack.
I hope the sequel will be released for mac too.

drew: re resident evil 4, I've been wating to buy it since before it came out (played ALL the others) but have held off until it gets cheaper. Might play over christmas if not too busy.

Yeah, Lords of Midnight C64 is awesome.

AshMantle: Yeah Hunter was amazing played it loads, never got boring. Do you remember another similar game called MidWinter?

Sinbad on the c64 was the first game I played that had speech in it.

I am unsure where it fits in with the other games with speech, I do remember straining to understand whatw as being said though :)

Cheers

Garion

Coming out into the snow after the library in Halo 1. A banshee is circling above and covenant and flood battle rages ahead of you, cue the drumming music and halo theme! That was the best moment EVER!

Splinter Cell had alot of *wow* too. When they kill the lights in the bottom of the Georgian castle - that was *wow*.

Elite (C64) - for the absolute vastness of the game.

Last Ninja 2 (C64) - for the flawless execution and blissfully free from pixel accurate jumping puzzles with no visual cues.

Skidmarks 2 (Amiga) - Because you could hook up 2 Amigas and multiplay in "widescreen" with half of the level on one screen, and the other half on the other.

ZeeWolf 2 (Amiga) - because it was like Desert Strike, but in real 3D.

Flashback (Amiga) - the pinacle of platform game evolution. Had "morphing" enemies that where an absolute pain.

Alien Breed Tower Assault (CD32) - because it was pretty, had a cool intro, was absolutely huge (I still haven't gotten through it all), and like other Alien Breed games, had awesome multiplayer gameplay.

Tomb Raider (Play Station) - because it was Indiana Jones / Rick Dangerous, in 3D and with a chick.

Mario64 (N64) - because it was a better game than Tomb Raider and the only successfully executed 3D platform game for nearly a decade.

Mortal Kombat (Arcade) - because you could rip peoples still beating hearts out through their chests and rip their heads off with the spinal cord still attached. Awesome.

Virtua Fighter (Arcade) - because it was a good fighting game, and the 3D perspective gave it an interesting twist.

Fallout (PC) - because it had a great story, was based around GURPS, and had mutants in it (and everyone knows mutants are cooler than elves). It was the game that finally got me to buy a PC.

Transport Tychoon (PC) - because it was massive and had an open ended gameplay, and possibly one of the only strategy games I've played where the computer AI doesn't overtly cheat.

Arcanum (PC) - because of the rediculous depth of characters and story.

Prince of Persia: Sands of time - the game that broke Mario64's monopoly on cool 3D platformers, the cool story, the suitable graphical effects, and how everything came together in a consistent and coherent way. Possibly the best game ever.

Vampire the masqurade: Bloodlines - for the first genuinely scary part of a video game I've ever experienced (the haunted house). Even today, having played through it a dozen times, knowing full well that it's next to impossible to die, and knowing exactly what's going to happen at all times, my hairs still stand on end when playing it. Excellent. Too bad everything else in the game is buggy as hell.

FlameDuck: Skidmarks 2: wide screen wow never knew that!
I actually finished flashback on the megadrive, it wasn't easy. I loved all those Desert Strike games, finished them all on the megadrive, got pretty tough near the end. Think I finished Tower Assult too on my A1200, neat neat game. PoPersia is grat, the rewind time is truly radical, some great moments in it too, also a tad frustrating at times and combat was a bit poopy but the rewind helped!

I feel the need to mention "Meteor Alert" on the ZX Spectrum as an early purveyor of speech- assisted gaming.

Bearing in mind that this machine only had a feeble 'beep' command, it was totally awesome to load the game up (from tape) and, just as a hail of deadly meteors came hurtling towards you in Asteroids stylee, to hear the ominous...

"Meech ich Lick. Meech ich Lick !" warbling from the speaker.

I guarantee it won't be.

BJ: what the hell is "Meech ich Lick." German?

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time - Growing up (and completion) (Same can be said of Link to the past and its dark world i suppose)
Super Street Fighter II: Beating my brother despite being four by constantly using Blankas electric attack while crouched in the corner?
Super Metroid - When you (Duh) See the Super Metroid (Gosh Darn'it wasnt that good?) and the following events.....
Phantasy Star Online - everything Episode1 when i played it first time...
Super Mario World- Getting a Blue Yoshi!

nothing beats that first shot from a BFG in DOOM!!!!

hooooooorahhh!!!

:)

--Mike

Red, this is so true! I remember enterng a room full of Mancubus and firing it for the first time!
And it was when I found put how long it actually takes to fire! ;-)

Another moment - the ending of "Another World" (aka "Out of this World") when you do your best to move back under the ray with a broken spine... My eye was tearing uo when I played it...

Tachyon: The Fringe. The amazing game that nobody played for some reason even though it also got great reviews... I guess it was ahead of its time. I wish Novalogic would stop messing around and make a sequel.
Very memorable moment when you blow up the medical facility in Sol. Captures a great feeling of confusion and all that... and shows just how awesome it all really is :)
Top 10 games of 1990... noone believes me though.
( It also was the first game I ever played with VOIP... and it was crystal clear too :( )

using force powers and lightsabre in Jedi Knight

When I was a wee lad, and would go with my Grandfather to his office, I loved playing this game on his Xerox Alto:



But, I rarely got to go and play that.

First game of my own to give me a "moment" was when I got Tunnels of Doom (TI-99/4A) for Christmas. I stayed up all night playing that. Still my all-time fave game from the old computers.

playing metal gear solid 3. it's so much fun slitting soldiers throats and blowing the scientists away with a shotgun. i wish i could play that game again but my brother is the only one in the house that owns a ps2.

Tunnels of Doom looks cool.

- Fort Apocalypse (C64) : great atmosphere and damn hard.
- Last Ninja 1 & 2 (C64) : so impressive for good old C64.
- Suikoden 1 (PS1) : my first RPG, and a good one.
- Vandal Hearts (PS1) : my first T-RPG.
- Doom 1 (SNES) : even if it sucks on the SNES... :-(
- Resident Evil 1 (PS1) : THE survival horror classic.
- Resident Evil 4 (PS2) : more action but incredibly addictive.
- Silent Hill 1 (PS1) : I got almost crazy playing this one ;-) The intro is so disturbing...
- Silent Hill 2 (PS2) : a masterpiece... remember Pyramid Head ?

Well, probably nobody here has played it but it's one of the greatest games but not recognizable..

Mafia!

It's overshadowed by the GTA series, but the end is so ironic, it brought tears to my eyes, the only game that has been able to make me cry, and I am not any less of a man to admit it.. Truly an A++++++++++ work, however, overshadowed :(

Long Live Mafia!

well Chad, you convinced me, I'm gonna try it out :)
Installing...

man... those old TI screens really bring back memories...
amazing how they can put you right back in the day...

and all this time i thought that i was the only TI-99/4A owner left standing...

... or at least one of the few that would admit to it :)

thx for the memories Brice...

--Mike

If I could find a TI-99/4A with speech module and software in reasonable shape I'd pick one up. I'm missing one of those from my 8bit collection. That and a Coleco Adam. :)

Putting in the shadow of the beast II disk to my Amiga for the first time ever and seeing all the graphics, music, and colors.

Lots of demo's on the Amiga pushed the limits every time that they were frequently impressive.

I haven't been really impressed with anything 3d yet.

Sonic was a definite high point.

Reading a behind-the-scenes how-it-works special in Amiga Format magazine on the First Samurai game, and playing the demo, was a big highpoint.

The demo disk I played with a demo of ICO. Wow!

Playing Gran Turismo 3 for the first time at Best Buy. I bought a PS2/GT3 combo box that day.

Playing Command & Conquer for the first time. Especially when all I had to compare it to was Dune II.

The first mission, after the slightly cheesey briefing FMV, the bombastic foot-tapping music kicks in and a ship cruises onto view taking out enemy troops on the shoreline, before your squad gets dropped off. Immediately it was obvious I was playing soemthing far more dynamic then Dune II.

Zooming out and seeing the whole galaxy on Frontier, and being slightly gobsmacked that they had managed to squeeze millions of planets onto a single 720kB floppy. Until, of course, I realised how they did it. Still clever, though.

Exploring the world of Exile on the BBC Micro. Huge and involving, there was plenty to experiment with.

Playing Burnout 3 and realising that it was easily the best arcade racer of all time.

AngelDaniel: I read the same First Samurai article and the demo was excellent was it, mind you it was hard.

Wolron: Was ICO that weird japanese game with the little boy? If so I finished it on PS2, it was really good, unique in fact, the whole thing was wow, but I don't think many people bought it despite the excellence.

Not really a WOW moment, but the intro song to Cannon Fodder on the Amiga ("War's never been so much fun") pops into my head once in a while (like this morning) even tho' it's been about 10 or so years since I've played it last.

@flameduck: http://www.modarchive.com/cgi-bin/download.cgi/C/cannon2.mod

I love modarchive, I went through all the top 10 lists and downloaded the best trance, chip music and demo style mods! Listing to them right now, great for coding due to no lyrics.

Kanati... the Coleco ADAM!!!!!

now that was a strange one... high speed tape drives... near the end, you could buy em... that gigantic box with everything in it but the monitor (computer, printer, tape drives, keyboard, manuals, etc) for $49...

... or was it $149??? :)

anyways... they were dirt cheap... and underneath they could run CP/M and via c you could access the video memory directly... the same chip that the TI used (i think)...

but god help you if you ever tried to print something after everyone went to bed... that impact printer sounded like gunshots going off when it was working...

hey, look on ebay for a lot of inexpensive TI stuff...

**nostalgia note ** my first software sales were for the TI-99/4A Graphics Expander, Basi-Calc99, E-Files99, and PageWriter99... way back around 1985....

those were some fun times... when you could publish software in a plastic baggie, with an 8 1/2 by 11 page folded in half as the cover and manual... and stores like J&R Music World (before they branched to become J&R Computers) in NYC would sell you stuff on consignment...

... we'll never see anything like those times again.

--Mike