Your perfect video game moment / memory

What is Your perfect video game moment / memory? That moment that you can hardly expect others to understand but makes them think back on their own memories to find their own perfect gaming moment.

There's just a bunch of moments for me, but when I think back to it and try to think of a cool, zen, mine and only mine gaming moment, the most recent memory that comes to mind is driving around in the desert in GTA San Andres while listening to the song A horse with no name. That was just completely and utterly relaxing. Just driving, not thinking about family, school or life's issues.

I was driving through Vice City while listening to Jan Hammer's "Crockett's Theme", and at some point I accidentally flipped the car and landed on the roof on a beach. And while turning the camera in circles and watching the pink/purple sunset the car exploded at the exact moment the song faded out.

It was fucking magic...

@harlechquinn: Yes!!!! That's what I'm talking about. That perfect video game moment that others will call cool but they wont be able to appreciate how great it actually was when it happened 8 )

GTA Vice City + Stretched out hog + She Sells Sanctuary + Sunset.

Also.... beating Ragnaros for the first time. Can't really be explained in text.

Chromehounds.

We sat in the river submerged all super stealth mode.

The sniper up on the hill had no idea where we were, so he sent his friend to our base to try and take it while he stayed on the hill.

Assault dude approaches all careful style, still confused as hell. He starts attacking the base and out we come, water streaming off us like terrifying marine mechs.

One salvo from each of us obliterates the assault. He had no chance. We see the sniper run the hell away after what he witnessed. Probably on his way to call the cops.

Found him, shot him, won the game.

That moment of coming out of the water like a couple mean motherfuckers will stick with me forever.

Becoming the Champion in Pokeon Crystal, for the first time ever in the series AND as a girl character. Me and my Feraligator man, we did it. Together from day one. Seven year old me was hella pumped at the time and twenty year old me is STILL hella pumped just thinking about it.

EDIT: AND THEN KANTO OPENED UP.

FUCK YEAH.

POKEMON CRYSTAL WAS FUCKING AMAZING.

xcom enemy unknown

it was the final battle against the main bad guy it was a rough back and forth, but ultimately the majority of my forces were outnumbered and were all under the mind control of the main bad guys forces except for my sniper, and the shot was available to take with the sniper to kill the boss and win the game, but the chances of it hitting the boss were at 30% the game said, and if i didnt had make a move then i would have lost the game. so i decided to move, and then i got the shot, a critical hit even, and all his health went down and i fucking cheered when i saw that i got the shot and won the game.

then i got the ending that basically shows you saved the world, typical stuff, but fuck, with that added tension of that final battle and then to get that ending, it definitely felt like a huge accomplishment

Watching the P4ER for the first time, spending that much time with Charlie, Chie, Vinny, Jeff and the gang is my perfect video game memory.

Grandia. I was 9 years old or so, just got home from a nice trip to the beach with family and friends, sun was shining, went to the living room with some homemade ice cream, sat down to play it for the first time and the music still makes me smile like crazy.

Resident Evil 2, I was round a friend's house and we were both playing it for the first time. Within a short time we had made it to the police station and to our first encounter with a 'Licker'. We were both 11 at the time. Resident evil 2 was so unnerving to me, it solidified my love of horror as it pertains to video games and still being great friends with the guy it's a memory we share to this day, relived and revived through the playing of many other horror games and iterations within the resident evil series. Whenever I hear that music from the main hall I'm back there either playing or offering advice, gesturing for him move Leon or Claire in our direction.

It's not so much a moment, but over the course of a week and a half I played through Arkham Asylum and City back to back all the while intermittently watching Batman The Animated series again. That entire experience was gold.

Riding into Mexico

Crawling through the hallway

"So this is what the dream feels like"

Shooting up the ramen shop with six revolvers

@jacdg: Oh I have a lot of those memories. It reminds me of when I was a kid and I spent the better half of the morning with that morning orange sun gleaming through the window while riding Epona in the legend of zelda OoT.

I'm just fascinated by this kind of stories.

Any more Giant Bombers?

Playing Virus mode on Timesplitters 2 on the Hangar Map with 3 other guys. And everyone fucking around with those goddam proximity mines.

Either that or the marathon Pokemon Stadium matches I used to have the same friends. I think we'd all reached some kind of transcendent peak, so it essentially became, 'if you didn't get the perfect score, you lose.' If you didn't catch all the eggs on the Chansey mini-game you sucked.

@themanwithnoplan: That's always really cool. I remember me and my younger brother spent the better half of a week grinding in monster hunter 2 for the PSP so we could get good gear to beat a dragon. After beating the thing, it felt awesome. Its the whole experience that made that moment cool.

@panvixyl: I remember my most memorable moment playing pokemon was when I found articuno in red or blue. Doing so was simply amazing to me, cause I didn't use any guides or anything like that, so going into a cave and finding an articuno was just. WOW.

OK, Persona 3 FES is an 80+ hour game, and during that game you spend an absurd amount of time in the Velvet room, unknowingly absorbing the ambient opera that plays the entire time you're fusing new Personas. That music comes up again at the end of the game and yeah... it's pretty much a perfect moment, though any end-boss from any long-ass RPG is incredibly satisfying.

Also, I played a ton of WoW in 2007-2008 and some of those raids were the most fun I've ever had in games.

San Andreas.

Was one of the early missions, take out a group of gang members in that turnaround CJ's house was on. There were a fair amount of them, so waited to approach, got all my guns reloaded, and started walking in for some closer shots.

Then, out of NOWHERE, a plane divebombs straight down into the car they were sitting around, killing them all in the fireball.

Was left standing there awestruck until the mission complete ping sounded.

Random pedestrian driver NPC AI at it's finest.

I had just graduated from college and moved into my first apartment. I found Grandia at a local pawn shop for 5 bucks and it was the first game I ever played at my own place. This is like the opening cinematic to my adulthood.

Open World Jank at it's finest.

@meltdown547: hahaha I know. That game is random as Fudge. This one time a pedestrian stole my car, which was one small wind gust away from exploding. So the guy drags me out of my car, gets in and drives into the highway, gets hit by a truck and causes the biggest accident and eventually the biggest chasing explosion I've seen. Just - amazing.

@mrfluke: Isn't it awesome when you beat a boss character and you thought you were gonna lose?

That's how I felt with some FF boss fights

@narley: oh absolutely, i can definitely get what your saying when you bring up FF,

got that same feeling with chrono trigger when your fighting lavos.

not as impressive/ cool as some of the other stories here i've read, but:

It was a weekday, I was 12 or 13, I had woken up really early to get in a little bit of videogaming in before school. I just had to beat that Paper Mario boss!
It was the.... 3rd dungeon? the ghost one. I had met that giant final boss and he starts running after you while that exciting music plays, it was exhilarating and tense because I had this huge dude running at me AND my mom yelling at me to get ready for school. But I ignored my mother as I already had gotten dressed, and was so wrapped up in escaping the terror! Running past ghosts and enemies, watching as my new ghost friends were swallowed whole!

then you find his weakness, his heart, and you battle. I can still remember the sun coming through the basement windows glaring up my TV screen, I could have put some couch pillows in front of the windows like usual, but I had no time.

you beat the heart, but it's not over! one more fight, the big man himself, but the school bus was almost here, It was gonna be close.
I did everything I could with all the RPG experience I had up to that point (which wasn't much, maybe FF8?), Finally beat the boss, and then off to school.

for some reason I specifically remember this experience, but nothing else from that year of my life. weird.

Walking into an open field as Link in Ocarina of Time. Before that, the game was great, but I had no idea what stood before me and the adventure I would take.

Playing X-Com EU while listening to the best of giantbombcast. I still haven't found a game that is that engrossing but doesn't require me to pay attention to any story beats other than the mission objective.

I remember having a blast with the RE:Remake. At the time I was a huge fan of the Resident Evil series, and when I played the Remake I just fell in love with it. I loved every minute of the game, it made me a happy person. Sadly after I beaten it my disk broke.

Extermination was a fun gory game. I still remember when I had to battle my comrade who got mutated by aliens, it was epic at the time for me.

Resident Evil:Outbreak was a game I kept playing alot, same goes for Outbreak file 2 aswell. I remember I kept replaying those games trying to unlock stuff, and it was just a blast playing. Though originally Outbreak was suppose to be a big game from what I've heard, but capcom decided to split the game into 3 games. Bad thing was RE4 at the time had people's attention, and when Outbreak file 2 dropped people lost interest and the game didn't sell well, after that no Outbreak file 3. Outside of the online survival Co-Op, the game was outdated compared to RE4.

I could go on forever about other games, but I'll just leave it at this.

Hmmmm.... I have a couple from childhood and one more recently:

childhood:

-first time visiting the End of Time in Chrono Trigger. I was 12 when I first played through that game. Mind thoroughly blown.

-the arcade heyday of the early 90's. Street Fighter II. Many many good times were had. Walk to mall with neighbourhood friends with intent to go see a movie. Get sidetracked at arcade and end up spending all the money our parents had given us for the movie on Street Fighter. The best.

-first time I logged on to a server to play Quake II deathmatch. My first FPS multiplayer experience. I was so overwhelmed I ran and hid into a corner and just watched the anarchy a bit before joining in.

recent:

Playing Just Cause 2 when the controls clicked and I understood just how much mobility that game actually gives you with just your character alone. I immediately stopped caring about the actual missions and just went on climbing and skydiving adventures for hours.

The intro of Halo 3.

@herbiebug: Chrono Trigger. Nuff said 8 )

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory multiplayer on Vertigo Plaza. My partner was dead, and I had 1 life left. All I needed to do was spawn, get across the map, pick up the extraction tube, get out, and back to spawn. Got in, and, with some confusion, snapped the necks of both mercs, grabbed the tube, and what followed was the craziest game of cat and mouse I ever had. They chased me all the way to spawn and I was a hair's breath away from dying when I crossed over to the extraction point. To this day I don't know how I did it, but because of it, I'm a lifelong Splinter Cell fan.

For me it has got be my multiple playthroughs of Soul Reaver 2. One of the best ps2 games. After playthrough 3 my friend and I could simply banter over the top of the cutscenes ER style...good times

- In Playing Penumbra: Black Plague, playing with my dad. We had already finished Overture, so we were pretty hardened by the high tension in these games, but the first few chapters of Black Plague was almost too much, even for my dad, a man who's sat in a Soviet interrogation room with AKs pointed at him for 24 hours and generally "seen some shit". I remember it clearly 5 years on. It was early on, just when you really encounter the first Tuurngait creature. We were in a room with a single door, which is accessed by a corridor. When you grab some key item in that room, you hear a previously locked door open out in the corridor, and the Tuurngait steps into it. Scared shitless, and hearing the eerie gurgling noises and creepy lines uttered by the Tuurngait out there, we crouch in the rooms corner. Then we see the flashlight its holding shine in through the small window in the room's door and pray it doesn't get in. My dad's like "No. Pause the game, pause the game". So I do and I look at him, he's shaking his head going "Shit....". So I unpause and the enemy swings the door open and runs towards us, battering us with a pipe until we're dead. One of the most intense moments I've ever had in a videogame.

-Playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2, when me and my friends figured out, quite early on in, how to exploit the UAV mini-helicopter to play win in an extremely cheap manner. First, you make a squad where everyone was armed with C4 + the perks that boost C4 capacity and make it more powerful, then strap everyone's C4, which is 20+ charges total, to the UAV mini-helicopter, then fly it into objectives or armored vehicles on the map and detonate them, insta-destroying them with no risk to yourself. We figured this out before there was any major youtube video, at least any that we had seen, demonstrating this trick, and we hadn't noticed anyone else doing it. It made for a hilarious couple of nights where we could completely wreck the game. We felt like evil geniuses. This exploit was patched fairly quickly after it caught on though.

- The ending of Braid, one of the most rewarding finales of a videogame ever.

...And countless others really.

When I played Red Dead Redemption and randomly decided to wander aimlessly in the middle of nowhere during a thunderstorm. I then decided to just stop near the edge of a cliff and sit there among all the ambiance. Then the storm cleared into a beautiful sunset, and I watched the entire thing as all the sounds of the world filled in the atmosphere.

I really felt like I was there for a moment. No other game yet can claim that.

- The part in Halo: ODST when you finish the ONI Alpha Site mission and that fucking beautiful music kicks in as you stare at the burning wreckage of the complex out at sea, silhouetted against the dawn, with covenant ships circling over it. I still remember that rush of endorphins. Halo games (pre 4, and slightly less in Reach) have a special vibe which runs deep. Melancholic, but uplifting maybe? Can't describe it, it's very particular. It's not like the story is that brilliantly written, but there's something communicated with the aesthetics, the music and what's implied between the lines that no other media quite has, and which is way deeper than the basic space marines vs. aliens stuff.

- Recently, I was playing System Shock 2 for the first time. Making it through the cargo bays in engineering. That environment, in all its 1999-graphics-glory, is somehow one of the most believable and frightening places videogames have taken me to. I was stumbling around there with extremely little ammo, listening for the grunt of a hybrid or the clunk clunk of a security robot which would clue me into wether I should equip armor-piercing or antipersonell rounds for my almost-broken pistol. Something about the way you have to operate those elevators and poke around between the crates in that dark-ass place just made me feel like I was in Alien.

Pool of Radiance (the 1988 Gold Box) - when I got fireball and wasted a whole room full of Kobolds in one shot.

Wing Commander - the lauch sequence.

Red Dead Redemption.

Walking around doing sidequests in planescape was always interesting since there were never any ordinary npcs in that game. Especially liked the brothel of slating intellectual lusts part. Though I guess the most prominent memory of it was when I was meeting Ravel for the first time, such good writing and the haunting music in the background made it all even better.

Also, P4, when you fight Izanami and "The genesis" drones on in the background only to suddenly become a orchestrated version of reach out to the truth. Friggin genius!

Edit: Oh, and beating SMT: Nocturne and getting the true demon ending. Most satisfying thing ever!

I could probably go on at infinitum listing things, one that instantly jumps out to me is the ending of Professor Layton and the Unwound Future. Few if any games have made me actually cry, but I can't deny I got pretty choked up over that. I could probably fill an entire list's worth with moments from the Professor Layton games, they just speak to me like little few games do ^__^

Running around the desert down in San Andreas and hearing a loud BOOOOM behind me. I swung the camera around to catch the end of an airliner exploding as it crashed through that hole in the rock formation, and the damn thing was sliding right at me.

I ran as fast as I could and managed to avoid getting squashed. Video games.

Not the most exciting example, but from the top of my head, I'd have to say Grim Fandango. I was stuck on that vault door puzzle (Year 3) for god knows how long and even stopped playing the game for some period of time, before trying it again. Then once I solved it, I literally started cheering out loud and nearly exploded from happiness. All that also happened while the rest of my family was home and probably thought I had finally lost it.

Don't think I've ever been that happy about beating some tough part in a videogame, so that's probably why I still remember it so fondly.

One other example would be playing the first Halo on Xbox with my friend. Neither of us owned it, but we happened to come by to an Xbox stand in our local store. I think there was some 15 minute limit per customer, but once we got a grip of the whole co-op system, we probably stood there playing the demo for an hour or nearly two, without anyone shooing us away. It was magical.

I think the first time I played through Journey was one of my greatest gaming moments, building that bond with another player on nothing other than a chirp and finishing the game with them was a feeling I couldn't really beat! I strongly urge everyone to place it, it was such a relaxing and amazing game. It really took me away from it all and it was nice to meet another character (player) that reacted differently to how I would.