What's a memory of gaming that you wish you could relive for an day? The memory or feeling you never forget.

For me, there are a few moments that I don't forget. They tend to be when you are younger with nostalgia and all but in all honesty, some moments are just magical. I remember halo 3 and finishing the campaign online where I played with a random for most of the campaign. We just stuck together. We didn't really talk much, but something about staying up till the sun came up on a summer Saturday, knowing you got nothing to do but turn off the game and sleep without worry...the feeling that that's it, we did it...ill never likely see or know this random again, but we shared this moment...felt magical. I think that's the feeling halo game sequels try to sell back to the old guard and that's the reason it never works, it's not that halo was revolutionary or whatever distractors say...it was a special moment and time. Hopefully infinite can return those feelings.

For a more at home feeling it was wiping the floor with my buddies in power stone 2, seeing the legendary rank after beating Skies of arcadia, and just remembering the journey of my goofy pirates, (though I find the reason RPG's are liked is the length makes you really attached by the end, if the story and characters are at least decent. The heart is really missing in the newer stuff pushed with realistic graphics and kinda dry characters (cough ff15, though i only played a few hours so grain of salt).

Lastly, playing good demos you got from a magazine, learning how crazy good MGS was, playing tony hawk warehouse over and over with buddies, listening to music while just cruising in jet set radio, or swinging around a city in any spiderman game. Your first battle royal win in any battle royal. Sonic running from whales. Etc.

sound off in the comments.

TLDR: a bunch of old game nostalgia I always look back to or moments...what are yours?

There's a lot but the first that comes to mind is playing Uncharted 2 for the first time with my friends. It was my first time experiencing anything with that kind of Indiana Jones feel and having friends there to experience it with me made it feel even better than if I were playing it by myself.

A number of these leap to my mind immediately.

The first big one was when I was 12 or 13 and my older cousin brought over his new PS1. You have to understand that at the time the consoles I owned were an NES and a Sega Genesis, and we didn't yet have an internet connection and didn't watch much TV, so I was fairly disconnected from the latest gaming news. So seeing this new console was just completely mind-boggling. I still remember the three games my cousin brought: Battle Arena Toshinden, Tekken, and Twisted Metal. That last one left the biggest impression of all at the time... I still have this image seared into my brain of Warthog driving around the Suburbia level.

Another one was when I realized I had stayed up all night playing Romance of the Three Kingdoms VII for PS2. For this one it's actually important to understand something about the room I was playing in. Our living room had a TV on a stand in the corner, and directly behind it on one wall was a big sliding glass door leading to the back deck that took up almost the entire wall. Well, RTK7 was so compelling in its "just one more turn" gameplay that I played until something like 7 in the morning, but didn't realize it until I turned the TV off... because the light from the TV shining directly into my face had obscured the light coming in through the sliding glass door. So there was this moment of, "Wait... OMG it's fucking light outside. What the hell time is it?!"

Then there was Resident Evil 4. I remember watching Greg Kasavin's Gamespot video review of the game and being just ridiculously hyped up for it. The problem was that I didn't own a Gamecube. I was in college at the time, and offered to go halvsies on it with a guy on the same floor of my dorm who did own one. The first time I got to play, said duder was away for the weekend, but a couple of other guys ended up hanging out with me watching me play it. And even despite my expectations, that game still just completely blew me away. I played it for 11 straight hours without stopping and just had about the best time of my life playing a game. It was the video game equivalent of seeing God. Of course I was forced to buy a Gamecube of my own shortly thereafter. Being unable to play this thing on my own schedule had just become completely unacceptable!

The last experience I had like this that really sticks with me is playing Demon's Souls for the first time. My brother and I had both been big From Software fans in the 90s, particularly their King's Field and Armored Core games. He'd seen some of the coverage for Demon's when it was still only in Japan, and we both thought it looked awesome, but worried that it would never be released in the west. Then, of course, it was. At the time I only had a 360 and no PS3, though. But eventually I was visiting my brother for our shared birthday (we're identical twins, but lived in different states at that point), and so I got to test drive the game. I hadn't felt that kind of wonder playing a game since RE4 four or five years earlier. The thing that sticks with me is that I did reluctantly go to bed one night, but then got up at something like 5:30 or 6:00am the next morning so I could play it a little more before I had to head back home... and I like my sleep. Demon's was so good that I didn't care. After that, much as had happened with RE4, I felt forced to buy my own PS3. But as it happened, the new slim model was being released in about a month, on Black Friday, so I forced myself to wait so I could get one of those. Waiting to buy a new console had never felt so long.

But I suppose there's a reason they call early adolescence "the wonder years." We tend to be hit harder by wonder during that time in our lives, when everything is newer, and we're not so old and jaded. I played Demon's when I was ~25, which I guess for me was sort of the tail end of having those sort of ridiculously intense reactions to games. I mean, I've played some great games since then, and some of them have even managed to hit me pretty hard, but nothing quite to the degree of those early experiences.

Finding a demo kiosk for the original Xbox from a department store with my best buddy back in 2002 and blatantly ignoring the ”20-30 minute playtime per customer” note while we spend 1-2 hours playing the Halo demo. If I had somehow owned enough money back then to just impulse purchase the console right there and then, I probably would’ve done it and that whole weekend would have been spent playing Halo.

Blizzard is tarnished now, but playing WoW for the first time is still a memory I’ll probably cherish forever (maybe). It was just such an incredible combination to see things familiar from Warcraft 1-3 made into proper 3D and on a scale I had never experienced before, it being my first MMO.

Playing through Journey with a stranger.

Going to echo demos from the first post. No one specific demo, but just getting to try snippets of so many different games before the days of the internet and when most of them would still feel fresh to my younger-self was basically always a treat.

I’m sure I could think of more if I really squeezed my brain, but I don’t want to wallow in too much nostalgia at once.

Hmm, for me:

...first castle on level 1 of Super Mario 3 when I was a little kid.

...first end boss fight in Twisted Metal III.

...starting every Silent Hill game or Pyramid head encounter.

...exiting the vault in every Fallout game.

Basically my heart beating out of my chest in all these moments lol.

I'd like to momentarilly forget about Senran Kagura, as well as every ecchi anime series that I've watched over the past ten years, to see if there's actually something to the games other than big anime titties, or if I'm just a coomer.

My first time properly getting into Knights of the Old Republic with my friend. There was this great Star Wars PC game bundle called "Star Wars PC The Best Of" or something like that, and it came with Battlefront (!), Republic Commando (!!), Jedi Knight: Jedi Outcast (!!!), Knights of the Old Republic (!!!!) and Empire at War (eh). But my friend and I bounced off KOTOR at first because, and I shit you not, you controlled the character with WASD instead of arrow keys. Yes, to our baby PC gamer brains, arrow keys were the way to go. Anyway.

Once we got over the WASD, and got past the (admittedly, boring and prolonged ship tutorial) into Taris, we were just blown away. The city felt massive! We had to explore to figure out how to get Sith papers to get into the Lower City! Or we could just ignore that and do duels and play cards for a while. This was the first proper RPG we had played, and to young me it just felt so epic in scope, even just getting off of Taris. And then when the whole galaxy opened up, DAMN.

Anyway, games felt cooler as a kid when I couldn't see the seams in the world and I will never get that feeling back, lol

2011. I remember it being in the late summer or early fall. One of my best friends in the world was visting the States from Korea, and carved out a weekend to come hang with me. We planned to spend an entire weekend just playing games and eating bad pizza and good steaks. I had a copy of Portal 2, and we dove into the co-op.

We got stuck. There was a puzzle/room we were banging our heads against for...I honestly don't remember how long. It could have been 20 minutes, it could have been 2 hours. But we had dinner reservations at Ray's The Steaks, and we were hoping a couple good cuts of meat and cocktails would clear our heads.

We were getting to the end of dinner and it hit me. "I got it. We need to hit each other in mid-air over the platform neither of us can get ourselves onto." We didn't rush through dinner, but we were giddy about trying this when we got back. And it worked! In hindsight, it was an obvious solution and we plowed through the rest of that magnificent game, but sharing that frustration and moment of discovery with one of my dearest friends, after not seeing each other for so long, and knowing it'd be another long stretch of not being on the same continent when that weekend up was up...it's my fondest gaming memory by far I'd love to relive that day.

The last few hours of Mass Effect 1.

In my heart Quake 2 at 640x480 resolution (3D-accelerated) is the most beautiful game ever made. The whole 3D-acceleration revolution was absolutely wild to see when we had been used to games looking like vomit, and suddenly games had clear, sharp edges.

@atheistpreacher: imagine your little kid brain blown if you time traveled and gave them VR resident evil 4 which exists...even telling them VR will be real and many wont care would blow my mind as a kid playing a Gameboy. lol funny that many first wow moments dont include new games, like vr, maybe we have become jaded to tech as a society. I know smartphones seemed as a kid like magic i'd never get, now babies have them, lol.

@lapsariangiraff:I think the ability not to overthink and see the seams is what made RPG's so good as a kid. This wide world of discovery. The newer games are a bit too big so it wouldnt have worked thou. The way its not all handcrafted these days. I still think the reason the crew hated shenmue besides it just not being the type of game they thought...the wonder and awe of a kid and thinking WOW this is real life in a game for once...after playing platformers and jrpgs with magic and saving the world to get that open world fix.

My killing being observed by forces unknown.

The entire day of Final Fantasy VII's release in September 97.. It was my freshman year of high school and I felt embarrassed to still be picked up by my mom since I went to a small private school and a lot of underclassmen without Driver Licenses caught rides with upperclassmen. I had been poring over EGM's spread of the game for a year and a half, and had it preordered for roughly the same amount of time.

I had carefully instructed my mom who was a homemaker at the time about how to pick up the preorder for the game. When I got in the car, I asked her where it was, and she did some fake story about how they didn't have it, then after 15 seconds brought it out of the glove compartment of our very 90s minivan.

I proceeded to play it as soon as I got home with only tiny breaks for homework and to pretend to go to bed. I stayed up til 2 or 3 am and got out of Midgar, about 6-7 hours of playtime on the in game clock.. I am pretty sure it was the latest I had stayed up at that point not counting weekend sleepovers and youth group lock ins up until that point.

Edit: Looking back I think I would have preferred FF6. The problem was that it was my first real true JRPG and I was in middle school and it was really hard to wrap my head around. I didn't own it but borrowed it from a friend. Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG were my SNES JRPG training wheels that then allowed FF7 to just friggin' shine as a young high schooler at the time.

Playing the N64 AKI wrestling games with my friends.

Ridiculously long and self indulgent anecdote incoming.

The day Skyrim came out sticks in my memory as one of the better days of my life. It came out toward the end of the first semester of my senior year in high school. I had already gotten into the college of my choice, so the pressure of grades was nonexistent. I had yet to have nasty falling outs with my high school friends. I was still happily ignorant about how the world and politics worked. I hadn't yet been hit by the gaggle of mental illnesses that have been a constant companion through my 20s. It was the most serene and blissful headspace I can imagine.

The game released on Veteran's Day, so I had the day off school. I'd spent the night at a friend's house and we got up at the crack of dawn to drive over to the local KMart to get our copies. It had snowed the night before and I lived in a very mountainous area, so everything already kind of looked like Skyrim. I got my copy and headed home, where I proceeded to spend the entire day playing it in my bedroom, absent a break around noon to walk into town and get a (in memory, extremely delicious) sub sandwich, and a family dinner where we cooked hot dogs in our fireplace. I played until I physically couldn't keep my eyes open any longer, and I went to bed with the snow falling once more.

Oblivion had been, and still is, my favorite game. As a result, I have never before nor will I ever again be as hyped for a game as I was for Skyrim. All-but-uniquely in my history of Getting Hyped For Games, it actually met my ridiculous expectations, a huge world of endless emergence and sandbox roleplaying. Moments from that first day are still burned into my memory. Walking out of Helgen and seeing the expanse of pine forest sprawled out before me. Immediately running off the beaten path and finding a half-sunken fortress infested with necromancers. Cackling while I threw every physics object I could find on the floor of that first shop where you get the quest for the Golden Claw. Killing a dragon and yelling "Fus!" for the first time. Climbing High Hrothgar and fighting that stupid-ass ice troll. Almost dying chasing a cabbage that rolled down a hill.

In the decade since release, Skyrim has become what it is -- one of the biggest and best known games in the world, a creaky dinosaur with a million SKUs and rereleases, a hive of stale memes, and a target of not-necessarily-undeserved mockery for how much Bethesda still uses it as a crutch. But on that first day, playing it with none of that yet-to-come baggage or cultural cruft attached, where "See that mountain? You can go there!" was still a promise and not a threat, it was nothing short of magical.

Sure, there will be more Elder Scrolls games, and I'll likely enjoy them, perhaps even love them. But open worlds have been done to death over the past 10 years and it's hard to imagine something truly mindblowing coming out of that template ever again. More than just the game itself was the whole vibe into which it released for me, that cocktail of no responsibilities and looking toward a future I thought was full of hope and promise. Sitting in my bedroom, full of hotdogs and murdering draugr while a snowstorm raged outside, not a thing to worry about in the world...that's a feeling that will never exist again. Man, I miss it.

There are so many memories. But, the feel good one I remember because it was just perfect was getting Tomb Raider for my PSX on Christmas. I had has my PSX for about a year and I had been watching teh development of Tomb Raider with some interest. So ist was slos a game where I saw the development of the game in magazines - so an anticipated game too. Moreover, it was the first gift in years where I asked for something. I played Tomb Raider most of the day and afternoon of Christmas day.

Something magical about that excitement for a game without all the negativity, reviews stating all the bad parts, forums talking about how it didn't live up to expectations. The feeling like, wow that game looks sick in that magazine I looked at while mom'z brought groceries. Wow, it got a good score on game magazine. 30 bucks saved up from finding quarters on the ground for a month. Asking your parents to drive you, picking it up, reading the manual on the drive home front to back. Looking at the artwork. Popping in the disc, and playing a decent game you enjoyed and didn't know would be something you'd look on fondly for years. Something like the first crash bandicoot 2 you played or FF9 and how amazing it was etc. Nowadays I can look online and get bumbbed out by how many articles state your favorite nostalgic game is flawed here's why...

Naw just a nice weekend no worries or FOMO on weekend parties, just you and a favorite game. Not 100s of free games on game pass that you only play a bit of cause decision paralysis...but just good gaming time, not to say now isn't good, it's great, just being nostalgic.

Playing Resident Evil 2 in my mates basement. It was surely something.

There are many examples, but one recent one is me being one of the lucky ones able to get a PS5 during launch weekend, and then discovering after it got delivered how better games played on it compared to my basic PS4 which I rocked during the whole generation never getting the PS4 pro. I replayed a lot of PS4 games with a new found enjoyment, one of the biggest examples being Day's Gone, which now ran at a smooth 60fps because of the unlock framerate, revealing that it's actually a really good game held down by performance issues on the older console. What made securing the PS5 so thrilling was that when I was trying to order it like millions of other people during that November launch weekend, it seemed like my order didn't go through, because the PS Direct site crashed, only to find out sometime later that it did. I was quite shocked.

Something more recent, playing BotW blind for the first time knowing nothing about it. After Skyward Sword I was pretty much done with Zelda and its old, tired formula, that game was the straw that broke the camels back for me.

It had been snowing for about a week straight up here in Canada, and I was cozied up by the fire, and didn't have anything in particular to play. I decided to give Zelda one more shot and bought BotW on the Wii U e-shop.

Queue what ended up being maybe the most magical, child-like wonder I've experienced playing a game since god knows when. Maybe WoW back in 05' when the game was still a mystery comes close, but the sense of wanderlust and mystery of traveling through a post-apocalyptic Hyrule and not knowing anything about any of it, while cozied up by the fire and occasionally watching the snow when I could manage to pry my eyes from the TV, was something I'll never forget. I could barely even sleep after being up 20ish hours, unable to stop playing. I can't tell you another game before or since that has had that effect on me; to make me feel like I was 10 years old again.

There are other personal reasons why that time in my life almost 5 years ago is a warm memory to me, and BotW was a wonderful accompaniment to that. I know people have their issues with it not having traditional dungeons and other misgivings, but for me I consider the greatest game ever made, and one of those bittersweet facts of life that you cannot experience something for the first time again. Cannot put that genie back in the bottle once it's out.

Maybe they'll create the Men in Black memory wipe pen one day and we can all experience our favourite media for the first time again.

For me, in the Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport series where I claim the virtual prize cars.