Batman (NES)… I recall there was precisely one place in the whole game where you had to press the “down” button, and it hit me like a dead-end. More impactful than super-metroid’s noob-bridge, as i had advance warning for that one.
She IS still alive.
More than anything that particular part still sits with me. The chapter title appearing, the voice lines from Wheatley and GladOS, and the achievement pop up. All perfectly timed.
The cherry on top is that, once you leave the area, if you double back Wheatley comments that he didn’t think you would and he kindly asks you to jump into a bottomless pit. Upon doing so, he reacts with pleasant surprise.
“The part where he kills you” was funny with the 1-2 punch with the dialog followed by the chapter name text, but what really made the moment shine for me was the first-playthrough-only achievement popup on Xbox with the same text coming in to finish the joke.
It’s one of like 2 great jokes I remember through achievements. The other was a 4th wall joke from “High on Life” where a boss taunts you by giving you an achievement for “Spending 15 hours in the Alien Strip Club” and explains that it’s permanent and all your friends can see it now.
This was a triumph.
I don’t mean to set the bar too high, but god damn, Chrono Trigger was the absolute goat
I miss the Squaresoft / Square Enix we had in the SNES to PS2 era. Almost every game they put out during that period was an absolute banger.
Plenty of memorable scenes in this thread, but I will never forget the utter shock, horror and sadness I felt after this moment. One of very few times I’ve cried from a video game.
How dare you .
This is the one.
I don’t know if this counts as a “scene” but the installer for Red Alert 2.
This was my first time experiencing a game installation experience like this and also probably my last time.
Launching the installer for Red Alert 2 and getting greeted with voice acting, game art and hype music was just so unexpected for me back then and really hyped me up.
It’s such a crazy experience, but it’s the type of experience that will likely never come back.
“Warning, Military Software Detected. Top secret clearance required”.
I loved hearing that every time
“Hell March”, right? Loved it.
I would have wanted her to be… curious. And willful, unstoppable even… but with enough compassion to… heal the world… just a little bit.
This was an incredible scene for me too.
The in game memorial for Lance Reddick also hit me pretty hard.
For Mr Reddick, I shed a tear or two. What an astonishing actor and his performance in games too. Man, when I recognized him on Lost. But…
I WEPT LIKE A CHILD at this last scene 😭
Adagio for Strings plays
“Kharak is burning.”
“It’s gone. It’s all gone.”
Man, I tried to get into the remastered version, but… it just wasn’t interesting. I guess the pixels were cute or something.
To be fair, the music is doing most of the heavy lifting here.
The voice acting was phenomenal too. Like hearing the calm pilot crack on announcing they can’t go home again. It was heartbreaking to hear.
Going blind into the game I did NOT expect that!
The animation is crazy visceral. I had nightmares for days.
Tomb Raider (2013)
Played that series last year, (recommend them, fun games.) there were a few “Jesus fucking christ” death animations for sure.
There’s a clip of Conan O’Brien playing this, and you can tell he’s definitely not a gamer, and he’s so shocked by a death animation. I don’t really understand their place in the game, they are so disproportionately violent compared to everything else, and it’s random.
There is a novel called Blood Meridian that has a lot of incredibly violent scenes to the point many consider it unfilmable, but that violence is depicted as an almost detached spectacle, the prose is externalised and the scenes are never lingered on for pleasure. It’s generally considered perhaps the most violent classic novel, but the entire metaphysics and purpose of the book exists in this violence.
When I first played tomb raider, I didn’t notice half the violent scenes, because the medium is so unnecessarily stuffed with it. It wasn’t until replaying it after seeing the Conan O’Brien interview that I really honed in on it.
In comparison to Blood Meridian, it’s so much worse. It doesn’t really have a message or a story purpose beyond showing the setting as dangerous, and it lingers on the violence, taking pleasure in the sudden violence, that has befallen our protagonist who we deeply care about and can internalise her suffering easily. We see a young woman, who we live through and care for deeply, come to a brutal, sickening end due to sheer bad luck, and then we hit restart.
I’m not even really mad about it, like it said, I’m so desensitised to video game violence that I only noticed the brutality of these scenes after seeing Conan. Perhaps the creep of violence in the medium alongside the fact that in 10 seconds, she’s fine and you do it again is enough to justify it, but it’s weird that it exists so normally in the first place.
Bleghh
That moment when all the visual story telling snaps into place and you realize what is about to happen to the Sunbeam.What game is this?
Subnautica
I just played Subnautica for the first time a couple weeks ago! This was indeed pretty awesome. When the countdown got close, I still sailed down there to watch…
One of my favorite games ever has to be Outer Wilds, and truth be told, of all the games I’ve played recently, this one came closest to giving me those outer wild vibes.
Here I am, ten years old. Just got home school. Figured I’d get some prince of Persia in before my parents get home. I just got a soundblaster 2.0 and I’ve got BIG speakers, enjoying the amazing sounds at high volume. I’m puzzling, exploring, getting used to there being piles of bones here and there. I’m backtracking through level 3 and this skeleton fucking rises and draws its sword with an eery sound. I’m shitting my pants here and reactively press the reset button on the computer to get out of this.
Loved this game. It inspired the Tomb Raider series quite a bit. Including the Mirror Prince /Atlantean Lara part.
First time realizing you have to wait for the rat to come help you was mind blowing.
I remember thinking that video games will never be more realistic.
I mean the movements were hella realistic for their time, because of the rotoscoping they used.
Never felt so bad about beating a boss.
SLAG?? REE-EEEEALLY???
You slag!
The opening of the mission “party time” in saints row 3. Screenshot wouldn’t do it justice. Starts as a wide shot over the shoulder of your protagonist looking out of a helicopter. Power by Kanye West starts as you jump out of the copter and parachute onto a huge penthouse full of enemies. Song continues to blast as you clear it out. Great mission and the best pairing of contemporary music with a game I know of.
Well, i was unable to find the actual screenshot i wanted, but it is the end of the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy game, but I could never actually beat it. Every time i enabled the improbability drive, i turned into the sperm whale instead of the missiles.
I played the game so many times start to finish, but never could completed it. I had a print out of the guide on the green and white dot matrix paper. I followed it exactly multiple times.
So instead, here is a screenshot near the start of the game.
You didn’t say it had to be a pleasant memory…
Oh fuck! If only you had a picture of the damn bombs.
Have to get there without getting insta-killed first…
This is the one NES game I haven’t replayed as an adult. That god damned seaweed… The whole thing is a slog.
You’re a slog /s
My first choice was already posted, so here is another moment I’ll never forget
That and ending the Quarian/Geth war.
