Original elite for the Amiga..

I heared about patholigic before. Something about how your choices matter and change the story or something along those lines. Cant really remember.

Since you mentioned KS, how was Kanon ? Depressing I hope.

Bleh, what a boring thread. Just state a game I loved to play?
No thanks.

I'll explain one of the best moments I've had in gaming (it's not "the" best but certainly in the top 50).
I played Counter-Strike Source and I was checking out servers with custom maps to them.
Then I joined in one server, it was dark, gloomy, a graveyard setting, and I saw a SWAT guy run past me and I shot him.
Well, the entire server lost their [censored] and told me to cut it the [censored] out.
Confused, I started looking around for stuff when I found this catatomb.
It was really... Really dark.. But I descended, only to have 5 zombies rush towards me and tear me apart.
The music was overwhelming as were the sound effects and zombie groans and moans.
I screamed in terror and when I was finally dead I sat there. Shocked.

And... Well.. It was freaking AWESOME!!!
Best zombie mod/game ever!
It was SOO much fun to play through.

Both teams start at two random locations then one player is singled out to start as a main zombie with 5000 health.
That zombie needs to hit you "once" and you become a zombie as well.
Now the zombies need to use tactics to get close to the humans and the humans need to run for their lifes.

Definitely one of the greatest moments I've had.
It's rare for me to get that scared in a video game, especially one as ugly as Counter-Strike.
So that moment was fantastic for me.

I agree with morrowind.. I'd never played a game like that before at the time. Oh the memories

Honorable mentions:

Diablo I & II
Zelda OoT

Edit: also Conkers Bad Fur Day.. Total hilarity (for a 13 year old)

Never tried the Kanon VN, the Anime was brilliant though, it does have really sad moments but overall it goes into the heartwarming category, just expect to bawwwwwl a bit on the way

Another moment that stands out for me was the first time I played Quake 2 and saw this new, dark, oppressive but amazing world and rampaged through it...and that music Still regularly replay Quake 2. Unreal and Forsaken had similar effects on me.

Ah. Well I will just wait until I get the VN then, the sad parts can hit harder, when your choices caused them.

Sadness or happiness, dosent bother me. Aslong as it makes me feel something I dont care. Though its great to be cheered up after you feel bad. Makes the good part even better.


Also while I didnt feel anything. Fallout new vegas is my favorite game. My first playthrough, not knowing much was great. Only real issue was NCR bias. A legion run is pretty bad.

Super Mario Galaxy without a doubt.

No, the best game you EVER played

The first two halos are my best experiences, I remember playing the first one when I was pretty young, and I played it with my dad when he still played video games. I also played it well into 2005-2006 with my brothe all the time. My cousin had halo 2 and when I would stay over we would sneak downstairs at 1 am, and play it some more. We also made dummies in our beds incase his parents checked on us.

Best gaming experience?

Greatest experience I had was in EverQuest Online Adventures being my first MMO. It was just that first experience of discovering things, exploring, grouping, guilding, etc... that made it memorable. Absolutely loved the fact that there was no loading screens unless you used a quick travel horse. All zones were interconnected and absolutely massive which was what drew me into it. Really felt sad about leaving it, but the game just lost players and it became harder and harder to find people to group with.

Only moment that reaches that pinnacle is when I played my first FPS game being HL1. Exploring things, killing enemies and having the ability to make my own worlds was great.

stepping out of the sewer in oblivion for the first time was amazing, realizing that i could fast travel instead of hiking all over the place was a close second

also as a kid beating crash bandicoot, playing pokemon at recess, and beating spyro.

Taking down a Colossus in Shadow of the Colossus especially the last one.
Playing a full game on Rise of Nations, biding your time, building up your forces and wiping everyone out.
Grid: San Francisco: Dodge Viper SRT

World of Warcraft. Playing it with my girlfriend at the time and beating the Lich King with my guild-friends.
I still kind of miss it, but those days are gone.

Also, all of the Elder Scrolls games are my best gaming experience.

MOHAA online, back in 2002-04. Nothing else comes even remotely close for me.

Yep, Zelda & Rare FTW... Donkey Kong 64

There have been too many good memories from younger days to remember. I did not think the magic would come back but, Fallout 3 FWE + MMM etc are so good.

My girlfriend could not believe her eyes when I finished a round after 125 + hours and immediately started a new one.

Memories to remember... that's a new one.

One of my most memorable moments wasn't even with a particularly good game. One of the Ace Combats, on my PS1. The final boss was a flying aircraft carrier thing and you had to shoot out all of its engines to win. (Probably what most final bosses are in those games...)

A good half-hour battle. Out of missiles, almost dead, and my fuel runs out. As my plane is dropping out of the sky, I hold down the trigger to pepper the carrier with my machine gun.

Which lands a lucky shot, destroying the last engine, and wins me the game.

Can't remember any other part of the game (and it might not even have been an Ace Combat game.) But that moment has stuck with me still, as one of my top dramatic videogame moments.

The final case of the Phoenix Wright trilogy... an amazing experience from start to finish.

i would have to say that Bioshock blew me away because i had just beefed up my pc and it was the first time i had seen a game like that run so smoothly on max settings

Portal 1&2.
Half-Life series.
The Elder Scrolls III-V.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series.

Another big one for me was the first Knights of the Old Republic. Now, I'd been familiar with Bioware prior to that game; but this was before they were known for their (now obligatory) romance options. Or at least, I went into this game with no idea that a romantic angle was even available for any of your NPC companions.

I created a smuggler-type character, and decided to have some fun with the game. I wasn't simply making only dark-side choices, or being evil for it's own sake - but I was roleplaying a character that was looking out mostly for himself, had no qualms about his priorities in life, and wanted nothing to do with Jedis. If there was a profit to be made, that was usually the choice I would end up making. And I fought against becoming a Jedi every step of the way, testing to see just how far the game would let me go with that (though obviously I was a fore-gone conclusion at some point.)

I also got a real kick out of being pretty much a total jerk to most of my companions - most notably I always took every opportunity to butt heads with Bastilla. And there were many opportunities for that. I'd take her on missions just because I knew there was a good chance for a fight somewhere down the road.

So I found it a real shock when suddenly, nearing the end of the game, we found ourselves falling madly in love. I seriously did not see it coming. Especially not with the way I continually chose to act with her. It just about blew my mind, and totally changed the way I approached the role of my character. Bastilla reformed my selfish thief of a character, and taught him how to love. I went from maximum Dark Side points to the complete other end of the scale by the end of the game.

With everything else going on, story-wise; and the story arc that organically emerged from the choices I had made for my character - the crucial revelations about my own character's past turned this game into a very compelling story about redemption.

Knights of the Old Republic is the reason that I still have a philosophy that I still find it more important in a single-player role-playing game that the choices I am given form a reactive world that is customized to the choices I make; than simply having different choices so that various things can be different if I play it through again. I only played KOTOR the one time. What happened in that playthrough was some magical fusion of plotted story and emergent storytelling. It was a unique experience to me, and going through to make different choices was not going to give me anything approaching as compelling an experience as that first time through.

Speaking of KOTOR that reminds me of a trick you can do that gives you unlimited Dark Force points just by telling a young girl who stallaways on your ship by just telling her over and over to get off. Yeah nothing says badass Sith Lord then telling little girls to get the !@#? off your ship . Speaking of which I hated that little girl---her language annoyed me greatly but I didn't have the heart to tell her to piss off .

Hmm, I'd say going out to mow my lawn and finding a perfectly uncratched game sitting in the middle of it. Just waiting for the love it truely deserved. I wasn't very old at the time and didn't have much money, so this new game became my focus. at the time I had no idea what the title meant but the gameplay felt like a modern day THIEF game (My older brother introduced me to that franchise). So I loved every moment of the game. It still holds rank #1 in my pantheon of best games ever played by me.

Still don't know it?

One last hint...

Lets put on a trenchcoat,

and fight some conspiracies

get some experience,

and level up abilities

will you pick rifles or computers,

don't pick swimming

because its fairly useless


got it yet?
I'm of course referring to the original Deus Ex

Dying. Happens in every game without fail, without hinderence, without trying, WITHOUT BEING WANTED!!!!

Oh and finishing what ever game I'm play on the hardest difficulty - latest being MW3, veteran in 6:15hrs, and the average time was 8hours I felt proud enough to rub it in a friends nose who thought his +7hr was great.

The best gaming experience I have ever had was way back when Ultima Online was still in its early days before they made the duplicate "care bear" world of Trammel. Back in those days PvP was absolutely ruthless because when you killed another player you got to loot their corpse of almost all of their possesions. A few things were not lootable like their spell book, rune book, and maybe a few other items, however the rest was yours for the taking. The player you killed would be standing there beside his or her corpse watching you loot all their stuff and they would only be able to say things in "ghost speak" like....Oooohh...ohhoooo... etc anything they typed would appear on screen like that. Also if they had their house key on them you could use it to gate to their house and loot anything there that was not locked down.

However that had almost nothing to do with my "best gaming experience ever".

What really had me captivated was the volunteer program that Origin Systems, the original developer of UO, had in place. This volunteer program included everything from customer service to Seer's. Seer's were basically a player who took an online interview from the developer and if they passed the interview they were then given a Seer account and invited to take part in the program. This part of the program was made so that these players would develop dynamic storylines that the developer would then implement on their server. Some of the Seer storylines took the player population a year or more real time to complete. Back when they had these stories running it was not a case of if I would log in each day, I simply HAD to log in because my character was part of this amazing story and I had to be there to see what happened next.

Also each server had its own unique storylines running because it was up to the group of Seer's on each server to make up dynamic events for their server.

Good Seer's were all about letting the players dictate where the story went and very often they would have to do rewrites and submit them for approval because the players had done something they did not expect, which would change the story and cause them to have to rewrite. It was glorious and so good it was amazing to be a part of. I was eventually even offered the chance to become a Seer, however I turned it down because my character was having so much fun in the stories I did not want to take the time away from it to make my own stories on a different server, you could not be a Seer on a server that you played on.

Seer's also had some powers where they could give items special names to support their storylines, erect permanent or semi permanent gates, and some other GM like powers.

It was an absolute golden age of MMO gaming however it all ended rather abruptly when they decided to make a server specifically for their AoL customers. They decided that because they were "working" for the company that they should be on the payroll and they proceeded to launch a lawsuit that caused Origin to end the entire volunteer program. This also set a precedence in the industry so that no other developer would ever take the chance and develop a similar program for their MMO.

It was a sad day indeed when we lost all of our Seer's. I can remember a wake we held for them, and so many players showed up that night we crashed the server several times because of too many players in the same area. I had tears streaming down my cheeks because I knew then and there it was the end of something magnificent and we would never see it again....