Great moments in gaming

And there was extra. Physics puzzles started out offering themselves, solvable using the gravity gun. We should weigh down one end of a board and turn it into a ramp. We ought to knock wrecked vehicles out of the way.

We may want to clear barricades from the long way facet of a door, letting us get admission to new regions. We ought to even yank ammo and fitness kits right into our palms from across the room.

With every bankruptcy, the gravity gun felt increasingly useful. It changed into a weapon too, a deadly one, and often served as safety from other weapons. We should yank a steel radiator off a wall and use it as a cowl from gunfire, then fling it into the soldier firing at us.

When a grenade landed at our ft, we ought to scoop it up and launch at whoever threw it or drop our own grenade, then fling it, turning the gravity gun right into a cannon. An orb fired from a Combine pulse rifle could be snatched from the air and spit again, disintegrating a handful of infantrymen—and yet again teaching us any other use for the destiny, in solving orb-based puzzles. It turned into a device, an outstanding weapon, and a protective guard, and via the quit of the sport, it felt like Valve had given it as many uses in Half-Life 2 as changed into humanly feasible.

Then they gave it any other use. They became it from orange to blue. These gaming keyboards are just used for the sake of gaming, which could be very small and mild in weight. However, there are infinite gaming peripherals of keyboards, but Logitech G Pro Keyboard is a great gaming gadget. But Snake makes it through, and falls to the floor vomiting as he exits the hallway.

We know how you feel, Snake. In long-running series in particular, the judicious re-use of a setting from a previous installment can instantly trigger an incredible form of nostalgia. I know this place! As before, a massive Whomp King lorded over the area — though the fight against him was even more epic the second time around!

What further callbacks to his previous quests can we expect Mario to come across in the future? The Galaxy games themselves would certainly be worthy of such a nostalgic nod. Put down your peanut butter and jelly. Drop your ham and cheese in the garbage.

Those old sandwiches are played out. The Sinner Sandwich is what you need. The game is certifiably creepy and darkly comedic as you encounter the strange residents of the town. But perhaps the strangest part happens when you and a local deputy sit down for lunch in a diner.

Just after you order your food, a man wearing a gas mask named Mr. Stewart enters and has his assistant order his favorite sandwich. The sandwich in question consists of bread, turkey, strawberry jam, and cereal. Not so, says Mr. Stewart, who insists Morgan try it.

Morgan does, and you know what? He loves it. He even changes his order to a Sinner Sandwich. No games do spectacle on a grand scale like the God of War series.

The first two installments brought the myths of ancient Greece to life in a way that seemed hard to top. But when God of War 3 came out on PS3, it did exactly that. The whole first level is a marvel of design, as Kratos hitches a ride on the titan Gaia as she ascends the towering Mount Olympus.

In a watery surge, Poseidon himself emerges from the water and soars up the mountain to where you cling to Gaia. Not only is Poseidon an astonishingly colossal presence, but he also comes riding on an entire herd of Leviathans.

This multi-part battle rages a mile up Mount Olympus as you and Gaia work together to stop him. By the time Nintendo fully took the leap into 3D gaming with the release of the Nintendo 64 in , The Empire Strikes Back was over 16 years old — already old enough to drive! Shadows of the Empire was the first game to get it right, doing so as one of the earliest third-party adventures released for the Nintendo In that moment it feels like you're being acknowledged directly as the one reliving the memories of Ezio — and the fact that a ghostly hologram knew that this would one day happened blew our minds.

We were also left feeling bad for Ezio, who struggled to accept that his entire journey culminated in a message for someone he would never see or meet. This moment stands as a great turning point for both the series unveiling more of its world, and for Ezio finding meaning in his own path.

The Mass Effect series is overstuffed with great companions. But Salarian scientist Mordin has always stuck out as a fan favorite with his fast-talking, rambling, pronoun-free language. He sees the world in black and whites though, and that can be difficult when trying to navigate interpersonal relationships.

Such a love for the arts suprises Shepard, and when you call Mordin on it, he professes a love for singing, especially Gilbert and Sullivan. It embodies so much of what Bioware does right: humorous moments in a dark subject matter, an added layer to a character, and just exceptional writing. The infamous ladder sequence in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater comes immediately after the fight with The End — a grueling one-on-one sniper battle that plays out like a hypnotically slow game of cat and mouse in the dense green jungle of the Russian wilderness.

Unlike most action-oriented games, there are plenty of moments to sit and reflect on your deeds in the stealth-based Metal Gear series. The fight with The End is one of them. A later battle, against the ghostly Sorrow, is another. But that ladder sequence is perhaps one of the most graceful and visually striking of all. As you approach the ladder, you have no way of knowing how high it is. But once you start your ascent, something starts to feel off.

The ladder keeps going. And going. Then a haunting, vocals-only version of the theme song starts playing. The sheer scale of his undertaking? His inability to have perspective on his own journey? Is it simply a moody interlude after an intense fight? An elaborate snakes and ladders joke? Persona 4 is all about the bonds you make with friends and classmates in the town of Inaba. But none of the bonds you form are quite as special as your relationship with your surrogate younger sister Nanako, and no moment in the game hits quite as hard as her eventual kidnapping.

Persona 4 is a murder mystery that sees lots of victims taken into the Midnight Channel, but the shock at sweet little Nanako disappearing from your doorstep and showing up on the TV is genuinely upsetting in a way few of the other victims even come close to. In the aftermath of Heaven, losing Nanako even temporarily is the final step that bonds the investigation team and pushes Persona 4 toward its endgame, and checking in on Nanako in the hospital becomes the emotional center of the later parts of the game.

On the surface, Frog Fractions is about as unassuming as video games come. It looks for all the world like an educational game made for school-age kids. You play as a frog sitting on a lily pad.

Collecting fruit lets you purchase upgrades that make your frog even more of a bug-eating powerhouse. Silly game, right? Who cares? When you upgrade your lily pad to a turtle, you can move around the screen.

If you move to the bottom of the screen, you go underwater, where you find a huge piles of dropped fruit. With that much currency, you can upgrade your turtle to a dragon and fly through an asteroid field to a bug planet, where… well, you should probably just see for yourself. Portal 2 is a game full of incredible moments, but none of them payoff quite as spectacularly as the last portal Chell ever has to fire.

So when the roof peels away and the moon is in clear view, white and shimmering, you just fire. Everyone fires. Everyone knows to fire, despite the game doing nothing explicit that tells them to do so.

But compared to the hydra battle in God of War, those enemies feel stiff and rigid. As God of War begins, you take control of Kratos as he makes his way from one end of a ship to the other while sailing through a raging storm.

You get a feel for the fluid combat as you swing your chain-attached Blades of Athena at all manner of mythical monsters. But none of that prepares you for what waits at the bow of the ship. To say the hydra is a towering enemy is an understatement. This dragon-like boss is the size of a skyscraper, but still remarkably nimble.

When an unfortunate shipmate makes a run for it, a second hydra head erupts through the deck of the ship and gobbles him up. Finally a third head springs into view, and the fight begins. Enemies in God of War have gotten even bigger in subsequent games, but the hydra boss was our first glimpse at the epic scope this series had set for itself — and we were mightily impressed.

Killing off the main character is such a rare thing in general, but killing off the main character before the final act of the story? Crono sacrifices himself in the battle against Lavos, and from there the remaining party members can either continue on without him, or go through a lengthy quest to bring him back to life. She takes charge of the baby, transporting it to a research facility and trusting in the team of scientists there to keep it safe.

They lose their lives in an attack by Ridley and his Space Pirates, and though Samus makes it back to the facility before that vile alien dragon completes his theft, he nevertheless manages to flee back to Planet Zebes. Because her heart kept her from following through and finishing that mission, her life was saved at the end of her next. What makes finding Eventide Island such a great moment in an already incredible game is just how unexpected it is.

Breath of the Wild does everything it can to encourage freedom — going anywhere, doing anything, and getting stronger along the way. For lack of a better way to say it, Eventide Island is a permadeath, survival game within Breath of the Wild. All this makes it a wonderfully surprising moment of discovery in a game with no shortage of them. In fact, with the grudging help of your new robotic friend Wheatley, you bring her back online.

An elevator lifts you and your talkative pal out of a massive breaker room, flipping switches as it goes. You emerge in an overgrown area strewn with broken electronics that begin to self-assemble into GLaDOS herself. You monster. Lots of video game villains want to destroy the world. The hero, controlled by the player, always swoops in, defeats the enemy, and saves the day. Sure, the villainous Kefka had big evil plans, but we had it under control.

On our side were heroes like Celes and Terra, Edgar and Sabin. We got this, right? Apocalyptic music plays as mountains rise, fires rage, the earth shatters, and explosions ravage the planet. The planet is ruptured in such a way that no team of heroes could ever reverse it. Even though the game uses cutesy art, this scene remains fully effective. Sora spends the entirety of the original Kingdom Hearts battling Heartless in his effort to find and save his friend Kairi.

But upon learning that the unconscious Kairi's heart lies within him, Sora has to sacrifice himself to free her heart — and restore the keyhole to Hollow Bastion. But in doing so, he becomes the very thing he's been fighting all this time — a puny Shadow Heartless. The late-game twist is a shock in itself, and a wonderful reversal of the satisfying combat players become so accustomed to.

But what really sells the moment is the defenseless Sora-Heartless having to scramble through Hollow Bastion to find his friends. And in a moving moment that encapsulates the series' themes of friendship and its power, Kairi instantly recognizes Sora-Heartless as he jumps in to defend the group. Friends truly were his power.

And while we didn't know this at the time, this moment becomes the crux of Kingdom Hearts 2, as Sora's transformation into a Heartless also creates his Nobody, Roxas. Everyone knows Halo is the story of Master Chief.

But in Halo 2, chapter six is not like the chapters that came before it. Thanks to some precise shooting, the mission turns out not to be a fatal sentence for the Arbiter after all.

But this chapter is important for Halo as a series. The very act of including a second playable character in Halo 2 enlarged the scope of an already epic-sized story. It also gave us a look into the inner workings of a previously inscrutable alien race. The low-poly count may look unappealing today, sure, but back in it was pure magic. But in full 3D? Actually soaring up and down and left and right, gazing down to see the abyss below?

Entering a level in that way added just an extra bit of surprise and whimsy to a game already overflowing with each. Red Dead Redemption is a game filled with moments that make you feel incredibly small in an impossibly-large world. Quietly riding across the American south, spilling blood across the prairies, and soaking in the views bring forth those feelings that Sergio Leone and John Ford emblazoned on the big screen in the past. A point-and-click adventure that was as much a hour-long playable comedy sketch as it was a video game, The Secret of Monkey Island was infused with hilarity in every scene and interaction.

Insults flew as the swords clashed, and players had to scroll through a list of possible comebacks in order to determine which line was the most appropriate and funny counter for the put-down just hurled their way. In December of , Capcom brought their inventive platforming adventure Bionic Commando to America. In that game, hero Rad Spencer uses his futuristic grappling arm to wage war against an army of Nazis, ultimately leading up to a final confrontation with Adolf Hitler himself — whose head explodes in as much bloody gore as the 8-bit NES could muster.

Just a few years later, the company that would go on to bring us the Doom and Quake series first cut their teeth on 3D, first-person shooting with Wolfenstein 3D, an over-the-top firefight of fury starring hero B. Blazkowicz mowing down Nazis left and right during his escape from a German prison. Well, OK, not entirely himself — he was instead made into an appropriately intimidating final foe by being rendered as a mutant cyborg named Mecha-Hitler, complete with four massive Chain Guns in the place of his arms.

Despite the increased firepower, though, he dies with just as much gratuitous gore as before. Miranda Lawson opens Mass Effect 2 with boundless praise for Shepard's feats. On what should have been a simple mission with your loyal companions, Mass Effect 2 sends Shepard's closest thing to home and companions into a nightmare when they're attacked by the then unknown Collectors.

Understandably, Shepard goes down with the burning ship when trying to get everyone safely off-board. Coming off the heels of a triumphant adventure in Mass Effect, it's difficult walking through the destroyed sections of the Normandy. Shepard gets Joker to an escape pod, but runs out of time to save themself.

Of course it is only the beginning of Mass Effect 2, so you know everything turns out alright for Shepard. Still, seeing Shepard tumble through space while slowly suffocating is as shocking as it is sad. Chapter Stowaway starts off as a simple fistfight in front of an open door of a cargo plane. But then quick-thinking Nathan Drake decides to deal with the bad guy by pulling the parachute off a cargo container. The problem is that this is tied to all of the other cargo, which then begins to fall out of the plane and take him with it.

The resulting battle takes the netting fight from The Living Daylights and pushes it to The entire scene is very scripted but still offers players quicktime moments and a challenging firefight to give them more agency than a Hollywood movie. And Drake, as ever, survives something no stuntman would ever endure. A Link to the Past started a trend that many Zelda games would follow: Complete an introductory series of quests to find the Master Sword, and pave the way for a plot-twist that would expand the scope of the adventure.

And then with the spin of the Master Sword, the Dark World theme begins. To this day, the Dark World theme remains one of my favorite compositions, due to this moment alone. After exploring so much of Hyrule in the Light World, it was exciting to find a new land to explore. The city of Kvatch had already burned to the ground. The entirety of Tamriel was counting on you to fight back against the invasion of hell itself!

But how could you focus on any of that when lush green hills, and a world of unlimited possibilities beckoned your fresh tracks? Shigeru Miyamoto once said that his inspiration for The Legend of Zelda came from exploring caves when he was young.

A smile at the thought of coming full-circle—this big, bright, beautiful world of Cyrodiil was just waiting for the next generation of budding game designers to do their own spelunking. Bats and rats. Crocodiles, wolves and gorillas. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Well, OK, there are no tigers. There are panthers, though. But even after things turn supernatural and foes like demons and mummies appear to oppose Lara in her exploration, little prepares you for the moment when a towering Tyrannosaurus lumbers out from behind a corner and begins to chase Lara down.

At this early point in console gaming history, the Tomb Raider 1 T-Rex was the most intimidating foe yet encountered in any 3D adventure — and its appearance was especially timely given the massive box office success of Jurassic Park just three years earlier. Truly impressive gaming accomplishments abound today, as gamers have had decades to invent, practice and perfect such wildly difficult challenges as finishing the entirety of Ocarina of Time while blindfolded.

In the NES era 30 years ago, though, no feat of achievement was more worthy of acknowledgement and praise than taking down Mike Tyson in the game that bore his name. If you were serious about taking away his championship belt, you had to bury your pride, dig in and practice, practice, practice.

Memorize the timing. Perfect each and every move. Any single punch from Iron Mike would send Little Mac to the ground, so your dodges had to be spot-on accurate. And if you did it? If you actually invested the time it took to master this bout? If you were one of the few to honestly, legitimately earn a viewing of the Punch-Out!! You became the stuff of playground legend. Protagonist prince Arthas of Lordaeron showed a willingness to slaughter innocents to stop the threat of the scourge, eventually alienating longtime friend Jaina Proudmoore.

The fall of a hero into villainy is a trope that Blizzard utilized more than once in their games, but Arthas is perhaps the least redeemable of these characters. Not only does he slaughter his father, but later series regular Uther.

These dark moments encapsulate the new direction Blizzard was taking the series — no character was safe, no cow was too sacred. The undead scourge would be a formidable new enemy and Azeroth would never be the same. It was a bold move by Capcom to throw in such a tough enemy in the opening hour of the game, but the gamble paid off, as his appearance immediately set the tone for Resident Evil 4 and forced players to adapt to its new gameplay style right away.

Half-Life starts out like a normal day at work and ends with you floating around an alternate dimension, closing a dimensional rift, and being frozen in time on a space train. The initial chaos of the resonance cascade sends the top-secret research facility of Black Mesa into a frenzy — headcrabs flying every which way, zombie scientists lumbering around every corner, and increasingly bizarre alien foes to contend with.

But after a few bloody chapters, you learn that government officials have finally arrived. After navigating several rooms full of suspicious sentry guns, you eventually encounter a shocking scene: a marine gunning down a fellow scientist who thought the soldier was part of the rescue team. The realization hits you then, but really begins to sink in once you enter a nearby lift and the music starts up — there is no rescue team.

The marines are here to contain the situation, which means killing aliens and human witnesses alike. It comes at you as a giant ghostly hand, which sears a burning purple void into the air as it reaches into your reality to crush you. Not because of its signifigance to the narrative, not because of its unconventional use of the game's mechanics, and not because you suddenly find yourself participating in an opera.

What's impressive about the opera scene is how much Squaresoft manage to make the player actually feel. Love, loss and song all compressed into a bit cartridge and relayed through your TV's crummy speakers. And yet, somehow, those sprites bouncing around on screen, "singing" their hearts out, managed to be one of the most believable and gut-punchingly real moments the medium had yet delivered.

Then you gotta fight a purple octopus. Your told upon first arriving at the city that the unexploded bomb should be left alone and I even tried shooting at it to see what would happen — oops. I admit, it was a tough decision to make for me — I liked Megaton, but it was a dump compared to getting my own luxury suite at Tenpenny Tower. I even felt enough remorse to return to the smoking crater that was Megaton, just to see firsthand the damage I had caused.

I went beyond morality — I had erased dozens of characters from existence; their quests, stores, and homes. It hits harder considering Megaton is often the first place you find after leaving Vault , and it takes a certain kind of evil to repay that hospitality with an unwarranted nuclear blast.

Just the sight of it alone is reason enough to ensure you have plenty of time left on the final day to warp back in time, otherwise you'd risk encountering the game over sequence where the moon crashes into the world, and a giant blast engulfs Link and everything in its path.

What is the deal with this moon? Did it always have that creepy face? This mystery comes to a major point when you finally fight Skull Kid for the last time, and the mask itself retreats into the moon — beckoning you to follow. It's hard to know what to expect, but none of us were prepared to enter a large sunny field with a giant tree in the center.

The inside of the moon, and the spooky masked children playing in the shade of the lone tree raise a lot of questions about what Majora truly is, and whether its actions are something we were ever meant to comprehend.

Secrets have been a part of the Super Mario series from the start, with Warp Zones being the earliest and most shocking ones to discover. When Super Mario Bros. Three Warp Whistles in all, actually, and gamers of the day might have happened upon any of the three as their first moment of discovery. The second Warp Whistle was a bit easier to come across, as its placement mirrored the hiding place of the first Super Mario Bros.

The third and final Whistle was buried deeper into the game, hiding behind what at first appeared to be the furthest boundary of the second overworld map. A correctly-placed Hammer bash opened up the road to it, though! Once any of the three were claimed, a toot on the horn summoned a whirlwind to whisk Mario away to an isolated island full of world-skipping Warp Pipes.

And if you had two Whistles in your inventory before tooting on the first? You could toot yourself directly to World 8 and its final gauntlet of challenges leading up to Bowser. Video games can make players feel frustrated, triumphant, intrigued, and even astonished. You play as Lee, a man who becomes something of a father figure to Clementine, a young girl he finds stranded alone in the walker apocalypse. They go through many adventures over the course of five episodes, culminating with the two of them sitting in a room, with Lee on the verge of turning into a walker himself.

You can choose to have Clem turn away, leaving him handcuffed to the wall to become a zombie. Or you can have her shoot him, freeing him from the horror of turning, but traumatizing her in the process. Either way you go, the two must say goodbye. So much of the appeal of EarthBound is its heart.

While EarthBound is a great game long before the finale, looking back on everyone is when it stands out for the truly special, unique experience it is. You could spend a lot of time trying to figure out what Inside is about, and it would still make no sense. Without any dialogue, the goals of your adventure constantly change with each new encounter.

Are you a boy just trying to avoid capture by mysterious people? No, you're on a mission into the heart of a city of mind-controlled slaves, but are you meant to free them? No, you're meant for something greater, something lying at the heart of everything going on in this twisted world. And then you see the blob. It was amazing to think that objectives can be conferred not just because you can only move on a 2D plane always going forward, but because you know just by looking that this was what you were meant to do from the moment you were first put in control of the main character.

And then it got stranger — you stopped being the boy, and became something else. But maybe you never stopped being the main character. Maybe the protagonist of this adventure has been working through you this entire time — it is a game about mind-control, after all. Pyramid Head is undeniably one of the most iconic horror game monsters of all time, despite its mere handful of appearances throughout the Silent Hill series, but not without good reason.

Learning the upsetting truth about James during his journey through Silent Hill also casts light on the true nature of Pyramid Head itself, making its official introduction even more disturbing. After catching a glimpse of the red triangle-headed entity behind a barred-off hallway, James later walks right into a room where the creature is assaulting two headless mannequins.

It isn't until the end of the game that we realize the scene served as a mirror of James' own inner violence, and dark foreshadowing for the reveal to come. Pyramid Head has since had a number of weak cameos outside Silent Hill 2, but it's hard to deny what an impact that first introduction had on both fans and horror games alike.

I want people to be able to get to work easily, not only because it increases my resource gain efficiency but also because I don't want anyone to have to walk too far or they might get sore feet. Arranging everything on as neat a grid as possible, with some wider boulevards and preserved green spaces, make it easier to get around and increases the aesthetic appeal of the various neighborhoods.

And it just makes sense to have the blacksmith close to the barracks. If someone breaks a sword during training, they can take a quick jaunt across the street to grab a replacement! None of this has any effect on the game mechanics, of course. If you boil all of these townsfolk down to their sterile, code-driven essence, they're just automatons with no feelings who will do exactly as I say without complaint, even if that means being eaten by wolves or carrying bundles of wood several miles on foot.

But where's the fun in that? All the effort that has gone into the art and sound to make an Age of Empires map feel like a developing civilization goes to waste if you don't treat it like a real place full of real people with real needs.