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For Love of The Game
A feature from Gamespot this week is an interesting look at gaming moments that moved you as a player. Emotional moments for several of the editors are explored. From the article: "This isn't an article about violence in video games. It's a chance for us to consider some of the moments in our lives as game players that made us feel strongly about something that, in the grand scheme of things, is probably pretty trivial. These are cases in which games drove us to relative emotional extremes. This is both how and why we play." What would be a gaming moment that drove you to an emotional extreme?
The FMV cut scene that involved the death of Aeris. That sucked, mostly because I had invested a lot of time getting her character leveled up.
I'm very responsible, when ever something goes wrong they always say I'm responsible.
I remember when I was heavily into GTA:VC...long after I had actually completed the game, I would still start it up and tool around Vice City, looking to get into some trouble. Sniping multiple targets from the roof of a building or leading police on a mad chase with a PCJ was very relaxing and thereaputic after a hard day at the office.
After doing this for a while, I noticed certain thought patterns while out driving...like veering toward pedestrians, unconsciously judging the distance to the nearest self-serve car wash, and reflecting how easy it would be for me to just jump out of the car, run to the crotch-rocket idiling a few lanes away, giving the rider a smart rap in the face with my elbow, and jump on...the cop three cars back will never catch me...
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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One I can think of recently is the very beginning of Half Life 2. The woman waiting for her husband. In 15 seconds of interaction, you understand her entire life and feel terrible for her because you know that her husband is never going to arrive, but she'll probably wait for him until they remove her. I'm sad just thinking about it, and she's not even real.
among Chessmaster characters. Ennemies too...
/wrld
I could name several examples of memorable gaming moments back on my Commodore 64, usually involving the Ultima series. But the most memorable was hacking games with hex editors, and seeing my name "inside" the game ;-)
More recently, getting totally freaked out by the top-notch ambience in Thief: The Dark Project and its sequels.
Finally beating Mother Brain in Metroid, feeling like a god, and then realizing I have a time limit to escape before the whole place explodes, and the rush of getting out in time and winning after so many months of playing was joyous.
And to this day, Metroids scare me. Metroid Prime / Echoes, when I see a Metroid I get the heeby-jeebies/willies/shivers whatever your dialect calls it.
And I'm almost 30 years old. Sad, huh.
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I remember the first time I let that ball slip past me in Pong. I felt like I'd let the entire world down. Man, that was such a crushing defeat for me. I don't think I've experienced anything quite so humiliating since then...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
I second the Celes thing. To me, it was worse than Aeris (but then, I liked Tifa anyway. Then, for the boobs, now for the fact that she's a Betty to Aeris' Veronica).
:D
Yasunori Mitsuda's overworld music in Chrono Cross made my eyes water one late night playing it just from the sheer emotion behind the strings. As long as he's not doing battle music the man is a god.
Though another favorite is the joys of screwing around in GTA. Nothing more cathartic than throwing grenades at strangers in the subway.
But if you really want "connection" then play Xenogears... Holy ****! That was a game where you had to sort of feel sorry for Fei and Elly(main chars). Plus it has the most beautiful intricate story of all.
Granted, it may have something to do with the fact that it was 2AM and I was somewhat sleep-deprived, but when I made it back to the starting room of Ico and had to fend off all the little shadows I was...mildly annoyed.
Then I noticed that all of them had tiny horns, just like me, and I put that together with the fact that they were coming out of the caskets I had escaped, and...I didn't want to fight them any more. I wanted to put the controller down and let them take out their ghostly despair on my hide. I felt a profound sadness, pity, but to save us all I had to first beat them down.
That moment will stick with me a long time.
Co-founder of GerbilMechs
"It's a chance for us to consider some of the moments in our lives as game players that made us feel strongly about something that, in the grand scheme of things, is probably pretty trivial."
:)
:-P
For me it's an opposite experience, but still applicable to the article's request, I think
I was playing UO, which is an MMORPG, set in a 2d top-down view of the world. I was in a town called Bucaneer's Den, fighting evil players around the town, and having a good time. Sometimes it can be frustrating fighting people, though; frustration and cursing are trademarks of the town.
Anyway, I was mounted on my horse, standing by a bridge, when suddenly more than three people starting casting damage spells at me! I ran, of course - northeast, toward a cluster of buildings I thought I could hide behind.
I ran behind one of the buildings (in 2d,) and two of my pursuers gave up the chase. But one kept following me, ripping around the building's corners toward me. I ran to the other side of the building.
For *45 minutes* this guy and I dodged around the building, me staying on the far side of it away from him whenever he moved toward me. We were both really determined; he could have given up, and I could have run away, but the chase was too fun. Every few minutes he would get a crossbow shot off on me, but I'd be gone around that building's corner before it really hurt much, and healed up by the next time he could shoot.
It was so hilarious that we both spent so much time playing around that silly building, that I was giggling after 30 minutes, and at 45 minutes I said "LOL" with my character and came out in to the open. He started to kill me, then stopped before I died, and said "lol" too
We both thought it was great, funny and fun, and became friends - what an experience! What I took from it was that while I'm a hardcore gamer who takes games pretty seriously, sometimes interacting with people in a sketchy virtual world can show how trivial the whole thing is-
-Sahrs (Sonoma UO)
Scoring a winning point or TD in the last second can be quite thrilling. The other week, in FIFA 2005, winning the game with an amazing bicycle kick that I had not converted ever (which was probably 5000 matches), into the top corner was enough to make me jump out of my chair...then I realized that it was a game and no one other than me really cared :)
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
Of course, nearly every comment in this thread will be a spoiler, but:
In Thief, when your client for whom you endured legions of undead morphs into the Trickster, and snatches your eye out of your socket and leaves you to die, bleeding. I was absolutely stunned that a game could have such an unpredictable turn of events.
In System Shock 2-- the initial glimpse of a zombie chasing down a Von Braun crewmember behind the fogged, reinforced glass window. Later, cowering and sweating behind collapsed file cabinets, out of ammo with a broken gun and no other weapon-- all the while listening to them call to me "join us... join us... the Many sings to us..."
Emotional games, those.
I graduated high school in 1994. I didn't come from a wealthy family (hell, we were barely blue collar) but I got into a good college on scholarship. My inclinations were always towards math and science so I spent all of my graduation money on a Hewlett Packard 486 sx 33 Mhz (not top of the line by any means but the best that I could do with no outside help). I had just enough money to buy one game, which took forever for me to decide on. I took everything home, cleared off the dining room table and fired everything up. It was late so all of the lights were off and after what seemed to be an eternity of load time I hear John Williams triumphant score and see the words X-Wing scroll across my 14" svga monitor. One of the most satisfying moments of my young life.
"It's difficult to meditate on amphetamines." - Joe Walsh
The first moment of true drama I ever remember in a game was Rescue on Fractalus. I suppose I mean drama beyond the excitement and frustration cycle that keeps people playing any game.
Rescue on Fractalus is a 3D flight simulator, in which one lands on fractally-generated terrain to rescue downed pilots from hostile territory. They run up to your ship, knock on the door, and you open the airlock and let them in. As the levels advance, the defenses become stronger.
At a certain stage, you find that the astronauts you're rescuing start to have green skin. If you let them in, they start sabotaging your ship. because they're aliens. The ideal way to deal with them is to turn your ship's systems back on before they reach the airlock, as the shields will kill them.
If, however, you don't open the airlock for them, instead of knocking politely, they jump in front of the windshield in brilliant full-size animation, scream at you, and scare the bejeepers out of you if you're seven years old.
Or, as it turns out, fifteen years old.
..in real life. I was staying with my brother, and playing Unreal Tournament 2004 on his beefy system.
I joined an online game where we were all tiny, blasting away in a living room, and I got REALLY into it. I wasn't very good, but I DID NOT LET UP. I just kept after the guy that was doing the best,(he was unbelievably good!), getting destroyed time and time again, but I did not quit, for like four hours.
Everyone else had left the game, and in the end it was just me and him, bounding around this crazy living room, four inches tall. After a while, he started giving me tips, training me on how to kill him better. (Anticipate where he'd land, shoot the ground in that spot, etc..) Simple stuff, but I improved a lot. We had a really great time, bounding over the sofa and coffee table, firing rockets and lasers from the staircase...
Here was a guy, hundreds of miles away, at four in the morning, teaching me how to kill his tiny avatar more proficiently, for no reason other than his respect for my tenacity.
I was touched. I still think of it as one of the best experiences of my life, and man, I've had some great times in the meat world!
I think that no game, nor any character, has managed to so deeply touch me as the character of Deionarra in Planescape: Torment.
I was therefore pleased, recently, to read an article on the site Gamer's With Jobs expounding on the virtues of the same character and game.
The episode "Longing," particularly, discussed in that article, and ultimately the character herself are kept just far enough from total exposition to be maintained as a tragic mystery whose explanation will be kept eternally just out of reach.
There's nothing quite so tragic as the loss of memory. You need only ask someone who has had a very dear loved one succumb to Alzheimer's disease to know this is the truth. And though it may seem a strange connection to draw, Planescape: Torment evoked for me the very real tragic quality of memory loss better than anything else I have experienced. And so yes, I do believe that games can speak to profound realities in our every day life.
I was in high school and going through the usual geek/teen problems, stumbling home depressed at night to play Wasteland. I'll never forget the scene where, after gathering chemicals and other inventory items, you help those two guys with radiation sickness back to health (Metal Maniac and I forget the other's name).
The NPC sits up and says, "Let's go kick some ass!"
I remember thinking, "Yeah, it's about time for that, isn't it?"
That's one of those moments that really changed me: tenacity and humor after near-total defeat.
I have never been more on the edge of my seat in a game than after destroying a reactor in Descent I/II and scrambling to find the exit before it blows to kingdom come! Descent was an awesome game, well ahead of its time... ahh, the hours spent in youth!
Change your name to Homer Junior! Your friends can call you Hoju
But yeah, there are so many moments in Torment that are incredibly memorable. One of my favorites is from right when you are about to enter the Fortress of Regrets, and Morte tells you that he had been there before, and knew all along that the portal was right where you started the game:
Morte: The other YOU, he... he didn't care very much for anybody. For anyone. We could have ALL died in the Fortress, and he wouldn't have blinked. So... I just want you to hold on to your differences, because... well, I like this *you* better. A LOT better.
The Nameless One: But that's not all you want to say, is it?
Morte: No...There's one other thing - I may not have liked that *other* you very much, but he was one smart basher - the smartest basher I've ever known; he always had every angle covered. If he died at the Fortress, that means... well...
TNO: You don't think I can succeed, do you?
Morte: No...It's not that, chief. Because it's not always who's smartest, or who's the most powerful, or who's the toughest... sometimes it comes down to who you are and what you *really* want. I mean, once you wanted to become immortal - but in the end, is that *really* what you wanted? Just be sure of what you want this time, is all I'm saying.
This sig is only here so people stop skipping the last lines of my posts.
OK, I'll bite on this one. I'm going to break this down into different types of "emotional" experiences, as trying to lump them all together under one heading is perhaps unhelpful.
I'll start with the generic sadness/surprise/exultation feeling that I think, looking at the other comments here, are what most of the other readers are thinking of. These kind of emotions are generally most commonly evoked by RPGs, as these have the time to establish characters and make you care for them. However, it's not exclusive to the genre.
Final Fantasy VI: I suspect I'm fairly unusual among the people posting comments here in that this is *not* my favorite installment in the Final Fantasy series. However, it's undeniable that it has a good plot with some pretty emotional moments, particularly given the technology it had to use. For me, the most powerful moment comes in the World of Ruin, when Terra decides to fight again.
Final Fantasy VII: Ok, "that" moment in this game has been mentioned by quite a few of the people posting above this and it certainly deserves to be. Plenty of other good moments in this game, though; personally, I liked Barrett's back-story.
Final Fantasy VIII: A slightly odd inclusion here, as this game's plot is really quite weak and a lot of the moments that Square clearly intended to be emotional just fall flat (eg. the bit where the main characters regain their memories of their childhood). However, the scene where Seiffer's side-kicks basically give up following him and ask Squall to beat some sense into him struck me as pretty powerful and well-done.
Final Fantasy X: Two real scenes stand out here; Yuna's "I can fly" moment in the wedding scene and the scene where Auron confronts Yunalesca.
Final Fantasy XI: Yes, the MMORPG. The cutscene you get when you enter Norg for the first time after beating the Shadowlord is actually incredibly well done and sets a hell of a tone given the limited tools available. Of course, the fact that getting this far is the culmination of months of effort also helps.
Wing Commander III: While cheesy, the cutscenes you get after the Kilrathi blow up the big Death Star alike and you see the full version of Angel's death scene made quite an impression on me at the time.
Wing Commander IV: The final section of this game, where you confront Tolwyn in the debating chamber is superb. Not only is it a rare moment of decent acting in these games, but it's an incredibly brave way to do the final obstacle in a space-shooter - not through a big space battle, but through a debate.
Knights of the Old Republic: The scene where the main character's past is revealed is utterly superb. I'd suspected there was a big plot twist coming, but this just took my breath away. In the course of one cutscene, the entire game-world is turned upside-down. The parallels to the famous "Luke, I am your father" scene in ESB are undeniable, but in many ways this is even more shocking. Further proof that Bioware can write much better Star Wars than George Lucas can these days.
Ok, now I'm going to move on to perhaps the second most common emotional reactions that games seek to inspire; fear.
Doom 3: A flawed game in many ways, but the first few hours of this, until I worked out the tricks the game used, scared the crap out of me.
Silent Hill 2: The first three installments in this series were all great (although the fourth is a big let-down). However, I think that on balance it was 2 that did the best job of scaring me. There's no one scene I can really point to; the whole game is just plain creepy.
Darkseed: an old adventure game, which in many ways is utterly forgettable. In most respects, this was a distinctly average game; the gameplay and the quality of the puzzles were far inferior to what Lucasarts were doing at the time. However, the location and creature designs, by H. R. Geiger (think Alien) were creepy as hell.
Kingdom Hearts: Ok, I admit this is an odd choice for this section. It's a Disney game
There's a sad story up on progressiveboink.com called Illusion of Gaia and my cousin David that's rather relevant.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
and the realization that games could be that well written. And without further ado, here's the three stages of playing Torment:
Stage 1: The aformentioned realization, and a desire to write my own Planescape stories.
Stage 2: The realization that I suck as a writer, and can't come close to Torment.
Stage 3: The final realization that the game more or less bombed, and that they'll probably never be a game with that much effort put into writing again.
It's the kind of game I wish I'd never played so I could go back and play it again.
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I knew people would start posting about Final Fantasy stuff. So, to keep proper balance in the world, here's some from Ultima series.
Wayyyyyyy back when I was kid. My very own Commodore 64. Watching Ultima V's intro scene and such (since that was pretty much everything that worked properly in the warezed copy =) I didn't know English very much at the time, so I was just looking at the pretty pictures. Then I realized something very very odd: This game thing actually has a story. You know, video games were supposed to be about shooting things and stuff. (And this was in the C64 era. You couldn't really fit a very long story in 64 kb =)
Wayyyy later (but while I was still quite young) I got a legit copy of the PC Ultima V. I had realized that you can simply press enter to end dialogue instead of saying "bye". Heee! I was going to become a Metagaming Teenager! But then I ran into this one guy in the game that just told me that it was impolite to run away like that! Hrrrm... so much for becoming a Metagaming Teenager then.
Fast forward to last year...
In Ultima VII, one beautiful day, I had throughoutly wasted time in the mines of Minoc. No apparent clues could have been found, let alone anything that could have possibly helped me financially (how un-Avatarlike for me to think of such matters, but hey, this is Ultima VII part 1, no so Everlasting Goblet yet and money buys food). I stepped out of the mines, back to the bright daylike. And my eyes actually hurt. I noticed that the immersion was actually working really well. I was actually filling Avatar's part of the dialogues in my head. (that's what makes this role-playing game, see?) I felt the need to shout at fools who blocked my horse cart's way.
And of course, here's the obligatory EA-bashing bit - note, spoilers for Ultima IX. In the end of the first dungeon, I talked with a Wyrmguard who claimed that he was Iolo, and said that I could easily note that he was who he said since his bow and lute were in the other room. That sounded like the most dumb set-up ever. The guy must be holding Iolo up somewhere, I guessed. Besides, Iolo uses a crossbow! An obvious imposter, and a dumb one at that. So I killed him. ... Too bad the setup actually was that dumb. That was Iolo. I killed Avatar's best friend due to a colossally stupid set-up and a factual error in weaponry. I was very, very angry at myself and really hated EA for rushing this travestry to the market.
My finest moment with the game came while trying to play through the game without killing any enemies.
Spoilers: Although if you haven't played the game by now, who even cares.....
I was trying to sneak out of the UNATCO base after turning rogue, and had cleared the basement of hostile threats. Alex Jacobsen, the UNATCO tech guy, wouldn't give me the key to leave unless I kill Anna Navarre. Anna Navarre is a mechanically-augmented agent for UNATCO, which compounded with her ruthless-bitch-ness means that if I escaped Alex would be in a world of pain.
Well, I'm not a fan of killing, but Anna is pretty evil so I guess it's OK. But, she's flanked by two normal fleshy UNATCO MPs. I kind of feel bad for them; we've had some good conversations in the past. So, I need a way to seperate them...
I charge up the stairs to Anna and the two guards and fire my pistol in the air to get their attention. "What the..?" "Kill him!" Tracers whizz past my head. I turn on my ballistic shields and turbo-legs and leap down three flights of stairs. Anna and her two lackeys are no match for my nanoaugmentations, plus they're computer AIs and don't know how to jump, so they take the stairs one at a time.
By the time they even reach the stairwell, I'm already in the basement. A couch blocks the entrance to the stairwell, and I'm carefully hidden behind a potted plant for cover. I hear the chirping of one of my proximity grenades go off, and then an explosion. Coughing. The tear gas has the two guards wracked with pain, but they're not going anywhere anytime soon. Navarre, on the other hand, literally has iron lungs; no gas is going to stop her.
However, she blithely runs into my EMP grenade on the stairs. A blue glow washes over the stairwell as her energy for her augmentations (like her own ballistic shield) is dissipated. Now for the coup de grace! Navarre reaches the bottom of the stairwell, smacks into the couch, and smirks as she sees me behind my obvious cover. I smirk because she doesn't realize there's an explosive proximity mine on the ceiling just over that couch!
The smirk quickly disappears. Instead of the chirping of the proximity detector, I only hear the ricochet of the bullets from Anna's assault rifle. The leaves on my potted plant start shredding. Gack! The EMP blast disabled my explosive mine! I'm a sitting duck!
I take out my 9mm pistol. I've never used the damned thing, much less put experience into it. My hand quakes as I steady my aim on the stairwell. The plant has disintegrated by now, but Anna has to reload.
BANG
BANG
Two misses. Make this one count.
BANG-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM
I manage to nick the explosive mine with a bullet, setting it off. Anna and the couch disintegrate, leaving only tattered upholstry and a motor oil stain on the floor.
I head upstairs, tranquilize the two coughing guards, and quickly make my exit with Alex's key.
- A woman who was severely ill from cancer thanked me for making her husband laugh. Those moments were few and far between for her family.
- I had several people professing their love, not for me but for one of the NPCs.
- There's a moment in the game where the player experiences a deep loss. A few people reported they were actually moved to tears.
I've decided that the best measure of success for a game is seeing how far I can emotionally draw players into the story. Emotions such as hate, joy, greed, and love are things core to the human experience. Even after all these centuries, the things that Shakespeare wrote can still move us.I have to admit that I'm not immune to that sort of thing. I remember playing GTA and then driving around afterwards. Things like curbs and stoplights seemed so unnecessary.
#3 - Deus Ex -- The death of Paul Denton. (If you're not careful.)
#2 - While playing in an RP-heavy text MUD. Take any of dozens of moments when the GMs or other players pulled at the heartstrings, as rarely happens in a modern MMORPG.
#1 - And weighing in at #1, the death of Floyd in Planetfall:
Steve Meretzky's like a tiny god. (To paraphrase Penny Arcade.) His game is one of the reasons I entered the industry.
We're indie. We're working on our 14th game.
For me, the most emotion I've felt while playing a video game was playing the first 'Deus Ex'. I'd been playing the entire game with some kind of moral sense - I tried not to kill people (even if they were "bad" ... I only killed less than a dozen people the entire game), I chose "sneakiness" over blazing guns, and I tried to do the "Right Thing" (including not stepping on those damn alley cats.)
I remember the end of the game - you're presented with 3 mutually-exclusive options for the mission that will end the game. After I uncovered the 3rd option and I realized the choice I had to make, I actually stopped playing the game for about a week while I made my decision. It really was that hard for me. How to best benefit "society", and is the cost worth it?
In the end, I decided it was best to destroy the communications hub and plunge the world into a 2nd Dark Age. Man, what a decision! But I figured I couldn't trust the HELIOS AI or Morgan Everett.
OFP is a ColdWar FPS. Renegade Russians take over some islands and threaten to launch a missile. US Forces in the area fly in to clean them out.
The missions take place on 4 large islands. There are no levels. The whole island is accessable at any time, and different missions just happen at different locations on the island.
In the last level, you fly your Cesnaback to the islands 10 years after the events. You get in a civilian car and drive around the island to meet up at a pub with your friends.
As you drive around, you're going through the same battlefields that you fought on. It was the coolest feeling to remember the hard battles fought and the experiences you had.
I'm not a veteran, but I can't help but imagine that they nailed the exact feeling you'd have if you actually did tour your old battlefields.
I'd testify on the witness stand that the whole game was worth playing simply to be able to have that feeling on the last level.
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--