Speaking of which - any time in Kirby's Air Ride where you manage to assemble the Dragoon or Hydra. Especially the Hydra your first time.

"You have to charge the engine? Look how long it takes! This sucks! I-"
*engine finishes charging, Hydra STARTS and overtakes the competition, blowing most of them to pieces in the space of a few seconds*
"....oh."

Buum. Bum bum buuuuuuum.
 

Sonic & Knuckles, just after you beat Death Egg 2.

Thanks for catching that one for me, Locke. Totally forgot.

The last quick time event during the final boss battle of KH2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUF8j974Pgg (starts from 4:00).

You deflect well over 100 shots.

Brutal Legend and the escape from Lionwhite's fortress.
You learn pretty quickly that even though you've won you're no match for the demons. Demonlord starts spawning huge megademons and it's a race to get out of there. I don't normally like Dragonforce, but Through the Fire and the Flames fit's this moment so much.

Tie Fighter: Pretty much everything. This is the game that ruined gaming for me, as far as ever reaching that same high again...

Bioforge: Beating down the crazy mutant in the first cell with his own severed arm.

Final Fantasy VI: When Terra goes full Esper. Her fears of her children seeing their mommy become a "monster", and them still clomping onto her was awesome too.

Bionic Commando: Hitlers head getting blown apart, in minute detail.

Metal Gear Solid: Basically every boss fight, especially the Psycho Mantis one.

God Hand: If Tie Fighter was like LSD, God Hand is like Crack. Pretty much everything was awesome.

Kingdom Hearts 2 rightfully earns all the flack it gets. But you cannot tell me during the battle for Hollow Bastion wasn't one of Squares best moments on the PS2.

X-Wing Alliance: I had a missile locked on to me...I avoided it once, and when it swung around, an enemy TIE Bomber ran into it.

Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear- It was my first online match, and it was down to me and one other guy. I wanted to draw him out, as I thought he was behind some crates, and it missed and went off a bridge onto the street below.

The guy walked right over it as it blew up.

TF2: This wasn't me, but I saw a Demoman bounce one of his grenades over a gate before a payload round started, and it killed a teammate. Everyone thought that was pretty sweet there.

To avoid sounding repetitive with my Mass Effect inserts, I will simply second this because it's a crowning moment of awesome that doesn't involve Bioware somehow.

Left 4 Dead 2 - Every time I play. Edit: Okay, the one that comes to mind was while playing Sugar Mill level on Expert Realism. Naturally, we'd already died numerous times. We're heading into the beginning of the witch-infested areas when we get the inevitable tank sound. My buddy playing Coach throws a pipe bomb over the entire warehouse and startles a witch. Now we have an Expert Realism tank and witch chasing us around. Coach ended up getting hit by a rock and incapped, but as the Witch ran up to kill him instantly, the tank threw another rock and killed the witch. Tanks in Expert Realism do over a thousand damage! The tank eventually fell and Coach was saved, happy day!

But it was Expert Realism so we died like 10 minutes later.

Well there was that time I tracked down the person who started TVTropes and beat him to death with my bare hands.

Wait I just dreamed doing that; that's not nearly as awesome. http://i606.photobucket.com/albums/t...icons/sad3.png