Crowning Moments of Awesome
 

Any moments in video games where you thought the game just became straight up fucking awesome?


Shin Megami Tensei - Strange Journey

I met three Dis in a room, and they asked me to defeat Yggdrasil, which had gone mad. I said okay, so they took me there to fight him. Yggdrasil does "something imperceptible" and then kicks my ass. As my character is blacking out, me from the future shows up and punks the everloving fuck out of Yggdrasil. That is fucking rad.

Final Fantasy V

So the entire team's been incapacitated by Mr. Final Boss, and Galuf's daughter's been trapped in a ring of fire. Does Galuf sit back and let this happen? NO. He jumps up, gets Krile out of the ring of flames, and goes "Screw you, fire" and dispels it. Then he singlehandedly crushes 4 Crystals to get to Exdeath.

and then he fights Exdeath in a boss battle that he CANNOT lose. 0 HP? That's a baby's complaint. He just keeps on fighting.

In fact, last time I played that section, I decided to make the old man go out like a champion. I made him into a Black Mage with Barehanded. The dude matched Exdeath spell for spell, and when he ran out of MP, he tore him apart with his BARE HANDS.

Some favourites off the top of my head.

The Colossus with the big sword you run up from Shadow of the Colossus. Everything up til then had been cool, that fight left me dumbstruck with awe.

The Goht fight in Majora's Mask. It was right about there I decided that was my favourite Zelda game ever.

Yuri flat out vigilante style murdering Ragou in Tales of Vesperia. That made me go "whoa this is not quite a normal JRPG at all is it?"

The other badass Yuri from a JRPG beating the shit out of the Imperial Japanese Minister of War in Shadow Hearts Covenant. Just cause damn that guy was a prick and it was so good that they didn't give him a pass just cause he was old and had a cute grandson in attendance.

FINALLY getting Officer Tenpenny in San Andreas.

Getting to the first level which had Stickerbrush Symphony play in Donkey Kong Country 2. Sometimes I just left the game sitting on that level while I did stuff that song was so awesome.

Fighting Final Bowser in Super Mario 64.

Fighting the giant smith boss (Ippon Daitara?) in Muramasa is my most recent example.

Also getting the circus chainsaw in Dead Rising for the first time.

Pretty much any opening level/boss fight in the God of War series, especially the opening minutes of GoW3 and the battle with Cronus.

Metal Gear Solid 4 - Rex vs Ray fight

Arkham Asylum - When you get the chance to go Predator on a room full of mooks and get to hear them freak out as they find more and more bodies of their buddies and never see you.

Fallout 3 - Liberty Prime

Freedom Fighters - storming the Soviet news channel

Prototype - the first time I was able to do the dive bomb attack into Times Square and hitting a packed intersection

Okami - the boss fights especially the fight against the clockwork owls

Shadow of the Colossus - all of the colossi really. the sword-swinger was awesome, but the two fliers and the final colossus were my favorites

Breath of Fire 2 - The final boss. St. Evans (Jesus) turns you and all of your party to crystals, but you break out. He paralyzes you and shatters your friends. Proceed with one of the most awesome sequences ever in a SNES RPG.

Xenogears - Bart and the Yggsdrasil versus Id. You threw a ship at me. Take it back.

Persona 2 Innocent Sin - Some of the more exotic and absurd rumors. Hitler was a boss.

Wild Arms - Ziekfried's Last stand. "I shall take you with me!" *grabs Rudy's arm and Rudy tries to cut the binding with his sword* "Fool! No human weapon could cut that!" *Rudy cuts off his arm.*

The Final Fantasy Legend - The final boss. You fight God, who incidentally has a bitching hat.

Persona 4 - True Ending. Major Spoilers.This.

Gundam vs. Zeta Gundam - This game is pretty much only for fans of the first two Gundam series, but some of the alternate continuities the game throws at you are awesome. Two examples are:

Quattro verbally curbstomping Scirocco in one of the final missions, ending his speech with "I'll show you that a mobile suit has its' limits, my friend, when it goes up against the Red Comet." In every other instance the situation is reversed, with Quattro simply muttering that he's "not finished yet" after Scirocco explains to him why Quattro is so horribly outclassed.

Even more nerdgasming was Garma's alternate path that takes him all the way through Zeta Gundam instead of dying early on in the original Gundam. You survive every major conflict along the way, with Char being your wingman for a good half of the missions. Suddenly he stops appearing in missions near the very end, and then you start up the final mission to be greeted with the phrase "Hey Garma, can you read me? Blame this on the misfortune of your birth!" And then you fight and kill him, ending the war. Good times.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

Kirby. Massive battle ship. A Dragoon.

Do the math. >:3

The Hades Boss fight in KH2, the one where I have Auron, Hercules, and Myself in Valor beating the ever living crap out of a boss who was normally contextually invincible.

Cave Story: Hell. Just hell. I have a girl strapped to my back armed with the second most awesome weapon in the game, I have the most awesome weapon in the game, and there are angel/lizards coming out of the woodworks in every direction- and then I kill a mad godlike being. I am the most awesome android/cyborg ever.

Half Life 2: I will murder without mercy in episode 3.

Tales of Symphonia: I not only got to beat up what I thought was a hopeless boss fight, but then a few minutes later Regal hadoken's a door open. If he had not bothered to stop using his hands, the game could have ended two hours earlier.

Metal Gear Solid 3: I beat down the boss with my bare hands, and my puny tranq gun.

Portal: The room filled with turrets. Not the test room, the OTHER room filled with turrets. Much more turrets. That, and the final boss of "the Flash pack/still alive".

Twilight Princess: Fuck you, I'm a wolf!

Halo ODST: Might not be the moment of awesome for the game, but I had a moment of awesome in the demolition man's level, when one of the tanks is lobbing a mortar at me, a guy watching me play says "Dude, watch out!" and I just move a bit to the left without even missing a beat and the mortar goes right by me, blowing up an enemy vehicle. "Damn!"

ONI: A run I did where I went through the entire game beating the crap out of everyone with just my bare hands, including the robots, turrets, and final boss.

Naruto Naiteki Kensei: I'm standing on the ceiling, looking down at a brawl going on, charging up a chidori/rasengan. F' yeah.

New Super Mario Bros Wii: Bowser. BOWSER.

Megaman Legends 1: 3 boss fights within one minute of each other, at he very beginning of the game!

Megaman Legends 2: It's a better game than the first one, which is very awesome in of itself!

Shin Megami Tensei: I fused my dog with a demon, and boy was he strong.

Persona 3: Defeating DEATH.

Deus Ex: Jumping from the rooftops with my cyborg legs onto an Angry German cyborg, and gibbing him, and being blown onto the next roof by his explosion. Alternatively, following Doug The Eagle's guide and climbing up to see Miss Wong with lams and leaving her some presents....

Summon Knight 2: I have a DRILL weapon.

You're not doing it justice. You left out the part with the exploding ship and insane dodging all being a distraction for Kirby, of all characters, to doom the enemy.

Video:The Great Invasion

The Advisors shall take many crowbars to the face.

For some reason, I loved the Superintendent. No real moment, just the weird little guy in general. Enough to make him (well, Vergil, rather) my TF2 name and spray.

Any time I was able to perform a stealth assination in Assassin's Creed. Sneaking in and out without being noticed was awesome.

Just Cause 2: I grapple onto a helicopter, shoot sidekick on it, hijack it, parachute out, grapple onto a second helicopter, do the same thing, then as it's burning crash it into the armoured car while parachuting away. Freakin Awesome.

Does it count as a crowning moment of awesome if it happens every time you go into battle? Not that it isn't the most awesome thing ever. If they gave me more drill stones, I would've used nothing but drills. Well, that and I didn't feel like grinding up two more when I already had my spear and sword of doom ready to roll when a mook wasn't worthy of my drill.

Part awesome games, part me being awesome at them
 

Oddly enough, what springs to mind for me is mostly racing games. Breaking the sound barrier in Extreme G (the future-motorcycle racer with the missiles and lasers for N64), whereupon the track takes on an unreal, hypnotic quality of absolutely shocking sense of speed. Swooping up and down the hills of Wipeout 2097 in tune with the music, which is Firestarter by Prodigy. Firing a green shell in a moment of strange spatial clarity, downing my rival an inch from the finish line from like 70 yards away and just barely making it past him in Super Mario Kart.

And then there's any given moment behind the wheel of the faster cars in Burnout Dominator, where it seems like you're riding a missile flying in a trajectory only incidentally parallel to the ground, tangentially touching it rather than relying on a firm grip on it to maintain speed.

I don't even particularly like racing games.

On a distantly related note, it occurs to me the Burnout games lack a vital feature from SMK: Characters. You want instinctively recognizable opponents, with individual cars, gimmicks and driving styles. There's something wrong with a game based on the idea of pursuing a personal vendetta with your opponents and their primarily distinguishing feature is that they have a red arrow over their head.

Crowning moment of awesome?

Dwarf Fortress 2010. All of it.
It's more than likely riddled with bugs, and it still the most AWESOME game to release this year.

COD: World at War.
After soundly trouncing the German armies, the Commissar hijacks a loudspeaker system somewhere and broadcasts, over the ENTIRE CITY of Berlin, "Citizens of Berlin! A ring of steel surrounds your rotten city! We will crush all who dare resist the will of the Red army! Abandon your posts! Abandon your homes! Abandon! All! Hope!"

Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World
This whole thing, starting at 4:00. Up till Marta intervenes at the end anyway. R-Emil doesn't take shit from nobody.

Excellent taste.

Hey, any game where you drive around and shoot stuff at each other and I'm there. Well, I was until the genre was perfected with Twisted Metal World Tour. . .speaking of which, beating it on Hard with Sweettooth was about as satisfying as every dream I've ever had about Johnny Depp combined.

Subtopic: What's the hardest thing everyone has accomplished in a game? For me it was mastering the Learning school of Learning in Eve Online. That doesn't take anything but patience; real world, real time patience, putting aside any immediate satisfaction or even basic ability to play the game for three months, just to let you learn every other skill after that a little faster than the common player. I think it's a test of patience unmatched in the history of entertainment. And yeah, it still makes me woozy when I remember I did it.

My father, my brother and I where playing some Smackdown wrestling game on the PS2.
We all had custom created wrestlers for everyone and had a fatal four way ladder match. Anyway, The CPU was a Muscular, horned, green, fat dude with long hair, a hook for one hand and a crab claw for the other. The arm with the claw was abnormly thick. He wore a skirt with a tiger pattern and his name, at that point, was "Default".
So we fought. At some point my brother and I were simultaneously down, and my father was about to grab the belt and win the match. We just didn't want our father to win. I mean, losing against your dad in a video game that's not older than you? SO not cool.
The only one who could save us was... Default. We didn't accept that as a name though, so my brother made something up on the spot, and he got his name... which isn't a name to be proud of.
We chanted "Big Noodle Fucker, save us, Big Noodle Fucker" and he saved us
He then won the match.
Ever since that day he was a staple of every future wrestling game we had. He was one of the first characters to be created. And every time we needed someone bizarre we had BNF. Leader of the one man stable "Freak League" I guess it's a "you had to be there" kinda thing, but to me that's a definite Crowning Moment of Awesome.

Talking about Wrestling games
My brother and I once fought in a Last Man Standing match which ended up lasting over two hours.

Also: Painkiller, blast baddies with a shotgun while metal music is playing in the background. And that's just the first level.
Later you have to fight ninjas. You can use a gun that shoots shuriken and lightning for that. And lightning shuriken.

I'm also going to second that FFVI Galuf thing, because it's just that awesome.

Earthbound... I've been very late to the party, but If the final battle doesn't qualify I don't know what will. I mean, it's not that the game before that point wasn't awesome. But that just pumped it up to eleven.

The whole last mission of Kingdom Hearts Numbery Days. Anyone who's played it knows why, anyone who hasn't should look it up on Youtube or something.

Post-Chozo Ghost boss in Metroid: Zero Mission. The remix of the Brinstar Theme, combined with all the shit exploding and firing and Pirates freezing and blowing up, and you being completely un-fucking-stoppable by ANYTHING that gets in your way, is just pure awesome incarnate.

Gonna call this next one You Should Know This Already: Devil May Cry, when the amulets and Force Edge combine to make Sparda. And subsequently, the whole rest of the game AND New Game Plus with the demonic weapon.

Also, the third-to-last mission of numbery days.

Beginning with the diary entry for that day.

"I need to know who I am. I am DONE WITH THIS."

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

Story Time: Civ 3!

Playing as Japan, I had two immediate neighbors, the Chinese to my west, immediately on my borders, and the French on another landmass to my north. The Indians to my southwest had long since been wiped out. Upon the French Landmass I had a single city. This city, Natsuma or something similar, had access to Iron, and was in fact the only source of Iron I had or would have access to until I had the technology to cross the ocean or started knocking the French around and taking their iron. As my unique unit was the awesome Samurai (replaces Knights, has one additional defense and does not require Horses) and I was lagging behind in research, this city was naturally very strategically important to me.

The French weren't having any of that and attacked suddenly with Longbowmen and Swordsmen.

Unfortunately, Natsuma was defended by merely two spearmen due to military budget cuts, as I really needed to either increase research spending or bribe the English and Zulu on the other side of the world for their tech. The good news is that I had several galleys and my most productive cities were just a short boat ride away, so I could respond quickly in the event of such a situation. The french were quick to knock out my one source of Iron so I couldn't immediately produce any Samurai. While Natsuma was set to produce walls, the rest of my productive cities were ordered to produce Spearmen, Longbowmen, and Horse Archers as quickly as possible to reinforce, though I feared it would turn from defense to recovery.

Anyway, on the first turn, two spearmen versus two Swordsmen and a Longbow. Natsuma holds with one half-health spearman remaining. One galley which happened to have a Horseman on it at the time arrives in the city, unloads, and the horseman kills another Longbowman who hadn't quite reached the city. The Horseman is killed before he can move again, but he bought me the time needed to get more troops on ships. Since it would still be a few more turns before I could actually produce anything, I grabbed a couple soldiers on defense and put them on ships.

As the French armies gradually streamed in, only barely being held back by what little forces I could muster, Japanese longbows and spearmen finally began to appear and were immediately deployed to the galleys. Spearmen helped defend the city while Horsemen and Longbows sought to attack the incoming French before they could close in on Natsuma. With the French unable to successfully continue their assault to any remarkable effect, I was able to secure the tile with the Iron on it after a few turns so that my Worker could restore the route to it in relative safety.

After half a dozen turns and a combined total of over 20 losses on both sides, the French offensive was broken, and several Japanese troops were around Natsuma and ready to kill something. The French sued for peace at this time and offered twenty gold per turn (over 20 turns) in addition to the Democracy tech... which I considered a sufficient peace offering, especially when one of the French cities revolted and joined my side a turn later due to Natsuma's overwhelming culture. :3

Of course I wasn't going to trust France after all that, so when I finally started to produce Samurai (and Pikemen), they were shipped right over, so that I'd be ready if the French ever attacked again, or I decided to save myself the trouble and kill them first... whichever came first.

It was pretty awesome.

Later, the French did attack again for some unfathomable reason, and I retaliated by taking all but three of their cities. Dumbasses.