Crowning Moments of Awesome

[BattyAsHell]

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.

[PyrosNine]

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.

[phil_]

Originally Posted by PyrosNine

Summon Night 2: I have a DRILL weapon.

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.

[The Sevenshot Kid]

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

[krogothwolf]

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.

[Amake]

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.

[Melfice]

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.

[Loyal]

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.

Originally Posted by IQ

Extreme G

Excellent taste.

[Amake]

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.

[A Zarkin' Frood]

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.