I don’t mean to set the bar too high, but god damn, Chrono Trigger was the absolute goat
I miss the Squaresoft / Square Enix we had in the SNES to PS2 era. Almost every game they put out during that period was an absolute banger.
She IS still alive.
This was a triumph.
Plenty of memorable scenes in this thread, but I will never forget the utter shock, horror and sadness I felt after this moment. One of very few times I’ve cried from a video game.
How dare you .
This is the one.
Here I am, ten years old. Just got home school. Figured I’d get some prince of Persia in before my parents get home. I just got a soundblaster 2.0 and I’ve got BIG speakers, enjoying the amazing sounds at high volume. I’m puzzling, exploring, getting used to there being piles of bones here and there. I’m backtracking through level 3 and this skeleton fucking rises and draws its sword with an eery sound. I’m shitting my pants here and reactively press the reset button on the computer to get out of this.
Loved this game. It inspired the Tomb Raider series quite a bit. Including the Mirror Prince /Atlantean Lara part.
First time realizing you have to wait for the rat to come help you was mind blowing.
Going blind into the game I did NOT expect that!
The animation is crazy visceral. I had nightmares for days.
Tomb Raider (2013)
Played that series last year, (recommend them, fun games.) there were a few “Jesus fucking christ” death animations for sure.
There’s a clip of Conan O’Brien playing this, and you can tell he’s definitely not a gamer, and he’s so shocked by a death animation. I don’t really understand their place in the game, they are so disproportionately violent compared to everything else, and it’s random.
There is a novel called Blood Meridian that has a lot of incredibly violent scenes to the point many consider it unfilmable, but that violence is depicted as an almost detached spectacle, the prose is externalised and the scenes are never lingered on for pleasure. It’s generally considered perhaps the most violent classic novel, but the entire metaphysics and purpose of the book exists in this violence.
When I first played tomb raider, I didn’t notice half the violent scenes, because the medium is so unnecessarily stuffed with it. It wasn’t until replaying it after seeing the Conan O’Brien interview that I really honed in on it.
In comparison to Blood Meridian, it’s so much worse. It doesn’t really have a message or a story purpose beyond showing the setting as dangerous, and it lingers on the violence, taking pleasure in the sudden violence, that has befallen our protagonist who we deeply care about and can internalise her suffering easily. We see a young woman, who we live through and care for deeply, come to a brutal, sickening end due to sheer bad luck, and then we hit restart.
I’m not even really mad about it, like it said, I’m so desensitised to video game violence that I only noticed the brutality of these scenes after seeing Conan. Perhaps the creep of violence in the medium alongside the fact that in 10 seconds, she’s fine and you do it again is enough to justify it, but it’s weird that it exists so normally in the first place.
I don’t know if this counts as a “scene” but the installer for Red Alert 2.
This was my first time experiencing a game installation experience like this and also probably my last time.
Launching the installer for Red Alert 2 and getting greeted with voice acting, game art and hype music was just so unexpected for me back then and really hyped me up.
It’s such a crazy experience, but it’s the type of experience that will likely never come back.
“Warning, Military Software Detected. Top secret clearance required”.
I loved hearing that every time
“Hell March”, right? Loved it.
Adagio for Strings plays
“Kharak is burning.”
“It’s gone. It’s all gone.”
Never felt so bad about beating a boss.
The opening of the mission “party time” in saints row 3. Screenshot wouldn’t do it justice. Starts as a wide shot over the shoulder of your protagonist looking out of a helicopter. Power by Kanye West starts as you jump out of the copter and parachute onto a huge penthouse full of enemies. Song continues to blast as you clear it out. Great mission and the best pairing of contemporary music with a game I know of.
You didn’t say it had to be a pleasant memory…
Welcome to the Black Mesa transit system.
My first choice was already posted, so here is another moment I’ll never forget
That and ending the Quarian/Geth war.
Well, i was unable to find the actual screenshot i wanted, but it is the end of the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy game, but I could never actually beat it. Every time i enabled the improbability drive, i turned into the sperm whale instead of the missiles.
I played the game so many times start to finish, but never could completed it. I had a print out of the guide on the green and white dot matrix paper. I followed it exactly multiple times.
So instead, here is a screenshot near the start of the game.
The D-Day landing scene in CoD 2 was i n s a n e at the time. Goosebumps
Shit I still remember this
