f13.net

I have two and cannot decide which left the more memorable impact upon my brain.

#1 - Wastleand (RPG by EA before they sucked ass) on my C=64 circa 1988/89

The C=64 limitations and a need for copy protection required that when you got to an NPC interaction you were presented with something along the lines of "Sally says to you <go to page 32 of your game manual>" where you would be given dialogue! Nonetheless I loved that game and the colorful combat descriptions such as "You attacks reduce the mercenary to a thin red paste". Would kill for a true remake (I know fallout is the spiritual successor but it did not capture the same feel for me).

#2  - Neuromancer (Interplay I believe) also on my C=64 around 1990

My first foray into cyberspace. Man I played that game for like a year straight! Having to upgrade your "deck" (computer) with new "ice" and battle other programs was just pure goodness with awesome sauce. Not to mention selling your body parts for cash! Read the book shortly afterwards not before. And the DEVO track is STILL stuck in my head!!!
Looking back the game was so shallow, but I never knew it. Ahhh to be a kid again!

Good stuff...share yours!!!
 

Edit - Typo

1. Me and my mom getting really sick one week when I was a kid and staying home, playing bubble bobble and eating cocoa pebbles.
2. Playing T.I.M. with my mom and sister.
3. PVPing in MMUD.

1st time we played multiplayer doom at the office
1st 4 months of Diablo 1

Seeing Duke taking a dump in the alien's neck.

Accidentally killing that goblin in Ultima underworld.

1. Sending the entire buffer of a day-long game of adventure to the office printer in the late 70s. I was 7 and my grandfather was angry.

2. Daggerfall, falling 40 stories down a well in a dungeon and fighting my way back out through the randomized (and often submerged) dungeon.

3. Exploring in Ultima 7/7.5. Or U4 or U5.

4. First modded game of Q2 where the whole house full of LAN players all had custom avatards. Hiding on a ledge until the room filled up with a nice firefight and letting go with the BFG, listening to the yells from every room in the house as it powered up.

Back in '99 I'm playing my lowbie Monk in EQ and fighting large spiders in whichever Karana is next to the Qeynos zone. Basically not having a clue what I was doing, but knowing that spiders dropped silk and monks wore silk armor, so there you have it. Mostly, I was dying. And more often than not, it was to some @#*&$)@#(*&$# werewolf that would run at me from friggin' nowhere. I was a human and my fire beetle eye gave me very little light, but it was all that I had. Anyways, dawn is about to break in game, I see a werewolf running around and start booking it to the nearest guard tower. Before I got there, this group of armored guys lead by a wood elf and surrounded with blue sparkles comes blasting in, grabs the werewolf, and pounds it in into puppy paste. It was the coolest goddamn thing I'd ever seen in a game. Dawn just breaking. Magic lights going off all over. It was epic for me as a fantasy fan and old D&D player.

Jamming out to Zelda's title screen probably.

I never did finish that game..

Me, my mom, my brother, and my sister all working together to get the locked door open in Zork II. The difficulty level of that puzzle, including the hints such as "The newspaper is too thick to fit under the door," was perfect.

Getting Ultima V for Christmas, and finding out that it was indeed the same world as Ultima IV...but it had changed.

Being unemployed, 1,000 miles away from my lifelong friends, getting into the beta for Ultima Online, and staying up all night saving for new equipment for me and my brother.

Writing my first game. It was a space ship that was the "Up Arrow" on the C-64, and every key on the keyboard made it do something. There was no real gameplay to it, but just an interactive little space ship.

SWOTL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Weapons_of_the_Luftwaffe), PC around 1992

 Finding extra uses my Gotha Go 229 could do on B17 intercept missions. Load it up with bombs and fly to England after intercepting and my long drawn out tour of duty trying to singlehandly win the war.

Diablo1, first time playing multiplayer for reals, beat the game pretty much entirely with a guy from Ontario Canada, my dad comes out to tell me to go to bed at 12:30 and I say, "this guys from canada isn't that amazing!?" he let me stay up all night.

10six, destroying everything a player had, repeatedly, after the third time we newbie locked him (took his last camp, forced him to restart the game) his mother came on his account and started scolding us because he was crying.  So much fun.

Tribes1, being so pumped with adrenaline before every OGL match that I could barely hold my mouse.  Also my first real lan party and stopping some of the best cappers in the game are great memories.  Irc drama, pick up games, good times.

AvP2, playing in the dark after hours at the local internet cafe before we all got dsl and internet cafes died out.  Playing as the marines was so great because the whole place would be spooky quiet then suddenly you'd hear that big two hand rifle make that great noise and everyone would start shouting and all hell would  break loose.

Myth2, playing in a 2v2 tournament and taking 2nd place, even though we knew nothing of the changes and the competition was all 30+ yr olds who took shit hella seriously.

WoW, watching that funeral celebration get raped, reading about it on f13 and the official boards, god I love that video.

In randomly numbered order:

1. People mention Diablo 1, and I have to as well:
-Enjoying the atmospheric music in Tristram (aka the "Town" tune - listen to it and all other classic Blizzard tunes here (http://classic.battle.net/window.shtml))
-Encountering The Butcher (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e02G8y000WE) for the first time - "AHHHH! FRESH MEAT!"

2. Me and like three cousins playing through Monkey Island 1 + 2 on Amiga in one sitting.

3. Playing Civilization 1 for the first time. On Amiga. On a tiny black and white monitor.

4. Participating in a hectic Quake 1 tournament with around 15 other players on a tiny map (House of Ch'ton) in a tiny room with no air condition, the tournament lasting for 3 hours non-stop without pause

Addition!

Playing at an all night lan party at the local internet cafe, playing the hell out of CS, DoD, and Diablo 2. They sold these air fresheners that were kind of like sponges in a can (I can never remember their name) and the scent of them always reminds me of that place. Good times... I bought a bunch of cheap games from them when they went out of business my sophomore year. /tear.

Same thing happened to me except my buddy claimed he was playing from Tehran, Iran.  My parents didn't believe it, but his Farsi helped make my case.

While I obviously have lots, my fondest is only tangentially related to any specific game (mostly MUDs, etc). But when I saved up enough money to buy extra keyboards and hide them, my parents stopped taking mine away. VICTORY.

Beating Ultima III for the Apple ][e+ and doing it before my father!

Discovering Tele-Arena 3.0 and getting my green rune for the first time.

Beating Ultima (finally). Yes, the first one.

Finishing the Fleet Street Phantom on the Acorn Micro (?) at school.

Coming back from camp to find that my brother had got a new game - Battle Squadron - that we cooped on. Also, coop games of Bubble Bobble.

I've got lots. :grin:

Playing Ocarina of Time for the first time after camping out at Walmart to get it at precisely the crack of 7 A.M. on release day, before school.  I just started a new file of it last night- damn that game is timeless and has not aged one bit for me. 

5.) Seeing Pac Man for the first time and not being able to figure out what I was looking at.

4.) Entering Blackburrow for the first time with a group of total strangers.

3.) Playing Space Invaders (cocktail model) with my friend at Pizza Hut.

2.) Almost shitting my pants the first time Sinistar roared at me and told me he hungered.

1.) Achieving the highest rank in Star Raiders on my Atari 400 after a marathon 2 hour single game.

One of my older memories is during a computer class in middle school (6th grade I think). A few of us were playing Kobra MUD, while pretending to be following the LOGO lesson plan. Somehow we ended up in a PVP fight with a bounty hunter, and one of my friends got trapped in a room by the BH's droids. He starts freaking out and yelling at us to come help him. The teacher comes storming over with this huge angry face and makes him log off. I pretend I wasn't involved and try to get safe before I have to log, but the teacher walks around checking everyone's screen and I have to hide the telnet session before I got more than a few rooms away. We all died. It was glorious.

My best memories pretty much always involve PvP of some sort, either in a FPS or an MMO, even if I lost. It's the encounter that leaves the lasting impression.

In no particular order:

Seeing Kelethin for the first time.

Playing Rebel Assault for the first time and saying to myself that these newfangled CD-ROM games sucked ass (heh).

Choosing to feign sickness and play Civilization instead of seeing my girlfriend at the time, who went to college several hundred miles away and was home for the weekend.

Tarren Mill.

Playing Siegfried vs. my friend's Taki in endless hours of Soul Calibur duels.

And of course the defining moment in my gaming life. My best friend telling me his dad bought a brand new, bleeding edge 286 computer with a 10 megabyte hard drive. I shrugged until he fired up Pools of Radiance.

Hmm...I'll constrain it to video gaming, and rule out MUDs as well. It's so hard to pick just one, so I'll do three:

* Marathon-playing Gauntlet with friends in the mall arcade (after claiming to be sick), monopolizing the machine all day. Man, the trash-talk...

* Having a room full of (semi)grown men get all teary watching me play when Aeris died.

* Finally finishing Zanac (22 years after having gotten it as an Xmas present) a few months ago, in unemployed gaming malaise. (Fuck you, Japan!)

EDIT: Okay, four, that part in Grim Fandango where you're trying to get that gal's megaphone and you try to keep up with her side of the conversation in a kind of 'Mm-Hmm...Yeah...Yeah, Mushrooms are great. Yep. Oh, both of them?' kind of way. That was masterful.

The last level in Episode 2 of the original Doom.  At the time all I could do is fire off a rocket and hide because those rockets it fires at you hurt like no other and if I just take my time and JESUS GOD IT FOUND ME.

Playing Resident Evil: Director's Cut late overnight during one of the worst ice storms Omaha ever saw.  The power went out at the worst possible moment, and to top it off tree limbs were breaking up and down the entire street due to the ice and sheer cold, making a cacophony of noises in the dark that almost sounded like gunshots from the warding off of zombies.  It was a very unsettling moment for me.

Beating Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and seeing the final ending sequence.  At the time I was so blown away by how cinematic it was, and those credits music still get to me to this day.

Going to a Lugian tunnel in Asheron's Call with backpacks full of auroch meat.  At the time there was no trade window; you could simply give a person an item.  I see you are in combat with that train of lugians; here, have some meat.  Overburdened by 200% of meat, it wasn't long before they try to run away.  I still cackle thinking about how many fell victim to being "beefed".

Final Fantasy Tactics.  All of it, including the awesome translation.

My parents "locked" my computer with the keys that came along with the cabinet. That worked for a little while, until I figured out that all the keys for all the cabinets ever made were basically the same. o_O

The UO and AC talk reminded me of two more "forever remembered" gaming moments:

1. UO - There was a dungeon (lower level) that had these jail cells that spawned rat men constantly (this was just shortly after launch, like same month). Anyway there were always dozens of dead bodies in that little cellar with cells and ratmen. We believed that there were untold riches down there and it was so hectic because so many people were down there dying. I must have died 20 times and was all freaked out because I was losing my stuffs  :grin:

2. AC - The Baron of Collier...OMG early in the games life the Baron guarded a chest that spawned Amuli armor among other vast riches. At night the place was camped with literally 20-25 people all waiting in line to kill the Baron. This was no problem since with 20-25 people he died instantly. Anyway, people had a habit of longing out there so when they logged back in they could get in the loot line.

So early one morning before work, I thought I would log in and get me some quick phat loot by seeing how long the line was...er...yeeeeah....no one was there save for the Baron, who exacted his revenge by practically one shotting me. Needless to say I died horribly to the much higher level Baron and lost some good  loot. Now in AC you lost your most valuable item(s) on death (and I had no concept of death items at this point) so I was frantic. In running back to my body, I died about 6 or 7 more times, bodies all over the place, lost and very sad from losing all my best armor and weapons (I was now naked).

To make matters worse, I also was VERY VERY VERY late for work (before I could do that without fear of trouble). It took about 3 hours to get someone to help me, I was distressed, sweating and freaked out that I lost everything. LOL...luckily someone finally did come help me but that memory will be with me on my death bed  :grin:

Playing Utopia on the Intellivision with my brother and figuring out what the hell was going on and how to grief each other.  Also yelling at the hurricanes and tropical storms to get them to move where I wanted them to go.

The rush to the library computer during grade school to play Civilization or watch whoever got there first play it.

Watching the opening sequences to Final Fantasy IV and VI.  The music more so then anything else but FF IV was my first SNES game so it was pretty awesome looking.

Mortal Combat II tournaments after school with like 6-7 guys passing the controllers around.  Who does that anymore?!

Diablo at my friend’s house  “You mean this guy is another person?  Like me?  Can I kill him in town?!”.

Breaking into Plain of Hate as my first ‘raid’.  No clue what I was doing, spent most of time with that song (bard) that lets you see from the mobs point of view and chaining it between mobs to get a look at the bosses.  That was also my first all-nighter as a gamer.

Another thing that always sticks in my mind is going down to see family in upstate NY (I’m Canadian) as a kid and coming back each time with 3-4 new NES games because they were so much cheaper down there at the time and I’d always get money for the trip.

 - Spending many sleepless weekends playing A Bards Tale on my first comp, an Apple IIGS.
 - Loading into Star Wars: Galaxies for the first time.  First MMO that truly gripped me from head to toe

1- Melting my friend's AC adapter for his brand new Colecovision during a marathon session of Donkey Kong.

2- Constantly revising my hand-drawn guide and map to all things Ultima III. Still have the map which I drew on a poster board mounted to an old street sign. Keep meaning to frame it. The cloth map was cool but inaccurate and useless for actual play.

3- Trying and never successfully beating the second to last level on Goldeneye. Still remember HOW to do it but never was able to master it.

Giggling when my pimped out character (who I allowed to be turned into a crab to make his weapons perma-poisoned) scored a max damage hit (I think it was a 'wallop') in Return of Heracles. The game made a sound for every point of damage taken, and listening to the sounds repeat over and over was hilarious. God that game was fun.

Any number of moments playing Ultima IV- harvesting Nightshade at just the right moon phase, discovering new shrines, finding new party members- Garriott may be a megadouche now, but he sure made some great games back in the day.

Getting Heart of Africa for Christmas from my aunt- was SOOOOO excited. Unfortunately my disk drive didn't play well with it as it errored out constantly on me. Tried 2 or 3 different copies too  :heartbreak:

Nearly soiling myself when an SS officer burst into a previously empty room (screaming in German) in Castle Wolfenstein. Those fuckers were terrifying!

Nearly soiling myself when the really mean aliens suddenly appeared a couple of squares away from my squad in X-Com.

Stealing a siege hammer from a group of baddies and then leading them into an ambush in Shadowbane (detailed in Scott Jennings' runaway bestselller Massively Multiplayer Games For Dummies (http://www.amazon.com/Massively-Multiplayer-Dummies-Sports-Hobbies/dp/0471752738/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239984668&sr=8-1))

Leading a train of 20+ orcs from Orc Hill to the lift @ Kelethin, giggling like a madman. I got to the guard and died at his feet before he could dispatch all the orcs. But it was worth the entertainment value, and my corpse was easy to recover  :grin:

Figuring out, at six years old, the various different text parser commands in Quest for Glory.  "Open gate" was a standout achievement.

Figuring out that the number system in Riven was base five.

Getting the rat tail in Final Fantasy.  I don't know why, but I remember that quest being particularly harrowing and memorable.

Dusk smart bomb run along the Norwegian fjords in EuroFighter2000

High among the precipitous towers of the Imperial Base in Dark Forces

Doing the cobra move for the first time in SU-27 Flanker

Utterly petrified in East Commons (I hid behind a rock for 40 minutes at level 4)

Utterly petrified in Lower Guk

Playing Duris land of bloodlust with my only previous experience with muds being tele-arena and being stunned by the complexity.

The first sex scene in a game i ever witnessed Golgo-13

Being absolutely stunned by Night Trap.

The Butcher in diablo coming out and scaring the shit out of me.

Random nostalgia: During early UO beta the forge building in Minoc was jam packed with characters trying to smelt ore and make weapons and armor, lots of hilarious banter going on but pretty much a cluster fuck situation. At that point in the beta each time you pushed on to a tile another character(s) occupied, your stamina would go to zero, you'd have to wait a while till the bar filled again in order to push into the next tile, getting to the back of the room where the forge was took a few minutes. It suddenly dawned on my that I had a few fire field scrolls in my backpack, sheer pandemonium resulted muahaha!

Come to think of it, a lot of my favorite gaming moments, at least in MMOs, involved fucked up game mechanics, bugs, crowds of people, and random hilarious banter.

* Battling the stolen Constrictor ship on a special mission in C64 Elite.
* Secretly playing Ultima Underworld in the student newspaper office (I was the editor and had the keys).
* The way MechWarrior II made you feel it was real.
* Descent 8-player deathmatch at the end of every working day, including our boss.
* Exploring Norrath (EverQuest) for the first time.
* Star Wars Galaxies end-of-beta party on the bridge in Tyrena. (Edit - or was it the day-long exploration of Yavin IV - on foot - by me and three other high-level beta doctors/combat medics? I don't think anyone else went that far until retail because we were the only ones who could rez and your belongings stayed on a corpse when you died. We managed to keep at least one doctor alive all day, and then it took us an hour and a half of real time to run back across the map to the shuttle.)

Music is by far and the number one thing that comes to mind for me.  I have to go with the big 3 SNES RPGs as being the most nostalgic for me.  The music is probably more important to me than the games themselves, heh.

Secret of Mana has these couple songs near the finish...the damn forest at the end of the game haunts me:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEilQOiuE_g&feature=PlayList&p=9B1F4546776E26A4&index=28
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8sGSKE5j14&feature=PlayList&p=9B1F4546776E26A4&index=34

ff6:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6ts3p2HQhk&feature=PlayList&p=866653D8AD00A745&index=51
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIhfs7Fw-vE&feature=PlayList&p=CBDBB48ABBDB7BF9&index=35

CT:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIhfs7Fw-vE&feature=PlayList&p=CBDBB48ABBDB7BF9&index=35
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvvXsreyo30

I think the realization that I could lose everything in UO if I'm careless was quite worth remembering. I learned a couple of scams on trades by experience and not taking any risk while mining like carrying items that I can't bear to lose. Which is a stark contrast to how I started playing, running in the wild with full plate armor just trying to get my bearing and get ganked and losing it all to 3 guys who paralyzed , wall of stone and fire field by ass to crisp.

Day of the Tentacle, my gateway into the SCUMM system games. 

Final Fantasy Tactics, bought it on a whim.  Still the best one they've made.

Secret of Mana, I bought the Multitap and actually played it with two other friends.  Great, great fun.

Metal Gear Solid, the first game I played on my newly modded Playstation.

X-Men vs Street Fighter, the reason I shelled out for a Saturn and 4 Meg cart.  Marvel vs Capcom 2, the reason I shelled out for a Dreamcast.  Damn you Sega and Capcom.

Unreal Tournament, my first online deathmatch game and my first clan.

I remember sneaking into the maths classroom with a couple of friends at break time to play space invaders on a RM of some kind, probably a 280Z or something similar, in about 1981? There were only about 5 people in the whole school who knew how to work it, including the teachers :p

Playing Defender on a table-top arcade console in a pub in Wales when we were on holiday there, probably early 80s again.

Elite on a BBC micro with my brother, one of us doing the movement keys and the other doing all the other stuff.

DooM2 multi using serial cables, just being amazed that it worked and realising that this was the start of a whole new way of gaming.

Playing Quake over a modem with a 400+ ping, when you could make teams by changing the colour of your character's trousers, and joining up with some guy called Zendog to make our first clan, the Brotherhood of MOO.

Playing all the way through Diablo 1 with my wife, who had never played a video game of any kind before but as soon as she saw and heard that one she wanted to try it.

Ahhh, nostalgia. It ain't what it used to be  :why_so_serious:

The song I sing
Will tell the tale
of a cold and wintery day;
Of castle walls
And torchlit halls
And a price men had to pay.
When evil fled
And brave men bled
The Dark One came to stay,
Till men of old
For blood and gold
Had rescued Skara Brae.

My fondest memories are all from the 80s, except for one.
They starts with Intellivision, I was 8 the Christmas I woke up and there was this big box under the tree, and I played Skiing and NASL Soccer 8 hours straight until I was called for lunch. I can still vividly feel my heart pumping like it is about to explode out of joy. Those two games entertained me for months.

Then nights and nights playing Utopia, decoding and being fascinated by its symols and intricacies a couple years before M.U.L.E. came and changed multiplayer forever for me.
Or AD&D Treasure of Tarmin, scary as hell and how I got hooked to RPGs.
Truckin', or how I learned to love trucks.
Imagic's Dracula, and the sense of wonder at the passing of times. I was ten and bothering everyone about dawn's in Dracula, which was nothing more than pink sky instead of the usual black. "You should see it!"

Then came the Commodore 64, and I sunk into Bard's Tale. 20 years later that's still the paradigm of RPG in a corner of my mind. DS'S Boletaria looks enough like Skara Brae to me.
And Mars Saga, or the epythomy of tactics, RPGing and sci-fi storytelling.
And Wasteland, up there with the digital gods. As a grown up I wanted to be a Desert Ranger.
EDIT: Pirates! and discovering the meaning of open gameplay. Trying to catch the Silver Train for days and finally getting the fat loot.
Phantasy Star 2, burned a Megadrive after a 14 hours long session. Painful to wait for for it to be repaired and finish the game. Its tunes are my cellphones ringtones since I have a cellphone.

The 16 bits era is filled with fond memories but I guess that's when I stopped loving the now, and started expecting the future. The best game was always the next one. It's no surprise that my fondest memory is possibly Championship Manager, a game I was playing in earlier forms since the C64 era.

Still, it would be unfair to not mention Disgaea, or the first time I saw the Commonlands, or 2 years straight playing NHL93 and 94 with my friends at my place, filling pages and pages of handwritten statistics and results.

But nothing really shocking came roughly ten years before and after Ultima Online. 1998, logged in on a 14400 stolen free connection, slow and laggy as hell, I felt like Case, or Count Zero Newmark or Kevin Flynn... finally into cyberspace. I was overwhelmed and eager to die and lose all my stuff (which happened over and over), as the only mean to prove myself it was real and happening to me.

Damn, SO many:

- Playing my first videogame on the Atari 800XL: "Summer Games" by Epix;

- Beating "Punch Out" at the arcades;

- Wandering the lands of Britannia in Ultima IV trying to grasp the concept of the Virtues (and again, on a mono-chromatic Atari 800XL version);'

- Playing the first two CRPGs on my Atari ST, Dungeon Master and Bard's Tale I ;

- The landing sequence of Elite, with "Blue Danube" playing in background: need I say more? :D

- Commenting my own matches in front of the monitor during infinite sessions of Kick Off 1 and 2 ;

- Ultima VII, all of it

- Playing Championship Manager for the first time in 1992 and thinking: "this is going to be great" :D

- The haunting and beautiful music of Ultima Underworld II, the soundtrack of so many nights spent playing that game;

- Bombing Kilrah at the end of Wing Commander III ;

- Exposing Tolwyn at the end of Wing Commander IV ;

- The FoA quest in UO, on Atlantic ;

- Beating Deus Ex ;

- The ending of Planescape Torment and Gabriel Knight III ;

My 12 year old son loves that game.  He's played it through several times, and keeps going back to it.  It's not only his favorite Zelda game, but probably his favorite all time game.

It's nice to see the Nintendo still get played, he's usually on the xBox.


For me, mapping out Colossal Cave.  I recently came across my notes from that and threw them all away.

What?  Seriously?  Asking me to choose one is like asking the Goat with a Thousand Young to pick her favorite.

To follow up on trias-e, two musical moments immediately come to mind, one good and one bad.

Good: Reaching the third level in Super Mario 64 and suddenly being assaulted by one of the best level themes I have ever heard.  I still have it in my head  :awesome_for_real:

Bad: All the back in forth in the dwarf village in Secret of Mana.  The game had some great music, but to this day I consider it a toss-up because of that fucking theme.  I still have it in my head  :ye_gods:

Myself and a buddy of mine finally conquering the entire map on the original Romance of the Three Kingdoms on the NES. It took us the better part of a summer.

Same buddy and I finally getting to end of Phantasy Star II on the Genesis.

EDIT: I'll also add playing Dungeons and Dragons on the Intellivision as well as many, many of the big brawls waged on the various Btech MUSE's.

Shit, there's a good reminder. The first time I overrode a thermal shutdown in MW2 was the culmination of years of playing PnP Battletech. I'll have to second/steal this one.

Stepping out of the Ship in Sundog: Frozen Legacy and realizing there are whole planets to explore, from flying around the solar system up to entering buildings where you could play a game within the game. That experience blew my mind and made me love the possibilities in computer games.

Who were you in Duris?

Finally scraping enough cash together to purchase an Imperial Courier and a multi-MW beam laser in Frontier.  I gave up trading at that point and just wandered and engaged in bounty hunting and piracy.

1) Beating the original Master of Orion at the highest difficulty factor.  I thought I was a god-damn gaming god after that.

2) Finally beating Wing Commander: Privateer after throwing my joystick around a few times in frustration.  That's when I realized that gaming god thing might be a tad untrue.

3) Playing all the Wing Commander games.  They were an answer to Star Wars fueled dreams.

4) Playing the last Beta before release of EverQuest.  First person fantasy role-playing with other people, what a rush!  It wasn't until later that I realized the suckage of sharing a fantasy world with several thousand other people.

5) Playing the hell levels of Diablo 1 with my firends.  It was great fun until one of them ruined it by showing us how to dup items.

lol privateer after a bunch of days mucking with the keyboard and failing most missions I decided to adopt a battering ram approach with the Orion. Head on collision with Retro Talons was instant kill for me and a slight scratch on my front hull.  :drill: Finished Righteous Fire with the same strat too.

Yeah the first couple WC games were cool as heck. Trying to sideways strafe some dude while you're both sailing through an asteroid field...god I hated asteroids.

Music is a good point. HoMaM 3 took music to another level imo. Loved the Quake soundtrack, too.

 - five of us sneaking in to the offices of the company my buddy worked for at nine PM on a Saturday, to play Warcraft 2 on their office lan.
 - the joy of seeing "3d" for the first time with Wolfenstein 3d
 - the sheer adrenilane rush of the first two months of AC Darktide (before the cheating, power leveling, etc kicked in)
 - UO beta, spending two hours making your first chain coif, becuase of the massive lineup outside the Minoc forge (yes, this was a good memory)
 - all nighter NHL 94 tourneys
 - succesfully setting up an Arc-net network to play co-op Doom for the first time.

- Playing Ultima 5 on a C64 with a friend. We were 8 and we didn't speak a single word of english.
- The first time I heared PC sound with a soundcard instead of the internal speakers in Ultima 6. I recorded the tunes and heared them for weeks on my walkman.
- Wonder Boy in Monster Land on the Master System, hunting for coins to get better gear.
- Mario Cart/Bomberman nights with a bunch of good friends. The best multiplayer experience ever.
- Final Fantasy 2,3,6 on SNes during a looong summer.

I gotta come back in with one more: Wing Commander I. I was flying a mission with "Spirit" and it was a rough one. Her ship got pretty well torn up but we made it out alive. On the way back to the base ship though, I accidentally nudged her ship, inflicting that one extra bit of damage that caused her to lose control and crash into the deck. I honestly don't recall another time were I felt truly bad about something in a video game. But there was nooooo way I was running that mission again.

Oh man, Bomberman and Gauntlet.  Jesus christ, were those good times.  Fuckin' super bomberman sessions were some of the best multiplayer times I ever had before being captured by starcraft.

Figuring out that by changing my computer's clock, I could control what monster Commander Keen VI asked me the name of before it would let me play the game (I only knew two or three). My first experience circumventing copy protection.

Watching Tyrael shatter the world stone. I still think that scene is really, really pretty for some reason.

Getting pissed when my friends told me that I should start playing a "real" character in Super Smash Bros. Melee, since I kept using Peach and Jigglypuff. Much (much!) later, getting good enough to pound the crap out of their Marths with my Jiggs. And finding out that Peach was high tier all along!

Re: Wing Commander Couldn't you send your Wingmen back if they were heavily damaged? Thats what I did with everybody but Maniac (who wouldn't listen anyway). Or was that WC2?

I couldn't stand my Wingmen dying. The empty mess hall would depress me as I would miss out on story sniplets.

Jiggly>All.

My first run from Kelethin to Qeynos.  My quake2 clan all moved to EQ, and after a few weeks in Faydwer we decided to make the run to pick up one of our clan, who had a rolled a half-elf and ended up starting in Qeynos. We met a dwarf at Highpass, who said he knew the way, so we followed him. Poor bugger died in West Karana and was bound back in Faydwer. We never did run into him again.

I logged into my character during a recent trial and the ambient background sounds in the original Norrath bought it all flooding back, less so the game itself.

My answers to this sort of thing always suck.

1) The original Ninja Gaiden.  The whole game.  If there was only one game I could go back in time and play again, this would be it.  Or the next one on my list...
2) FF7.  The whole game.  Too many things to list.
3) SWG wins for single defining momemt...when I finally unlocked my jedi.  I kind of teared up, a mixture of pride, relief, joy, nerdboner. 

Booting up Ultima V and getting a sense of the scale and depth of the world.  On an Apple IIe.  It felt like you could do anything there.  NPCs slept during the night and walked during the day.  The most immersive gaming experience until that point.

 

You're right! Your list does kinda suck! I mean, you only listed 3 things, so FF7 is 33% of it.

 :awesome_for_real:

I guess I'll never understand the intense dislike some people have for that game.