What is your Fondest Nostalgic Gaming Moment?

[rk47]

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.

[AutomaticZen]

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.

[apocrypha]

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 

[Ironwood]

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.

[Falconeer]

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.

[Lucas]

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 ;

[Xanthippe]

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. 

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.

[Yegolev]

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

[ahoythematey]

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 

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 

[Falwell]

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.

[justdave]

* The way MechWarrior II made you feel it was real.

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.

[Tebonas]

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.

[Draegan]

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.

Who were you in Duris?

[MisterNoisy]

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.

[Brolan]

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.

[rk47]

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.  Finished Righteous Fire with the same strat too.

[Sky]

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.

[Bunk]

 - 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.

[Hoth]

- 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.

[raydeen]

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.

[ahoythematey]

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.

[ezrast]

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!

[Tebonas]

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.

[FatuousTwat]

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!

Jiggly>All.

[penfold]

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.

[Cyrrex]

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. 

[UnwashedMasses]

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.

 

[schild]

2) FF7.  The whole game.  Too many things to list.

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

[Cyrrex]

 

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