For Love of The Game 243
A feature from Gamespot this week is an interesting look at gaming moments that moved you as a player. Emotional moments for several of the editors are explored. From the article: "This isn't an article about violence in video games. It's a chance for us to consider some of the moments in our lives as game players that made us feel strongly about something that, in the grand scheme of things, is probably pretty trivial. These are cases in which games drove us to relative emotional extremes. This is both how and why we play." What would be a gaming moment that drove you to an emotional extreme?
Final Fanasty VII (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Final Fanasty VII (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why Final Fantasy is Great (Score:3, Insightful)
Yasunori Mitsuda's overworld music in Chrono Cross made my eyes water one late night playing it just from the sheer emotion behind the strings. As long as he's not doing battle music the man is a god.
Though another favorite is the joys of screwing around in GTA. Nothing more cathartic than throwing grenades at strangers in the subway.
Re:Well... (Score:2, Insightful)
Looking Glass was very good with emotional moments (Score:5, Insightful)
In Thief, when your client for whom you endured legions of undead morphs into the Trickster, and snatches your eye out of your socket and leaves you to die, bleeding. I was absolutely stunned that a game could have such an unpredictable turn of events.
In System Shock 2-- the initial glimpse of a zombie chasing down a Von Braun crewmember behind the fogged, reinforced glass window. Later, cowering and sweating behind collapsed file cabinets, out of ammo with a broken gun and no other weapon-- all the while listening to them call to me "join us... join us... the Many sings to us..."
Emotional games, those.
I shall wait for you in death's halls, my love... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that no game, nor any character, has managed to so deeply touch me as the character of Deionarra in Planescape: Torment.
I was therefore pleased, recently, to read an article on the site Gamer's With Jobs [gamerswithjobs.com] expounding on the virtues of the same character and game.
The episode "Longing," particularly, discussed in that article, and ultimately the character herself are kept just far enough from total exposition to be maintained as a tragic mystery whose explanation will be kept eternally just out of reach.
There's nothing quite so tragic as the loss of memory. You need only ask someone who has had a very dear loved one succumb to Alzheimer's disease to know this is the truth. And though it may seem a strange connection to draw, Planescape: Torment evoked for me the very real tragic quality of memory loss better than anything else I have experienced. And so yes, I do believe that games can speak to profound realities in our every day life.
Paintball-net (Score:3, Insightful)
It was humbling, and left me feeling a little hollow.
Descent (Score:3, Insightful)
Gaming moments (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll start with the generic sadness/surprise/exultation feeling that I think, looking at the other comments here, are what most of the other readers are thinking of. These kind of emotions are generally most commonly evoked by RPGs, as these have the time to establish characters and make you care for them. However, it's not exclusive to the genre.
Final Fantasy VI: I suspect I'm fairly unusual among the people posting comments here in that this is *not* my favorite installment in the Final Fantasy series. However, it's undeniable that it has a good plot with some pretty emotional moments, particularly given the technology it had to use. For me, the most powerful moment comes in the World of Ruin, when Terra decides to fight again.
Final Fantasy VII: Ok, "that" moment in this game has been mentioned by quite a few of the people posting above this and it certainly deserves to be. Plenty of other good moments in this game, though; personally, I liked Barrett's back-story.
Final Fantasy VIII: A slightly odd inclusion here, as this game's plot is really quite weak and a lot of the moments that Square clearly intended to be emotional just fall flat (eg. the bit where the main characters regain their memories of their childhood). However, the scene where Seiffer's side-kicks basically give up following him and ask Squall to beat some sense into him struck me as pretty powerful and well-done.
Final Fantasy X: Two real scenes stand out here; Yuna's "I can fly" moment in the wedding scene and the scene where Auron confronts Yunalesca.
Final Fantasy XI: Yes, the MMORPG. The cutscene you get when you enter Norg for the first time after beating the Shadowlord is actually incredibly well done and sets a hell of a tone given the limited tools available. Of course, the fact that getting this far is the culmination of months of effort also helps.
Wing Commander III: While cheesy, the cutscenes you get after the Kilrathi blow up the big Death Star alike and you see the full version of Angel's death scene made quite an impression on me at the time.
Wing Commander IV: The final section of this game, where you confront Tolwyn in the debating chamber is superb. Not only is it a rare moment of decent acting in these games, but it's an incredibly brave way to do the final obstacle in a space-shooter - not through a big space battle, but through a debate.
Knights of the Old Republic: The scene where the main character's past is revealed is utterly superb. I'd suspected there was a big plot twist coming, but this just took my breath away. In the course of one cutscene, the entire game-world is turned upside-down. The parallels to the famous "Luke, I am your father" scene in ESB are undeniable, but in many ways this is even more shocking. Further proof that Bioware can write much better Star Wars than George Lucas can these days.
Ok, now I'm going to move on to perhaps the second most common emotional reactions that games seek to inspire; fear.
Doom 3: A flawed game in many ways, but the first few hours of this, until I worked out the tricks the game used, scared the crap out of me.
Silent Hill 2: The first three installments in this series were all great (although the fourth is a big let-down). However, I think that on balance it was 2 that did the best job of scaring me. There's no one scene I can really point to; the whole game is just plain creepy.
Darkseed: an old adventure game, which in many ways is utterly forgettable. In most respects, this was a distinctly average game; the gameplay and the quality of the puzzles were far inferior to what Lucasarts were doing at the time. However, the location and creature designs, by H. R. Geiger (think Alien) were creepy as hell.
Kingdom Hearts: Ok, I admit this is an odd choice for this section. It's a Disney game
Ultima series moments (Score:3, Insightful)
I knew people would start posting about Final Fantasy stuff. So, to keep proper balance in the world, here's some from Ultima series.
Wayyyyyyy back when I was kid. My very own Commodore 64. Watching Ultima V's intro scene and such (since that was pretty much everything that worked properly in the warezed copy =) I didn't know English very much at the time, so I was just looking at the pretty pictures. Then I realized something very very odd: This game thing actually has a story. You know, video games were supposed to be about shooting things and stuff. (And this was in the C64 era. You couldn't really fit a very long story in 64 kb =)
Wayyyy later (but while I was still quite young) I got a legit copy of the PC Ultima V. I had realized that you can simply press enter to end dialogue instead of saying "bye". Heee! I was going to become a Metagaming Teenager! But then I ran into this one guy in the game that just told me that it was impolite to run away like that! Hrrrm... so much for becoming a Metagaming Teenager then.
Fast forward to last year...
In Ultima VII, one beautiful day, I had throughoutly wasted time in the mines of Minoc. No apparent clues could have been found, let alone anything that could have possibly helped me financially (how un-Avatarlike for me to think of such matters, but hey, this is Ultima VII part 1, no so Everlasting Goblet yet and money buys food). I stepped out of the mines, back to the bright daylike. And my eyes actually hurt. I noticed that the immersion was actually working really well. I was actually filling Avatar's part of the dialogues in my head. (that's what makes this role-playing game, see?) I felt the need to shout at fools who blocked my horse cart's way.
And of course, here's the obligatory EA-bashing bit - note, spoilers for Ultima IX. In the end of the first dungeon, I talked with a Wyrmguard who claimed that he was Iolo, and said that I could easily note that he was who he said since his bow and lute were in the other room. That sounded like the most dumb set-up ever. The guy must be holding Iolo up somewhere, I guessed. Besides, Iolo uses a crossbow! An obvious imposter, and a dumb one at that. So I killed him. ... Too bad the setup actually was that dumb. That was Iolo. I killed Avatar's best friend due to a colossally stupid set-up and a factual error in weaponry. I was very, very angry at myself and really hated EA for rushing this travestry to the market.