What's your fondest gaming memory?

[𝐍𝐲𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐥]

Most of us have played video games long enough to have experienced some of the best memories in our our lives. What's a memory that you will forever think back on as one of the best gaming moments in recent memory?

[coldhand25]

I got two that I like to think back on - one is playing Rayman 2 for the very first time. It is still to this day my most favourite game, and I'm pretty sure nothing will ever top it. I remember all the suffering, when I didn't know what to do, and we didn't have internet at home, so I couldn't look things up, but even if we had, I didn't knew any english at all (I learned german at that time), so I had to call my dad or mom to help me figure out what I'm supposed to do.

The other good memory must be the times we played Cossack - European Wars in multiplayer with my father and siblings. Playing til late at night (until my mom came and told us it's time to stop), it was something we used to do every once in a while.

[Ertrick36]

Maybe it's the OP's username and picture making me think of this, but...

Somehow beating Fallout: New Vegas for Caesar with good karma.  I mean, looking back on it now it's easy to do because most tasks you need to complete for the Legion don't actually net you negative karma - I think even stuff like helping the Omertas prepare to basically slaughter everyone on the Strip doesn't net you negative karma for whatever reason.  But go all the way back to when I did it for the first time, it was when the game had only been out for, like, maybe a year or so, and of course I was a lot younger (probably even a teenager).  I was like, "holy shit, I beat New Vegas as a bad guy with good karma".

Also, any time I tried an entirely new franchise and loved it, such as when I played Fire Emblem: Awakening.  Nothing beats the novelty of discovering a new gem, and it's especially so when you weren't expecting anything.

[Fabulously Olivier]

So, this is a difficult one to quantify because there are moments that I like for many reasons. 

 

But how about the one that got the most visceral reaction from me. Just, straight up drove me to uncontrollable tears.

 

The choice in the final level of Bastion.

 

Spoiler

So, you have a very small circle of friends/fellow survivors, and one of them is named Zulf. At one point, he leads a faction of Ura to destroy your base. Through side missions, you find out why he did it, and well, it's not all black and white.

 

In the final mission, the Ura turn on Zulf for bringing down your unstoppable wrath on them. So you have a choice. Wield this powerful weapon and wipe out the enemy or drop it to pick up your wounded friend and carry him to safety. And if you choose the latter, well, it's the most simultaneously heartbreaking and gratifying experience. The enemy fires on you as you slowly make your way through their ranks. But then, as you struggle through, taking health potion after health potion, they stop, pause, and take in that you are not their enemy. And they let you through. All while the game's gorgeous soundtrack plays on.

 

And that moment was just... I can't even.

 

[EricaofRenais]

The moment I 100% completed The Legend of Zelda The Minnish Cap without using a guide once is up there (MC was the first game I ever beat). 

I also have many fond memories of playing Wii U games with my old dog in my lap while I played (I still cry some when I play my Wii U because I still miss her even after 2 years).

I have fond memories of playing Soul Caliber 2 with my friend, we played Brawl too, but I liked Soul Caliber better at the time and was better at it back then.

Playing Radiant Dawn for the first time is pretty high too, I knew next to nothing about the game so I didn't know it had four parts so when I first played it made me so happy how much content it had. 

[Reality]

Wizardry 8 -  Had never experienced such "party banter" before - You use literal generics, in this game but Chaotic female voice 1 and Aggressive Male voice 2 have more personality than most characters in full RPGs  - It got me real excited for Jagged Alliance afterwards, but even though JA and JA2 are better games by the same studio, they don't quite have the memorability of my first character ever dying in a party only to be met with "The dead guy, what was his name again?" 

Worms Armageddon - playing the game without planning and just having a chain reaction of guy going flying, hitting a mine, going flying again, killing someone else during their death animation, that second guy flying down a cliff and landing next to one of my own guys, and then drowning my guy during his death animation - 

MDK 2 -  This game will save your health on a per-checkpoint basis, so I got put in a situation somewhere (I think 7D-7E) where I had to go without taking damage because I could only load that save file with minimum health.

Monaco: What's Yours is Mine - multiplayer speedrun = good memories. I always tell people Prestige and Red Carpet were the most fun.

Ace Combat 5 Mission 3 - this level sold me on the franchise due to the Osean Fleet radio chatter.

I have a lot of woahmo ments, but that usually more to do with game-design than a full-on memories. 

 

 

 

 

[indigoasis]

I tend to forget a lot of my favorite moments (especially the ones that give me goosebumps), but for a memory that I DO remember...

I was on the final map of Three Houses on Claude's route (the route I chose first). I was close to beating Nemesis, so I sent Byleth to use Sublime Heaven on him. I think it was enough to defeat him, but to add icing on the cake, I got a critical hit on Nemesis AND activated the Crest of Flames. (Byleth also got a level up, woohoo!) What made this so special was that I don't think I had seen anything like that happen in the game yet. My favorite part of all this? I beat the game on September 20th, which was the day I had set for Byleth's birthday.

That was a more recent-ish memory, but one to remember nonetheless.

[Captain Karnage]

that's really hard for me to say, I have a lot

there are a lot from when I was a young kid, but I think I have better memories from the 7th generation, with me getting to play online and meeting different communities. Minus the Xbox 360 livechat

I think my favorite was when I got to rush home with my copy of Halo Reach and going online with my cousin to play the multiplayer all night, doing the single player, and the hours spent making maps on the Forge

[eclipse]

Playing through FFXV.  Advanced the story whenever my mom was home, so we both got to see it.

Spoiler

Mom wanted a happier ending.  Ah, well.

 

[Callie]

Bioshock infinite game. What a master piece game. Some best moment I still remember from that game :

- when the player chose paths. all the path is diffrent , but still lead to an end that he will sell his daughter to pay debt.

- A man and a woman hold a board that show 2 path the player become. 1: still Booker DeWitt and try to save his daughter back, 2 Comstock.

 

[Brave Lance]

Completing the Subspace Emissary for the first time with my brother is definitely up there. We were young enough that we didn't even know there were more games in the series than brawl, let alone what characters were in this game. We completely lost our minds at practically every moment of the game, and when sonic made it in (we were big fans of mario and sonic at the winter olympics) that was special. When the Great Maze came around we spent weeks on it, and our mom eventually printed out a whole bunch of sheets that when put together made a map of the maze for us to get through. Brawl holds a lot of great memories for me, but going through an adventure like that with my brother is one of the best in all of gaming.

The next one is a little weirder. Facing Ganondorf in Wind Waker, I killed him at the exact same time as he killed me, which apparently corrupts that save file and every future save file so that whenever you kill him you get forced into this out of bounds area where Ganondorf is T-posing at you and the ground isn't fully loaded and it's very clearly so broken. I was, like, 10, and my brother and I were really creeped out. I'll attach a link to the glitch if I find it. 

In Lego Star Wars, the level on Bespin had a mechanic where Lando could kneel down and kiss Leia's hand. The thing is, the action can't be stopped by Leia, so I was able to torment my brother the entire level by keeping him eternally in that animation, even causing him to fall off the edge a lot while initiating it when he was trying to make jumps. I'm sorry, I was really evil back then, but it's still a fond memory.

On Christmas Eve some friends of my family and their kids would visit for dinner. Their two kids, one girl older than me by a year and one younger, both brought their DS's so we could play pokemon together. Except apparently one year makes a huge difference since I couldn't deal with her Darkrai, ever. Just when I thought I had finally one she'd pull out some other insane pokemon I'd never seen before and I'd get swept. I was beating my head against a brick wall for years, and even now I still can't beat her, but the challenge was always so exciting.

And to end it with one that actually happened this decade, back when Minecraft was really popular I was 2nd in command of a personal server on Mineplex. Personal servers were able to run current minigames, past ones and unreleased ones, and our server was dedicated to not every single game, not a selection of the owner but one unreleased game: Zombie Survival. ZS was a game where one player would be turned into an alpha zombie and all the others would have to try to not get killed and thus turned into one. There were a whole bunch of npc zombies also trying to kill players, but they were much weaker than the alphas. We didn't really play it normally, though- we established our own rules. One of the two maps that had been made for the game had a part with a mountain, and we got every single player to defend that mountain, with some defending the bottom (usually the first to die), some watching the sides for climbers, some watching stairs, and some watching the top where a waterfall came down from. We eventually came up with the idea of separating into small squads, each led by one of the admins and a couple mods, each with their own specific jobs. Some would defend and some would be mobile and some would snipe from a distance. It was organized chaos, and we became the most popular personal server on Mineplex whenever we ran it. It got me new friends, some which I still have and some which I don't, and it gave me something really fun and uniting during high school. And the game was never officially released. We just made our own fun. Oh, and our rules would also establish one player as the "king" for everyone to try and protect. If the king survived there would be some special game played.

That's it. Really just reminiscing about days long gone. Not to say that the memories I've made recently are bad, they're just not as powerful.

[Hanes]

I don't have anything. Mostly singleplayer and videogames don't cause a reaction from me most of the time so I don't generate many memories.

The "best" memories I have are:

Asking my uncle why my giant Onyx was defeated by a mere Poliwag.

Having a level 60 Noctowl carry my team in Crystal and never beating the elite four

Seeing Clive die in Echoes. Seriously, I don't know why but his death animation I remember happened a bunch (why are you so bad clive?)

Beating Castlevania: Circle of the Moon for the first time when I was 11. It's a tough game but today it wouldn't be too much, back then it was a huge deal though.

Constantly beating my brother on Smash Bros. Ultimate

Playing MK8 at night on a friend's house way long ago (I miss those friends but I moved) also traded a pokemon card but i dont remember which.

Playing Minecraft fro the first time with my brother and 2 cousins. We built a house together and it was all fine until my brother thought of the genius idea to burn down a tree besides the house... why not just break it???????!? Shit ensues and we are panicking and try to stop the fire with water. We manage but now our house is filled with water and has a side burned off. Then the power goes out and we didn't save. So we stuck for an hour and a half playing "Slenderman" with some flashlights on the roof. When the power gets back on we think on no tletting our brother play for being such a dumbass but he wasn't happy with it (obvs) so we just let him and told him to stop being a moron with the fucken' tree. We rebuilt our house midway and that was it, our first minecraft world.

Ok so I had more memories than I thought, cool.

[Anathaco]

Well, I have quite a few:

Super Mario Galaxy 2: This was the first video game I ever beat, and I spent hours that night on the final level. Upon finally beating Bowser, watching the ending, and wondering who the weird space girl was (I hadn’t played the first one), I turned the game off and realised that I had received a WiiMail (I’m just calling it that, can’t remember what it’s actually called) congratulating me on beating the game. That was... legitimately rewarding to see, and definitely something that I miss upon beating a new game now.

LEGO Indiana Jones 2: Wii: Once when my cousin came over, him, my brother and I started playing. We managed to drive a car into a river, only for it to respawn at the edge of the road and fall in again. Wash, rinse, repeat. The three of us were just laughing our asses off  the whole time, and we somehow managed to get a video of it in between laughs (though we have since lost it). Admittedly, I haven’t thought about that moment in years, but it just popped into my head while I was trying to think of something, and it is a pretty fond memory of mine. 

Paper Mario: Colour Splash: This was actually the first turn based RPG I ever played, so I was pretty crap at it. I am a little embarrassed to say I struggled to beat a bloody Paper Mario game, but hey, it’s the truth. Regardless, the game had so many memorable and charming moments that the entire game deserves to be on here. Specific moments include that one train level which included an existential Shy Guy opening up to Mario about how he dreams of a better life away from Bowser’s army, and an army of complaining Toads (“My wife left me!”), fighting said Existential Guy later on and horrifiedly resetting once I realised who I just killed, and the ending, which actually made me cry (pls no judge)

Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia: I got to Act 4 on a flight, so my vacation was half relaxation, half prepping/planning for how I was going to tackle the next battle. 

Eventually I got sick and had to go back to the hotel room early with my dad, because he was also pretty tired. Both of us took a nap, but I kept thinking about Echoes, because I had just come off a failed attempt of the final map the day before. So I climbed out of my bed, and walked over to where my 2DS was on charge.

Keep in mind that I was still sick as a dog, but I was just lying on the ground, DS in hand, grinding to finish Echoes’ final map.

It took me almost 2 hours, but in the end I did it. It felt really good, despite the fact that I was still shivering from my fever. But those credits were the most rewarding thing I have ever experienced. My dad woke up midway through the credits and seemed confused as to why I was holding back tears. I blame Heritors of Arcadia.

Xenoblade 2: The entire ending had me in tears. So, automatic fond moment.

[BrightBow]

Beating Star Fox 64 on hard route for the first time. I spend around 1 hour on the boss of Zoness before I figured out how to damage him. And ultimately ended up beating the game without any lives left. I had no idea if I needed to boost or if boosting just made it harder for me to keep track of James. Or what would happen if I took a wrong turn. Or if the flames behind me were actually a threat or just for show. So that was pretty intense, to say the least.

There was also the first time I managed to collect all 120 stars in Super Mario 64. The next day on my way to school, I meet up with my best friend and we quickly exchanged the fact that we collected all the starts on the same day independently from each other. Might seem silly now, but I was a little kid back then.

Also when I first heard the World Map theme in Tear Ring Saga.
Admittedly the decay of Fire Emblem hit me pretty damn hard. There were other franchises that moved away from what I loved about them. Like the Gothic series or the Elder Scrolls series. No biggie.
Awakening however was a special case due to it being actively insulting. The implication that one who loved the series as it was, one that was about people caught up in the horrors of war would love to see the series to be about a bunch of self-pontificating sociopaths who take pleasure in cruelty and murder. Not to mention that we'd want to actually get intimate with those people. *urgh*
While criticism of the series' direction has become a lot more common these days, back then Awakening was universal beloved. I can't say remember anyone else calling it out back then. Everyone was just shrugging of my complaints by telling me that the series had always been that way. Well, that is if they weren't just throwing insults and accusations.
So with everyone accusing me of hating the franchise that I loved, shaming me for even being on the board and most importantly: denying that my experience with the series over the years was even real, being able to play another past Fire Emblem game that embodied everything I love about the series and consequently gave me the assurance that all the time I spend with those games was not just some delusional fever dream, was pretty therapeutic.
But it really was that map theme that just instantly gave me that feeling of relief and that sense of being welcome.

[Hecatia]

I can say that I have my fondest gaming memories on three stages of my life:

On my childhood: The first game I ever played was Super Mario Bros., emulated in a PC running Windows 98 at the age of 4. My big bro helped me with harder levels, but I remember making it to world 8-3 because the last Hammer Bros. were super difficult.

On my adolescence: The first two Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games endings made me cry a lot. Those had such great stories and I'll never forget how a game made me cry... Oh, add the ending of gen one of FE4 too! FE8 was also a game that marked my adolescence, but not as much.
This was also the first time I got a Nintendo console ever, a used Wii, but I took advantage of everything about it and played it with my friends every weekend.

On my recent adulthood: It was actually a mix of FEH and Smash that helped me through dark times, when I ended up in a toxic relationship with a gal who only wanted me to spite another gal who had feelings for me and when I got diagnosed depression because I was stuck in an university studying something I didn't expect to hate. Now the same gal who had feelings for me is my actual girlfriend, we nerd about FE or any game we like almost everyday and thanks to FEH the relationship grew and grew until we decided to have a serious relationship, now we're planning on living together.

Here I am hoping that the future looks brighter for us! 😄

 

 

[eclipse]

Might as well post the runner-up, since it's more pertinent to FE.

Back when SD was released in the US, I picked up my copy, drove home. . .and had my car break down in the middle of a busy parking lot.  Someone stopped to help, flagged over several other people, and they managed to push my car to somewhere a little less inconvenient.  My first experience with SD was in the waiting room of a car dealership.

While it sounds traumatic, it's a fairly sweet memory for me.  The people that pushed my car didn't have to do that, but they made a lot of people's days better because they could.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

A lot of my fondest gaming memories were with other people. For instance, I used to compete in Project M tournaments many years ago. And one day my friends decided our typical hangout/training sesh should be spent going to a huge venue up in North LA. It was a road trip of several hours, but I never seen a place like that before. Multiple games were being run at once with booming announcers and commentator desks in the back. The concept of streaming your tournament to Twitch was fairly new at this time. I was used to our tournaments being held in arcades and trading card/video game hobby shops. My first set went very well. For some reason my friend was striking a conversation with me in the middle of it before asking "so how did your set go?" to which I responded "I'm kinda...in the middle of it." He must have thought it was a friendly sparring match. When it was over, my friend congratulated me on my win before telling me he was my next opponent in round 2. Yikes, my win/loss ratio against him was probably 3:97, he was the better player in every way. But we both promised to fight our heart out, and it was a great set. My run ended soon after in Losers, but I got to watch the two of my friends I rode up with upset the Doubles event with a first place win and that was a big day for all of us.

Another fond memory was when we got together and hooked up a PC to the tv and played, of all things, Rogue Legacy. We handed off the controller on each death. And when it was our turn, we decided the music we would play on a smart phone hooked up to external speakers. I don't remember which track I selected, but I do remember lots of castlevania music, and I think soon after that night I played Castlevania 1 for the first time and realized those games are pretty great. I was also the best Rogue Legacy player in the room so it felt good to flex my skills with a very long run. 

My fondest, recent memory is probably the day RE2 remake came out. I was glued to that tv for about an hour before being called away for some chore. And when getting up, I noticed my hands were shaking. I didn't realize I was so terrified of the enemies for a remake of a game that never scared me once as a kid. Plus, unlike the original, the remake is played in almost total darkness, and you must rely on a flashlight. There was a lot of nervous triple checking of corners and turning up to speakers to make sure I can hear the idle groans of a zombie up ahead. The sound and graphical design of that game was a lot to take in. And there were a lot of changes to familiar environments of the original to throw off veteran players like me.