Five Great Moments in Modern Gaming

Ever play a game and experience a moment that stuck with you for years to come? Maybe it was something you’d never seen before or something that turned an existing concept on its head. Or, maybe it was just a really novel Easter egg that got a laugh out of you—once you finally tripped over it during your third time through the game. Regardless of what it was, you never forgot it.

 

And with (what I loosely define as) modern gaming covering so much ground these days, there’s little that’s new under the sun. Less new ground, so less sticks with you. That’s where this blog comes in: Five moments from the PlayStation onward that have stuck with me since I started gaming.

 

 

#5. Mass Effect 2: Interrupts

Often punishing you with immediate death for failing to react in a split second, quick time events have been maligned for years. “PRESS X TO NOT DIE!” Ben Croshaw once said in his Web series ZeroPunctuation. Instead of outright killing you, BioWare changed things up: By pressing a button at the right time, you could interrupt a cutscene with a Paragon or Renegade action, ranging from pulling allies out of the line of fire to pushing enemies off of skyscrapers.

 

Up until this point, failing a QTE usually resulted in death or some other penalty. And while God of War didn’t outright punish you for failure, it didn’t incentivize success in quite the same way. Mass Effect 2 differed from previous efforts in that you never stood to lose anything. If you succeeded, you made things quicker or easier for yourself later, or saw an alternate turn of events that led to more or less the same end result in a characteristically different way. Who said QTEs had to be terrible?

 

 

#4. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: Hyrule Field

It should be no surprise that a Zelda game made a list of anything memorable in gaming, let alone Ocarina of Time. Yes, including one of the best-regarded games of all time in this list might be cheating, but don’t pretend seeing Hyrule Field for the first time (at the time!) wasn’t amazing.

 

Link lived in Kokiri Forest his entire life, until a quest entrusted to him by the forest’s guardian spirit led him outside. Setting foot on Hyrule Field must have been for him like it was for the rest of us. We’d seen open areas in games before, but nothing with this level of detail—at least not in 3D. Ocarina of Time pushed the Nintendo 64 to its limits, and at least for the time, the efforts made by the team were evident in the look and feel of the world.

 

 

#3. Silent Hill: First Otherworld Transition

Konami’s Silent Hill was creepy enough before things literally went to hell in this scene. Harry enters Midwich Elementary in search of his missing daughter, only to find the school overrun by monsters. When his exploration leads him to the basement, distant warning sirens begin blaring outside. Upon exiting, Harry finds himself in a warped version of the school. The world is covered in blood, grime and rust, and there are more and bigger monsters lying in wait.

 

The trickery employed in this sequence is what made it great: You crawl down a ladder and make your way down a cramped hallway, then climb another ladder into the “dark world” school’s courtyard. Unlike its contemporaries, Silent Hill used atmosphere and isolation to make players feel uneasy. Before the “Otherworld” transitions, the game was creepy enough, but the Silent Hill series is renowned for its dark imagery and penchant for throwing weird things at you just because it could.

 

 

#2. Shadow of the Colossus: Valus Boss Fight

To revive his lost love, Wander made a deal with an entity known as Dormin: Kill sixteen guardians and you get your girl back. Easy enough. How big can they be? Oh, just about... seven stories tall. When Wander stumbled upon the first boss, a massive club-wielding minotaur, you have to wonder what went through his head. Maybe, “No problem. Only fifteen left after this guy.” But the smart money says it was more like, “Oh god, oh god, I’m totally screwed.” Really, Wander, for a game called Shadow of the Colossus, what were you expecting?

 

For all its technical shortcomings, Shadow of the Colossus was and still is a marvel. It conveyed an incredible sense of scale with a vast, seamless world where your only interaction is with giants who want to flatten you, giving you a sense of isolation and wonder not felt since classics like Metroid. By the way, that seven-story minotaur? It’s the fourth-smallest enemy in the game.

 

 

#1. Metal Gear Solid 3: Pretty Much Everything

When the action froze after the fight against The Boss and players had to pull the trigger mid-cutscene and take her life themselves, that was big enough to make this list. But that’d be giving short shrift to Metal Gear Solid 3 as a whole. Whether it was the kinda-kinky joke scene with EVA pulling a transmitter out of Snake or the hidden Nightmare minigame about vampires, Kojima Productions was clearly having a lot of fun during development.

 

And what about The End? …No, not the end of the game—I never saw it. I mean the aged sniper who called himself The End. If you got the sniper rifle early enough, there was a brief window in which you could kill him from a distance. Even if you didn’t do that, you could kill The End without technically fighting him. How? Just leave your console on for 24 hours straight during the encounter: He dies on his own!

 

Metal Gear Solid 3 is a great moment in gaming in and of itself: It’s basically a metric ton of Easter eggs piled atop one of the best games ever made. As I started writing this list, I was positive my No.1 pick would be either Ocarina of Time or Silent Hill. But as I did more research, it became obvious: Was there a better way to cap this off than with a game that threw in dozens of memorable quirks? I’ll let you decide.

 

(But the answer is no.)