Two that come to mind:

• One that I still remember from high school. It was just a simple Counter Strike match. But it was down to me and one other guy. I switched to knife, turned the corner, there he was, going the other way. He didn’t see me. So I followed him, riiight behind him, around several corners, while chat spectated. Still never noticed. I finally knifed him in the back, chat erupted, I felt like a god even though I sucked at Counter Strike.

• Winning my first Rocket League tournament after years. It really felt like I’d done something that mattered.

Someone else’s comment about LAN parties jogged my memory. I only ever attended one (big one in a university auditorium), and for the most part, it was kind of meh. Until late in the night, a game of Savage got going, something myself and my friends had never played before. After a few other people hopping in and out of the commander role, I decided to give it a go. Before long, the game just clicked. I had four of my friends at the table around me designated as squad leaders and was barking orders to them as they moved across the map, I beefing them up with spells, poi ting out enemies, etc. We handedly shut down everything the opposing team could offer. It’s the only time that I can recall getting into a real tactical squad-based flow.

I didn’t chase that experience much, though, because nothing recreated the physical space I was in. I went on to play Savage 2, which I loved for a time, but I almost always eschewed the commander role.

Aerial dueling in Starsiege Tribes was a high for me that I will always chase. Any game that offers that freedom of movement + timing of shots always piques my interest. Wall running and leaping as the Alien in AVP 2 did much the same.

Hearing that we were missing half the game in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

This one IS a bit of a spoiler… but not much. For one, everyone knows it. Two, the game came out in the 1990s. That’s why everyone knows it. So anyway.

So you play this game. It’s like a Super NES game, but it’s on the PlayStation. It has CD quality music and voice acting (actually pretty shitty voice acting, but, I mean, it’s CD quality audio). Actually, let’s qualify that with a 45 second video. Aside from Dracula’s final line in the exchange, the lines are poorly read from a poorly written script and it shows. And yet, it’s still awesome.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tV33Ewf_hw

Anyway, it’s a fairly long game as far as Super NES games go. You go through the entire castle, you eventually confront the bad guy (who isn’t Dracula — he’s dead, and has been dead, you kill some other guy) and the credits roll. You won. Fine game. However, shortly after the game came out — it didn’t really take that long, but we weren’t all on the Internet then, so it took longer to get to some people — that if you did a few very specific things, you would instead see this ball above the last boss. Attack that instead, and the last boss is revealed to be a puppet, and he lets you pass… into the inverted castle. It’s the whole ass castle, but it’s upside down and has harder monsters. And take a wild guess who you fight at the end?

Its Game Boy Advance sequel, Aria of Sorrow, attempted a similar thing. Beat the last boss and you win, but do it with three souls equipped and… well, I’m actually not gonna spoil that. A cool thing happens. And you can go to this final area, it’s not a long area. If you win, you win the game harder… but if you lose in that final battle, you get this awesome cut scene that calls back to the video I posted above. So while they reused the gimmick, they did it in the best possible way.

None of the Castlevania games have captured that magic since. Bloodstained, the spinoff by the creator of Symphony of the Night, kind of does a similar thing in a couple spots, and it does have the false final boss, but I think it’s more clearly called out and I think you’re meant to know it’s not the end of the game. And I feel like it’s not a win if you take it, the game kinda laughs at you. Another game that poked fun at this was Shadow Complex, the shameless ripoff of Super Metroid on Xbox 360/Live Arcade. (Great game though!) After losing your girlfriend to paramilitary thugs in the Pacific Northwest and exploring a bit of their compound, you eventually get back to your car (Jeep?) and you have the option to leave. Credits roll and you pop an achievement called “Plenty of Fish in the Sea.” They knew you’d try it and rewarded you for doing so, but it’s clearly not the real ending (it’s too soon).

the very first Call of Duty and Tribes 2 on PC way back in the early 00s.

I used to be fairly “known” on the old “Planets” websites (PlanetQuake, PlanetTribes, etc) that were hosted via gamespy. I was popular, on a few of their camportals that were invite only and I worked on a couple of the gaming news sites providing art, writing reviews, and doing web dev stuff. I was friends with some very early internet celebs which really just consisted of guys that made webcomics or had their own websites. Friends with Mike and Jerry at Penny-Arcade, etc.

So anyways about once a week we’d all get together, Jerry from PA, myself, couple of gamespy guys, and a few other close mutual online friends and we’d play CoD, Tribes 2, etc. We started playing CoD fairly frequently. One guy on our team, Porkfry, had a thing about not playing as the Nazi’s so if we got into a game that put is on the Nazi side we’d always have to leave and find another server until we were Americans.

It was funny, we joked about it. just one of his many quirks.

Now on one map in CoD there was this german truck that had a raised flatbed. there was NO WAY to normally get in it but Porkfry had figured out that if you jumped at the rear of the truck at a certain angle you could get inside, duck down, and you’d essentially be hidden. So we did that. We would hide in the back of this truck and while the enemy team was frantically searching for us we would stop crouching and just blast them when they got nearby. We’d do this constantly and just howl with laughter over vent or teamspeak or whatever we were using. That’s what we did, just silly stuff like that. Or we’d be playing Tribes 2 and one of us would act like a disgruntled bus driver when flying the troop transport. We’d just do dumb shit in the games we’d play to keep us all entertained and make each other laugh.

I really miss those pure early internet days.

Playing Skate 2 for the first time on PS3 whilst blasting Fall Out Boy on my CD player.

Alundra for PS1 perfected the Zelda genre and I haven’t quite ever played anything like it.

I’ve had a few over the years. In high school I got all stars in Mario 64 and I beat Quake 2 without getting shot for the lulz.

In college I went through and beat all of the Adventures of Lolo games. I played hundreds of hours of FFXI but the real gem was later on when I could solo almost anything, including legendary Pokémon that normally take a party of six.

Portal and portal 2 are great experiences I’ve been through a few times.

I was obsessed over Pokémon Y. It was the first time I got into breeding perfect Pokémon with egg moves, hidden abilities, and perfect or zero IVs. I also tried for weeks to get 100 consecutive victories in Battle Maison but the third time I failed at 99 because the game cheats I threw in the towel.

In Pokémon Scarlet I really got into shiny hunting and have 200+ now. I also tried Masuda method for the first time but dang is that slow.

The last time must have been when Valheim released. That shit got me hooked. Now I am waiting for the Deep North biome to finish development before I play it again.

Now that I think about it the last time was when Schedule 1 released.

Ragnarok Online. Before the third jobs, and without donation items and high rates. I played on the kRO server for a while and afterwards for many years on a 5/5/3 private server. I still remember how it felt, the first time I played it. Never found anything like it again.

Now, I’ve played a lot of amazing games and some of them really hit me in the feels, but this was the first MMORPG I played, ever. I was like what, 15? when I started playing and I played this game with the same people, for years. In the same guild, over Ventrilo, I knew these people. From all over the world, we’d even set alarms and such to make sure people were there when WoE started and half of us were sleeping due to time zones, or to make sure we could keep the MVP boss schedules. Some of us even met in real life, we talked off-game as well. We grew up together, quite literally, from teenager to adult. It’s not surprising it left such a mark, I guess. Nowadays… well I’ve tried MMO’s but it just isn’t like that anymore.

I only have to listen to the soundtrack, music from Prontera or Amatsu, and boom, nostalgia!

For me it’s probably playing online games like BF2, Day of Defeat Source, TF2 and Live for Speed in about 2005-07. Communities and community servers back then were different and now sorely missed.

Grand Theft Auto 3.

Going into that for the first time was mind blowing. A true generational leap over everything before. Now you just get slightly nicer reflections and loading times and pay £500+ for the privilege.

So just shy of 10 years ago me and the dudes were playing a lot of Dota 2, we had played since early Beta. At this point in time the game was still young and hip so the ratio of casuals to sweaty mlg was much more forgiving, which was great because it put me and the dudes in the upper bracket especially when combined with shenanigans, nowadays we’d probably only be in the top 60 percentile at best.

Very few people knew about this or utilized it but you could put your level into stats instead of an ability, so I would find weird builds to focus on only 1 skill and stats. We discovered this build called Sand King Jesus where you could use a character called Sand King to sit, invisible, in sand storm AoE DoT effect on the lane and just never leave but the tradeoff was the inability to move without cancelling, items focusing on regen and armor items as well as utilizing another little known mechanic where you buy 2 stout shields: they used to have a 50% chance to reduce damage by 20 (almost all damage a creep can do) and it would run that 50% check for each individual shield. At the time there was an exploit where if you move, cancelling the Sandstorm ability, but recast it before the particle effect dissipated… Uh Oh! The particle stays put but the Sand King and the AoE radius both moved. That made him not immune to non-targeted stuns or hooks but it did make him extremely hard to hit with them. It also made it difficult to avoid the DoT if you couldn’t see where it was. Now there is an immortal, invisible, constantly damaging enemy on the lane, but sure you can still buy wards or keep firing shots in the dark until something hits: but Sand King has another ability called Burrowstrike. Burrowstrike is suppose to be used to instantly travel in a straight line towards enemies and stun them momentarily. But instead, you can burrowstrike away from enemies and then cast Sand Storm as soon as it comes off cooldown, and this ability allows travel up and down ledges and past trees. All of this culminates in “Sand King Jesus” because much like the mythical Jesus it would take forever to try and kill him and often still fail.

Now this is silly at best but the true greatest gamer high for me was this one match where I used this strategy to dominate middle lane, cutting off the creep waves with a well placed sandstorm to both take out an early tower as my creeps poured in damaging either the enemy mid or the tower, chipping away, and I get all of the last hits uncontested, started roaming and ganking with the boys, and buying up hearts, assault cuirrass, vladmir’s offering, refresher orb and for added AoE DoT a Radiance, and I became so tankie and my team had me covered on healing and providing DPS that I was able to enter the enemy fountain, where players respawn, and sandstorm in there for another 10 or 15 minutes before we had even taken down any towers before barracks. We were all laughing so hard at these real human beings on the enemy team reduced to NPCs unable to leave their own fountain and unable to do anything about it.

Awhile later they completely reworked the character.

Halo 3 Multiplayer before system party calls were a thing