What's Your Most Exhilarating Game Moment?

[Morderkaine]

Not sure if Exhilarating or just damn funny....
Medieval Total War - im on top of a hill defending with a few hundred troops and the enemy is attacking me with approx 800 troops. I have a few catapults that are launching boulders at the enemy and I decide to click to follow the missile path on one of them. I watch the boulder fly at the enemy ranks and land smack in the middle of the unit of royal knights and watch the counter of enemy dead move up 1 (it was only about 10 out of the 800 enemy dead at this point) and got the message "The enemy king has been killed in battle!"
Another great thing in the same game was I was the english and to expand had to keep attacking the french, and the pope kept excommunicating my faction due to attacking another christian faith and it was seriously hurting my happiness. So I got fed up and invaded the papal states with a huge army. 2 battles later I got the message "The Pope has been overthrown and you have installed a puppet pope on the throne! All previous excommunications are null and void" I thought that was awesome.
Both times I laughed really hard.

 

[Morderkaine]

Oh and gears of war,playing multiplayer for the first time on a friends HD widescreen. After several matches I did the first curb-stomp on my friend (we didnt even know it was possible) and the horrified expression on his face at the brutal death and the reaction of "What did you just do to me?!??!" was priceless.
HL Counter Strike - AWP sniper shot got 4 people with one bullet in a map based in a 747 plane.

 

[guyy]

Hmm...I actually have a new one related to Portal, though you may not believe it.

The first time I played the final boss fight, I idiotically failed to notice where the second brain-orb-thing went (the one that lands up above on the high platform) for a couple of minutes and lost a lot of time. I didn't expect to have enough time left but kept trying anyway. When trying to drop the last orb into the fire, I had almost no time left but seemed to have just enough. I placed the portal over the fire pit, ran over to hit the button, and shot the other portal under the orb.

I was a bit off. The orb bounced out of the pit.

With about 10 seconds left I dashed back over in a desperate but probably hopeless attempt to finally drop it in. I placed the first portal again, hit the button again, and made the second portal. This time my aim was perfect and the orb fell right into the fire, much to Glados's dismay. Apparently I had managed to do it fast enough. But the awesome part was when I looked at the clock to see just how close a call it was. Know how much time I had left?

One second.

...No, I'm serious. Without even meaning to I had won without a moment to spare. And on my first try, too.

It was just too amazing for words...a ridiculously unlikely action-movie-like ending that actually happened on its own. I almost thought the developers somehow planned it that way.



TF2 has too many to count, but one of the funnier ones happened recently when I was playing as Spy...I walked up behind an engineer, who was hammering away at his upgraded sentry gun and had a dispenser nearby. Naturally I immediately backstabbed him. The sentry was pointed the other way, so as it tried to turn around to blast me apart I tossed a sapper onto it, disabling it. I threw another one on the dispenser as I ran out the door and back to my own base. The sentry and dispenser both blew up shortly after, since they had no other engineers. "All in a day's work."

That makes it sound more amazing than it was, but it was pretty hilarious at the time.

 

[BaronAsh]

Beating contra without the konami code. (I should have filmed it)

 

[MrHappy255]

Winning Mike Tyson's Punchout was amazing and without a broken controller to speak of. Good thing those old nintendo controllers were built sturdy, man I whipped that thing across the room a lot.

In COD4 having a 20 kill streak and just continually calling in the chopper hoping my turn will come up, (damn 50 person servers). I felt like I was totally on the defensive running and gunning, hiding until I could call in a whole bunch of easy kills and finally getting them.
Hard to repeat at least for me but man did I have butterflies in my stomach and a giant bloody smile on my face the whole round.

 

[Kedcom]

Playing Crysis at the moment. There's a new and even more exciting "This is so awesome!" moment every level! Loving it!

Looking back though, I'll never ever forget the first level of Goldeneye when you take out the Ruskies on the dam and then at the end when you (er... well Bond really) jumps off the edge.

There's so many other moments in so many game though that it's hard to know where to start really. Good topic choice!

 

[shatnershaman]

In single player beating Halo 3 on legendary using the mongoose at the end.

In mulitplayer when my team in Halo 3 ACTUALLY USED tactics so I flanked the whole red team and killed them with 2 grenades and ended up getting my 1st steaktacular.

 

[birdygirl]

Final level, maximum difficulty, Elite Beat Agents.

Struggling to make it through those last few phrases, then seeing that spinner come up, signalling that you're almost there and all you have to do is spin really freakin' fast for about five or ten seconds and you've got it...

Damn, what a finish.

I second that! That was flippin' difficult

 

[Ultrajoe]

Playing Halo on legendary co-op, At the end the driving sequence was extremely ... intense!

does it really matter about the difficulty?

yes, bigger blasts, more enemies and i'm fairly sure a shorter time limit (perhaps im wrong)

 

[Drugar]

Beating Sephiroth in FF7 after a 20 minute battle. Apparently, my mother came in halfway through and asked if I was ok since I was so intensely staring at the screen and flipping through orders. I've no recollection of it.

In Rome: Total War I had a massive army of the Julii marching on Athens when the elderly general (Gneaus the Merciless) died of old age. I'd foreseen the problem, and had been honing his grandson in the roman Scriptorums and Arena's, filling him up with a proper retinue and having him take care of some peasant uprisings to get his skills on a bit. With the Gneaus dead, I put Lucius on a ship and moved him to Greece. The army was a bit inland, so Lucius had to go by land for a bit. Against all my planning, he had to spend one turn unsupervised, trekking through greek lands.
I clicked "Next turn" turned a whiter shade of pale when I saw a massive army move out of Corinth to charge my future conquerer of the eastern lands. Almost a thousand hoplites versus a general and 30 of his bodyguard, no retreat possible. I was determined to inflict maximal casualties then, and took command of the battlefield. I was on the lower part of a mountain, long lines of Phalanx moving towards me.

Wait, phalanx? Slow moving, slower turning, only dangerous at the frontside. I let the greecian pigs come down the mountain, and then charged past them, turned around and cut through the first group of hoplites like a gladius through butter. The other groups were turning around, trying to surround me but careful running kept my general free.
In the end, hundreds of hoplites lay dead, I had lost two bodyguards. The unit was promoted to the first gold rank, and Lucius was an instant Roman Hero. I cheered in my seat.
And repayed the greeks by burning all their cities to the ground, of course.

 

[Librarian Mike]

Playing Goldeneye with 3 friends and coming into a room where they were all in the middle of a fierce battle. I just stood there watching it for a few seconds and then tossed in a timed mine. It was worth it for the stunned looks they all gave me at exactly the same time.

 

[dukethepcdr]

That's a tough one. I'd say the first time I managed to get Ryu to beat a boss in Ninja Gaiden Black stands out right now. That game is so hard that when I beat that guy in the dojo I was like "Wow, did I just do that?".

 

[Anarchemitis]

I had several in Half-Life 2.
[li]Walking into the zombie-infested tunnel full of goop and haunting wrecked cars with their lights on, with that exhilarating sound bit too.[/li]
[li]Walking under the bridge. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you haven't played HL2 all the way through.[/li]
[li]The chasm veiw before entering the Citadel.[/li]

 

[Strafe Mcgee]

Playing Burnout 3 for the first time was probably the most exhilarated I'd been by games for quite a while. I'd also like to add the sequence where you enter the tripmine room in the original Half-Life. Nothing quite as tense as knowing that if you make one mistake you're going to be a smear against the wall.

 

[captainfuzzy]

Starcraft: Any time I get the chance to drop in a full control group's worth of shuttles carrying goliaths into someone's base. It's not the most viable strategy by far, but the look on people's faces when they suddenly find their base infested with fully upgraded goliaths is just priceless.

 

[Geo Da Sponge]

The entire last hour or so of Mass Effect. Basically. Everything from the landing on Ilos to the end.

I loved that bit too! Especially fighting with no gravity on the Citadel!
Note: The previous sentence contained spoilers.

Also, running across Sandtrap on Halo 3 carrying the enemy flag in a Big Team game, and getting five kills with it along the away. I was rather suprised I survived that long.

 

[Quaidis]

Any moment while playing SplinterCell on the Wii with the terrible control scheme is an exhilarating moment. My heart continually leaped into my throat when I was trying to hide from some enemy and the Wiimote spontaneously decided to take the screen for a spin by gliding to the side of it. [To avoid a shit-flinging fest, that's the only Wii game I own with that control scheme problem. Metroid, I believe, had a similar one with moving the camera, but it was handled much better in term of controls.]

Any roleplaying game where I'm fighting some enemy - especially the last one - and my last life or death move ends up killing him/her/it off.

 

[PedroSteckecilo]

Everything after you set the Explosives on the Shagohod in MGS3.
The Attack against the Krogan breeding facility and the Finale in Mass Effect.
Fighting the Final Boss in Persona 3 (I was way underleveled but I did it damn it!)
Halo 2, leaping onto the back of the giant spider tank.
Uncharted: Drakes Fortune, the chase after the German U-Boat on the Waterfall incident.

 

[Gooble]

Getting 19 kills in a row on Halo 2, snipers only...was pretty pissed off I didn't get the 20th though

Any racing game where I'm in 2nd, am slower than the car ahead of me, manage to pass him and then have to try and hold onto the lead. It's so awesome when you pull it off.

Any online FPS where you have to try and defend somewhere, or survive, and you get into those close-quarter crazy shooting/butting situations...they rock!

 

[Samuel71]

I'm goddamned sick of this shit.