Games

Killing Malenia. Finally.

Clutch team killing in Rainbow Six Siege. A rare occurrence but so much adrenaline.

Hillcrest in The Last of Us 2. Never have I had so much fun trapping and hunting people down. It really brings out the psycho killer energy.

Clearing Star Fox 64 with the good/true ending for the first time ever was an indescribable feeling.

Vermintide 2 dlc where Saltzpyre gets a piglet as a hat. Best goddamn $5 I've ever spent on dlc. His little legs and his butt wiggle around when you move and ofc the purity seals are on point.

Also way back in DCUO when fire tank was busted AF I kept summoning fireballs that I would then Chuck into my buddy trying his best to actually complete whatever task we were doing.

Also Also max difficulty helldivers 2 against the robots on Mavelon Creek. It was a struggle to survive more than 10 seconds out of the drop pod and it was some of the funniest shit I've ever played.

At least in recent memory, it was Dragon's Dogma 2 teaching me that I could pick up and carry downed party members by having one of my party members pick up another one and bring them over to me. There's so much that's possible in DD2 that just isn't in a typical videogame, that throughout the entire experience I was mostly learning niche interactions from my other party members instead of my own experimentation. It was a really cool experience, and felt way more impactful then a text prompt just lecturing me about all the mechanics the game has.

Breath of the Wild: stepping out of the cave in the begining, seeing that vast world in front of Link waiting to be explored

The Switch was the first console I had since the PS2, and the PC "gaming" I did in the meantime was mostly retro games on emulators or a bit of Stardew Valley, so the contrast to that was HUGE.

Another one was re-playing Ragnarok Online months after quitting (and giving away all equipment and deleting all characters) with a friend. We were barely second job class (he was Hunter, I was Priest) and rudimentarily equipped enough to beat Abyss Knights, so we went leveling in the area where those sometimes spawn. AND ONE OF THEM DROPPED A CARD! Cards are extremely rare (allegedly 0.01% drop chance) and monster-specific, and the Abyss Knight card is extremely valuable. So from one second to the next, we practically went from piss poor to rich AF.

Another extremely lucky moment was in Diablo 2: a regular cow in the Cow Level dropped a (perfect!) Windforce, at the time one of the best unique items in the game. I don't remember exactly but IIRC from some online calculator the chances for this drop were under one in a million (I wasn't even wearing anything with lots of MF%)

A few years back, testing out new zombie infection game mode in indie VR FPS, 12 of us on the server including the dev. I'm last man standing, everyone else is infected, making scary zombie noises as I pick them off with my trusty bow and arrow. I eventually succumb to the inevitable and get piled on, they're all too distracted making brain eating noises to notice the martyrdom grenade fall to the floor...

That was peak gaming for me.

Me and my cousin played FFXI starting in the beta. I got the game for free at official launch and we played for a long time. But the greatest moment of gaming excitement is when we got the peacock charm drop from a super rare NM. I'm pretty sure it was the rarest, most valuable item in the game at the time. The NM was deep in a maze, and had a huge spawn window. I think it was something like an IRL week or something, and even if you managed to tag it from the countless other players camping it, you still had a very low chance of the drop.

I spent the night at my cousins one weekend and we went to bed one night after camping it for hours and left our characters logged in at the spawn point so we could check the combat logs to see if anyone got it while we were asleep. When I woke up, it had not spawned, but my cousin had already got up and left the cave. I was surprisingly alone in that room for the first time ever. No other players. After about 30 minutes, it spawns. I'm alone, and not strong enough to kill it by myself. My cousin somehow managed to make it from Jueno to the maze (like at least a 10 minute run) before anyone else showed up, and we got the kill and the drop.

We were literally screaming and high fiving so hard that his step mom thought we had won the lottery or something.

We both put it on at least once just to say we had, and sold it for more money than we'd ever imagined. We then bought the best gear for our characters and felt like gods.

Never even made it to max level, but holy crap nothing has ever come close to that level of excitement in or out of a game.

I don't know if that's count, but I spent one Summer almost every night playing on an almost dead private WoW-Server with my Brother and my best Friend. Since we were only 3 People and the Server was almost empty, it felt like we had the whole World for us. This was such a fun time back then......

As a millennial, I'm probably not alone when I write Red Alert, Atlantis, Diablo and Fallout 2 on a computer without internet connection. Also endless demos from PC Gamer CDs.

The more unusual game I want to add is Warlords 3. Got it as a Christmas gift from my cousins boyfriend (he was maybe 20 years older than me). Probably because he wanted someone he could play shared screen PvP with. Spent a lot of time with that game. The same guy also gave me a pirate copy of Diablo. I should probably give him a call today and thank him.

Also playing Tibia on a 33k dial up connection was special. A very laggy and expensive experience. Always afraid that mom would just turn off the connection because she had to make a phone call. And the true horror I felt when I encountered another player or a new monster deep within an unexplored dungeon. I didn't like WoW when it came out. Probably because of emotional bluntedness that free PvP in combination with gear + xp loss causes.

And I'm still chasing the dragon.

Rank, taking out 2 full teams while my dead teammates watched and cheered. With health that even a sneezed would kill me.

My hands were shaking and my heart rate high AF, fucking diamond Apex.

I think nfsu2, we got it for christmas and played it for 2 full days in a row.

But tbh i still remember my playlist (flyleaf - i'm so sick/ fully alive, hinder - wings of an angel, Marilyn Manson - the beautiful people, a perfect circle, Korn and a couple others) i used while playing wow for the first time when you could get to lvl30 within a certain trial period. Definitely been hooked for some time but never made it to lvl cap nor did i get sny good gear.

Skyrim gobbled up the most hours of any game.

But i think wow really offered the best escape of real life back then for me, which is my main drive for playing games.

Being able to do the right thing and actually getting rewarded for it is a thing that keeps me coming back to videk games.

Real life isn't really like that most of the time. It will drain you completely, eat all your good intentions and shit you out the other end completely drained and empty handed.

There are too many. Completing Lode Runner on my C64. Playing the Oregon Trail as a kid and making silly names 'Tit face has died of dysentery'. The first time I played Sonic on my megadrive on Christmas day 1991. Playing Wonder Boy on my game gear for hours with my little bro. Crash Team Racing or FIFA tournaments (any FIFA after 16 is rubbish) on PS1 with my mates. Playing Echochrome on the PS3 on LSD. When the nuke exploded in Modern Warfare 2. Playing through Inside in one go in the dark by myself. Winning a PS5 in a raffle the day after my xbox1 died.

Probably back on dota1 before matchmaking and meta and all that crap, you could play any hero in any role on any lane and everyone was mostly just having fun

I got Kim to dance with me in the church in Disco Elysium

Ace Combat 4 and 5 both made me feel awesome, then sad, then vengeful, and then awesome in their campaigns. They start as casual arcade styles, throw in some grief, grow the antagonists' justification, then the skies start speaking Latin and you systematically destroy some megabase. I was fairly young, so now sad Spanish guitar riffs cause me grief when thinking about Yellow 4 and 13. Is that joy? The memory of a fairly casual arcade game weaving in a heartfelt tragic war story?

At risk of making this my only personality trait, Far Cry 2's desert at night was a treat for me. I seek out similar experiences in real life now. It didn't necessarily create that desire, but it was my first open world game, if I remember correctly. It didn't make me jump for joy, it just made me feel serene.

I'm sure it was driven by the memes, but Portal 1 gave me a great sense of accomplishment. It was mild reaction skill with some decent logic puzzles. The build up, the turn, the fight, the final song. Quite a trip.

Overall most joy might go to Forza Horizon 1. First open world Forza title, first (for me?) open world racing game with decent driving mechanics, excellent variety of cars, hit me at my peak interest in house music and other EDM, showed me Colorado scenery I'd see IRL 10 years later, and the campaign was focused around the Woodstock of a [cars X EDM] festival. I wish that was real and I wish the scene would be respectful. But, unfortunately, you can't control 300 drivers and prevent them from one-upping each other and making it dangerous and disrespectful. And you gotta pay for parking everywhere nice. See: h2o, ocean city Maryland.

Just a small thing.. I must have played Civ II for hundreds and hundreds of hours as a kid. Then one day a large civilization in civil disorder had its capital taken and one half of the empire seceded as a brand new civilization. I yelped.. one of those joyful wtaf moments..

Going to a big tf2 LAN in England and watching the games with a crowd of people that shared in the love for that game.

Made me realize for the first time why some people obsess over sports.

River of Sorrow in Metal Gear Solid 3. First regular then as "no kills" run. It's something that made me genuinely question everything while playing a video game. Everything.

When I beat Grim Fandango.

It was bitter-sweet, because you ::: spoiler have to leave one of your companions behind, him being a spirit of the land; while you ride off to the land of eternal rest with your new love interest spoiler :::

Don't know if it's the greatest joy, but I absolutely adore the sound effect in the original borderlands where you set a Crimson Lance person on fire and they scream before being disintegrated after their health depletes. Sounds horrible, but it's just a sound I think they did a really good job on.

Finishing the Easter egg at the end of origins in black ops 2 zombies after trying all night and seeing the special cut scene with my friends on Xbox 360 has to be up there as core gaming achievement.

"Rock 'N Stone!"

Playing Left4Dead2 versus with 8 friends, running my own custom 'Random' mod. That game was so great to play matches in with the right people - and very fun to code sourcemod plugins for as well.

Beating most any "hard" video game is always a great feeling just due to the sheer hours that go into it. In some cases, you have to develop the memory and skill to do the whole thing in one sitting. I can't count how many from the NES era fit this criteria. Top of that list are: Contra, Bionic Commando, and most Zelda and Mega Man games.

The best one happened in the middle of my Dark Souls play-through. I kept having to quit playing after short sessions, as skill and vigor checks kept wrecking me. This lead to anger and rage that just made it impossible to proceed. Once I made the connection that I could concentrate more and flow through combat more easily while calm, I changed tactics to calming my own mind and keeping it that way. The game just "opened up" after that. From there on, it was much more about meditation and breathing than equipment and leveling - skills I now carry with me everywhere. DS literally made me a calmer and more resilient person.

Riding a snake in Getting Over It With Benett Foddy.

WoW probably holds the most cases of this for me.

World PvP was one front. Early on, just winning fights felt good. Then, as I got better, it felt more normal when it was an advantageous matchup for me. But the peak for me was during TBC, I was leveling my rogue and a hunter jumped me as I was mining. This was pretty much a worse case scenario, especially because the hunter was lvl 70 (max at the time) and I was still something like lvl 65. But even at the same level, a) a hunter is a natural counter for a rogue, and b) I was mining so I didn't even get the stealth advantage.

So there was a lot of dopamine when I ended up getting to finish mining that node and the hunter had to walk back to his corpse after I beat him anyways.

Also a lot of dopamine from finally beating raid bosses that my guild had been stuck on for a long time. Vael in BWL was the peak for that one IIRC.

A recent one that comes to mind is playing 4 player Bopl Battle with some buddies and just laughing our asses off.