The Gaming Den

I'm not putting this in the similar moments thread in MPSIMS, for two reasons. The first is that this is just restricted to videro james. The second is that this is for when the game made you specifically feel like a badass. Not 'something badass happened in a cutscene', though the lines can get blurred.

I'll start us off. Area 6 in Star Fox 64. That's the best level in the game. You and your teammates charge right through a defensive line of Venom's finest and the enemies just keep panicking more and more as you just contemptuously destroy whatever they can throw at you.

Mount and Blade. I was running around with a hundred dudes, including ten or so levelled-up companions. I was having fun. I rode into the Rhodok kingdom and started attacking minor lords as they were riding around, using my speed to catch up to them as they kited me.

When I pounced on one, I got a whole screenful of green messages saying "Lord X has joined the battle." It turns out that they had kited me into the entire grand host of the Rhodoks, and there were several thousand guys there.

We won. I was almost dead, all my companions were red, and most of my dudes were killed. I probably killed a thousand Rhodoks personally. But we won. It was awesome. It was the most badass feeling in the world, and my mouse finger *ached*.

Call of Duty 4's AC-130 level. Right after you do a mission of carefully sneaking past big groups of enemies and avoiding their attention, you get to play as the fucking giant plane they call in to support your team and annihilate those same enemies with impunity.

The most recent was escaping the reactor overload in the Portal 2 DLC/Mod Aperture Tag (basically, Portal 2 but with a gun that shoots the blue and orange gels instead of portals). You're basically told "Oh shit. Run!" and the flight is sufficiently cool, tense, fast, but at just the right pace you can do it in one or two tries.

On top of that, they do a nice thing with what happens at the end of that escape that I appreciated, but won't elaborate on because of spoilers.

John Magnum wrote:Call of Duty 4's AC-130 level. Right after you do a mission of carefully sneaking past big groups of enemies and avoiding their attention, you get to play as the fucking giant plane they call in to support your team and annihilate those same enemies with impunity.

I forgot about this. That game was really well-written and well-paced. What happened :-(

My speculative story is that for Modern Warfare 2, they were very self-consciously attempting to be Bigger And Better Than MW1, so they stuffed in as much random bullshit as they could to make it epically vast. And then, somewhat famously, after Modern Warfare 2 came out there was a huge dispute between Infinity Ward and Activision that precipitated the departure of a huge core of their team, who formed Respawn and made Titanfall. Hence Modern Warfare 3 and Ghosts were made by a shell of the team that did CoD1, 2, and 4.

Ar Tonelico 2, whenever you get to use Replekia, its theme starts playing, and then next turn you do like a million points of damage.

1. Most times that I won at a new boss fight in Devil May Cry (1/3/4). It's so overwhelming and seemingly-bullshit, but with enough practice and skill you can eventually beat them and then go from there to making it look easy. Similar to a lesser extent with some parts of Bayonetta. These games are good for making you, the player, feel like you did something amazing by taking out whoever you took out, by a combination of good presentation and very high but manageable difficulty.

2. Making big plays in a action RTS/MOBA/dota-clone/whatever. Dota 2 is my particular vice, but it seems very common in all of them that there are certain heros who can make huge plays happen to completely swing a fight around for example, and executing this sort of thing and thereby winning gives me this sort of feeling all the time.

Metal Gear Rising, the final boss. Beating that? Yeah.

I also liked Red Dead Redemption. Its multiplayer lent itself to some of them, especially because I knew the map very well.

I have plenty for Mass Effect 3 multiplayer.

My favorite: I played a Krogan Sentinel specced out for melee. Excess points went into the Lift Grenades.

So I was in a match against Cerberus. On the Noveria level. I'd played enough to guess where enemies would spawn, as when the wave starts I run to there--and come face-to-face with about ten guys.

So I threw a grenade, got three of them it, and then killed the rest in a bunch of melee attacks. One Krogan-sized headbutt at a time. And over my headset, I hear, "Where's the rest of the wave?" and someone else responds, "Inverse (half of my user name) is killing them." And there's a moment and the first guy says, "And you're just watching?" and the second guy says, "I've never seen anyone melee clear a room like that!"

And later, when the Atlas mechs are spawning, the conversation more or less repeated.

"I hear the Atlas, where is it?"
"Inverse has it."
"And you're watching?"
"I'll step in if he needs the help, but I think he's got it covered. I've never seen anyone solo an Atlas this fast before."

Good times.

I won an 11 hour game of Warcraft III (pre-expansion).

2v2, me and my ally were both orcs vs two humans. The map was Lost Temple, which has island expansions. We had demolished the enemy army except for them turtling on an island, they told us we should just leave because orcs have really frail air units and towers completely tear apart air, so there's no way we could've won. My response was to completely cover the map with towers, with as many anti-air (troll spearchuckers) units patrolling as I could. Then I went to bed.

I woke up 8 hours later to the orc victory screen. Checking the replay...

4 hours in (I am asleep): enemy players are taunting me, saying I can't win.
5 hours in: enemy player masses gryphons to attack me, they get eaten by my shore defense towers.
Some time later: enemy tries massing gryphons again, fail again.
11 hours in: enemies quit, I win.

Killing the last boss of Suikoden Tactics in one hit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOXPb6ECodQ

Getting a pentakill from behind in League of Legends. That, and winning from-behind teamfights with wombo combos. Snowballing is so common that it feels particularly badass to beat a team with a huge lead by having everything come together. Getting a penta or winning a teamfight from ahead happens all the time, but those underdog victories give me so many feelings.

Diablo II had hardcore mode where you only ever had one life and lost your character if you died even once.

I saved two strangers from situations where they were mobbed and about to lose their character. It made me feel like a proper hero.

In TF2, going on a massive murder spree with Your Eternal Reward, the knife that disguises you as whoever you stab in the back. Once, when my team was nearly at the end of a payload map and the enemy was rushing out to push them back, I backstabbed essentially the entire enemy team.

Defeating Gamma in one hit with Top Spin in MM3.

K wrote:Diablo II had hardcore mode where you only ever had one life and lost your character if you died even once.

I saved two strangers from situations where they were mobbed and about to lose their character. It made me feel like a proper hero.

That is legitimately badass.

I only played D2 in later versions, after the expansion pack came out. It's interesting to hear that it was apparantly much different at some point, so much so that some people were actually threatened by things that didn't instakill them - town portal use basically made anything not instantly lethal not lethal at all when I was playing.

When I first started playing Dawn of War's Dark Crusade expansion, I cranked the difficulty higher up than I had for previous games and started playing the campaign as space marines. As space marines, I was used to turtling up until I had an unstoppably powerful army with which to go out and cleanse the map. This strategy served me very well against the Imperial Guard, but for my next target I picked the Necrons (a new faction with the expansion), and not only were they a firmly entrenched force with two bases rather than just one in nearly every territory, they were also the first faction in the game which shined brighter than space marines in the endgame. I built my way up about halfway through the tech tree and successfully repelled some early Necron assaults before both bases hit me at once. There was a long slugfest between my army and theirs, but after a while I could tell it was futile and stopped reinforcing my troops. After the Necrons finished off my armies in the city's plaza, they marched on my base. The battle was lost.

After two more failed attacks on other territories I had discovered that neither side could breach the defenses of the other. The game remembered my bases whenever I was fighting in a territory I had won in before, which allowed me to immediately pump out my most powerful units. The Necrons, for all that they were more powerful than me in the endgame, did not have any endgame units to attack me with when my terminators swarmed their underdeveloped bases. Neither side could breach the other.

I attacked that first territory again, this time with a powerful vanguard of elite soldiers. If I couldn't break through with this force, then both sides were doomed to an eternal stalemate. This city was a special map in which recovering neutral units scattered throughout it grants you victory, so I thought an especially aggressive early game might allow me to steal a victory by snapping up enough of the neutral units that I would not have to storm the Necron base to steal some of theirs in order to get enough units for victory. I have no idea how I will defeat Necrons in other territories with standard base destruction victory conditions, but this at least will give me one territory.

I expand a little bit faster and a little bit further, but the Necrons still have two bases to my one, which gives them double the population cap. Once again, my scouts run into Necron forces and are slaughtered before they can find enough neutral units, and once again both bases send their armies to come down on me at once while I'm still a step from the top of the tech tree, long before my army is ready to go and destroy one of those bases. I meet their forces at the city's main plaza just outside my base, the same place I faced them before, with only a slightly larger army and about a half-dozen elite veterans (compared to the ~40 marines in my army and the ~75 Necron attackers). My gambit to win in the early game has failed, everything is playing out exactly the same as my previous defeat, and I begin to despair for my ability to ever defeat so powerful a foe.

After several minutes of fierce combat in the plaza, my resources spent as soon as they come in on reinforcements to sustain my flagging forces, I feel what is possibly the most awesome feeling I have felt from a video game in years. My god, I'm winning, I think, as the Necron forces thin and I regroup my forces to go hunt their bases down.

Necrons are kind of OP. Their units are powerful, and their primary weakness (being slow)... isn't. They have plenty of defensive and offensive teleport/summon options, and their primary combat units can't even cap points, so they have nothing better to do than fuck you up all game. The best anti-necron strategy seems to be to win the game as soon as it begins with a rush (assuming you even can). In the campaign mode, that isn't so simple.

Pseudo Stupidity wrote:Getting a pentakill from behind in League of Legends. That, and winning from-behind teamfights with wombo combos. Snowballing is so common that it feels particularly badass to beat a team with a huge lead by having everything come together. Getting a penta or winning a teamfight from ahead happens all the time, but those underdog victories give me so many feelings.

I must admit playing as ADC my pentas too often feel like I'm just KSing the whole time. But the 4v5 games, which you win through just being *better*. Those are awesome.

World of Tanks. I am driving a Sherman. They are driving a pair of Tigers and a King Tiger. I killed them all.

Game awards me with a special medal for tankers who show that even the puniest tanks can slay giants.

Dragon Age 1, running around with my arcane warrior, two other mages, and whoever random I felt like taking. Triple haste, buffs out the ass, and blood magic. I fucking rocked some faces like that.

Zinegata wrote:World of Tanks. I am driving a Sherman. They are driving a pair of Tigers and a King Tiger. I killed them all.

Game awards me with a special medal for tankers who show that even the puniest tanks can slay giants.

Can you remember the circumstances? That sounds like an legitimately badass piece of tanking which would make a good story.

(Also, I'm a T34 whore so understand exactly what you mean. Killing high tier tanks with mid tier ones makes you feel like a pimp.)

Doom 2 double-barreled shotgun. 'nuff said.

Jedi Outcast, the mission where you insta-fail if you get caught. There's a room full of troopers. There's no way I can sneak past all of them. I use the speed power, enter the room and start killing them all. I left the room before the body of the first trooper even hit the ground.

Advent Rising: Pretty much the whole game, after getting the powers.

Laertes wrote:Mount and Blade. I was running around with a hundred dudes, including ten or so levelled-up companions. I was having fun. I rode into the Rhodok kingdom and started attacking minor lords as they were riding around, using my speed to catch up to them as they kited me.

When I pounced on one, I got a whole screenful of green messages saying "Lord X has joined the battle." It turns out that they had kited me into the entire grand host of the Rhodoks, and there were several thousand guys there.

We won. I was almost dead, all my companions were red, and most of my dudes were killed. I probably killed a thousand Rhodoks personally. But we won. It was awesome. It was the most badass feeling in the world, and my mouse finger *ached*.

I'd have to second the spirit of this anecdote. Mount and Blade is an awesome game. Warband especially. Coming up against ridiculous odds and then being victorius after single handedly taking on 100 men, requires a huge amount of skill and is therefore incredibly rewarding!