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…
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.
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 still play ffxi to this day and I fully remember moments like that. Good nostalgia but I’m also glad they don’t make games like that anymore. FFXI itself has been modernized to remove this kind of grind and is still getting new content updates. You should check it out again.
Me and that same cousin got together and played it again 3 or 4 years back and got to 99. The grind at max level is just too strong to keep my interest. He, however, got into the ffxi horizon fan server that’s pretty much exactly like original XI, but with some QOL additions and an added hardcore mode. He got summoner to level 75 in hardcore mode and died like 2 days later. You don’t lose your character, but there are some cool items you get from hitting certain level milestones that you do lose. One of which was a ring with a teleport spell on it that had unlimited charges and only like a 20 minute cool down that you get st 75. It also does a server wide announcement when a hardcore character that high dies, so everyone was messaging him. He got super bummed and quit.
My most recent was playing Saints Row 4 horrible pc port. The Enter the Dominatrix dlc was awfully hilarious. Seeing that they didn’t have enough money to do everything they wanted and seeing actual story boards in my game was great. Also the character commentary was fun. The thing that the said was too crazy for Saints Row was definitely true and did not expect.
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%)
I think my purest moment of gaming bliss was experiencing completely blind the last handful of worlds in Super Mario Odyssey while buzzed with a few whiskeys. God, my soul was in orbit with that experience. Pure, unfettered joy and whimsy through and through and cinematically epic when it wanted to be. I wouldn’t call it the best game ever or even my favorite game ever, but god damn it, it struck me just right way at just the right time. It was something truly special.
More games I will cherish will certainly follow, and have followed. But for that specific set of vibes and circumstances, I don’t know if I’ll ever top that peak from playing a video game ever again.
Ikr? There are a lot of people who look like this. Practically impossible to tell one another apart just by looking at, let’s say security camera footage…
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