Those moments that made you go "wow"

Playing an imported copy of Starfox 64 a few days after the Japanese release. Still one of the best games ever made.

Firing up a consolised MV-1C I built. I was doubly impressed that it worked first time, and Blazing Star has an awesome intro sequence.

WipEout HD. Absolutely stunning.

 

Making a Goblin's head explode in a bloody mess in The Immortal on Sega Genesis.

 

First time I played Panzer Dragoon on the Saturn. That was like, a life changing experience for me, and I have been devoted to the Sega Saturn ever since.

Flying over the cliff in Episode I of Panzer Dragoon II Zwei (alternate path). Great moment.

Fighting the Guardian in Panzer Dragoon Saga, as its music from PDIIZwei played!

The whale chase scene from Sonic Adventure. It just looked so good.

Shenmue. Just... all... of Shenmue.

Actually, back to the Saturn, all of Taromaru and all of Radiant Silvergun. Those games are just amazing to me. Even today.

First time playing Halo: CE. That was pretty damn incredible.

First time playing Pilotwings Resort on the 3DS at Best Buy. The glasses free 3D really surprised me.

 

You said exactly what I think about FFXIII. For the first six hours or so, I wow-ed my ass off.

The city, the battles, that one place made out of crystals, and then you get out of that and get to those steps to enter a huge temple... it has so many amazing audiovisuals!

And I played it on 360, which looks not as good as PS3, too!

 

For me the most memorable was the plains area, where the game becomes sort of open-ended. Those fucking huge Adamantoises stomping around, dragons flying overhead, basically life going on everywhere in this incredible lush environment. I've played a lot of games in my time and plenty in this gen but I've never seen anything that captured a scene quite like it. The draw distance is insane, too, you can see for miles.

(I know it's heretical, but I actually enjoyed the gameplay more than any previous FF game, too.)

 

Now for the older crowd....

Sniping on the first stage of GoldenEye.

Inside view of Need for Speed on the 3DO.

The opening sequence in Parasite Eve, including the opera (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBvCsJRE6A0)

Realizing that real people were shooting back at me in Team Fortress.

Donkey Kong on Coleco.

Flying over Vegas in Air Simulator.

Pitfall II.....catching the balloon.

 

In rough chronological order:

Atari 2600 (i think): Discovering that the multicart worked by resetting...
286: Testing the cheats a school friend told me for Prince of Persia (funny, it were only command line options, like prince -f)
Stunts, first 3d in my life

Amiga:
Walker, longest loading time i´ve ever seen (no shit, 10 minutes with rotating loading logo... then a rotating change disk logo and 5 more minutes of loading.)
Getting killed the first time in Wing Commander :-0
Playing Wings with my stepfather
Seeing "State of the Art" for the first time. I had no idea what i was looking at, but it was awesome!
Seeing what my stepfather did with Final Writer on his Amiga, true WYSIWYG on an 7 MHz machine! There was nothing on the PC that compared to this (i thought)...

386: Seeing Windows 98 actually get installed to the end... only to crash while booting. xD
Throwing away that shitty PC and going back to my Amiga.

Game Boy:
Discovering the surf cheat and Missingno in Pokemon
Discovering the secret elevators in the Egypt level of Super Mario Land

PSX:
MGS, lots of things to Wow at
Seeing Aerith getting killed (13 yo kid: wtf?!)
Crash 3, the tiger ride
Fucking up the pro license in Gran Turismo :bangheadWow, why must they do this?!)

PC:
Going back to the Mine Valley in Gothic 2 (see my Avatar) in the middle of the night only to get my ass beaten by ~ 500 Orks
InstaGib in UT
MoH:AA, the Normandy scene
Call of Duty, first level
Call of Duty 2, Stalingrad
Discovering a GTA:SA modding site
Counter Strike Source Zombie Mod, so many epicly well balanced maps. L4D sucks in comparison (not graphics-wise).


Could go on and on... Unfortunately, those Wow moments have gotten very rare over the last years.

 

In recent years, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. That's it.

And several when I was younger, like Mario 64 and Super Mario World.

 

Silent Hill: Baby Shadows, WTF moment. If you played the game you know what I'm talking about.

 

the baby shadows were what scared me the most until I figured out they were harmless.

 

Ooooh yes. I only entered the current generation two weeks ago, when I got a PS3. Of course WOHD was the first game I got with it! I booted it up, wasn't terribly impressed by the menus (okay, they look cool, but Rez did that too, almost a decade ago), but then I started the race...

at first, before the race countdown, the camera pans around your craft... "OOOH no it's not going to actually look like this?" I marvelled like a child.

And then it did. :thumbsup::dance:

It had been a long while since my last "moment of wow". Watching the intros on the X-wing PC game in 1996 springs to mind, for one.

 

KZ3

Against a crafty Chinese squad of 6, a few weeks ago

 

There are a few games that made me say "wow" in the past but the very first was the title sequence to Super Shinobi on the Mega Drive. I had been playing only Altered Beast since November and then on that magical Christmas day I saw Super Shinobi for the first time. The lightening effects and sound amazed me. Of course these days it's nothing special but back in 1988 or was it 1989, it was a whole new level.

I also remember the end of game boss on Star Fox wowing me. Most new gen stuff is basically "That's nice" rather than "wow" or maybe it's because I'm getting old?

Yakumo

 

Quite frankly, I feel that way about cgi. If you've seen or remember old-school cgi like the animatica commercials/idents, you'd know what I'm talking about.

EDIT: The game boy advance wowed me. first by what it could do (Castlevania Circle of the Moon, especially. I vividly remembered the old GB castlevania games so this was a revolution to me and many others probably.), by how small it was (till I had one in hand, I only saw it from photos and I had assumed this thing would be as big as a sega game gear), and how tiny the cartridges were, which made me joke to my friend, back in 2001, that someday they'd make cartridges that would be so tiny they'd look like chips.

 

^^
This

Floored me

EDIT: Also these.

-Arriving in Esthar for the first time in Final Fantasy VIII.

-Walking around Yokosuka for the first time in Shenmue

-Wandering around the Central Expanse of the Archylte Steppe for the first time in Final Fantasy XIII and realizing how huge it is, and how huge the Adamantoise are.