Games That Made You Go... Woah

[Clockwork Knight]

Oh sure, there are other games that have done so more recently, but I've seen some mentioned already and I doubt y'all are intersted in 'stabby's Adventures in Monster Hunter' that much.

Well, go ahead. It's not like OP sets up the thread to be a srs trip through memory lane;

 

[J_C]

Nobody mentioned System Shock 2? What is this travesty?

Yeah, every time Shodan speaks is a Woah moment. And for me, the ending video as well, hinting a possible sequel (which never happened).

How on earth did I forget Diablo 1. I probably peed a little when first encountered The Butcher. Was trying its demo at some gamestore in Paris, finished the demo 3 times before they kicked me out

Ah, the first time when I heared: HAHA, FRESH MEAT!

Another one in Starcraft. One of the first terrain mission,s when you have to hold out for 25 minutes against the zerg. And just when you are ready, the zerg launches a massive attack, tearing down you whole base.

 

[Derek Larp]

Aliens TC for Doom. That was the scariest fucking thing I played in my entire life. Probably won't hold up if I played it today but back then it was the shit.

 

[Dreaad]

Chrono Trigger.
I was 10 and honestly thought the game would end after I rescued the princess from the chancellor... then I got to go to the future, then prehistoric times, then floating magic lands, then one of the main bosses joined my party, then I got a flying time traveling device and fought a boss with three(!!!) fucking forms. Up to this time I had only played shit like tetris, snake and boulder rush. A game that lasted for more than an hour let alone ten was insanity.

 

[Azrael the cat]

Fuck, ANOTHER thing to remind me I'm old. We've reached the fucking age where people at the Codex are thinking back to Oblivion as their first golden experience, instead of the harbinger of the decline (nb: I've changed my views since those days as well, and actually don't think that Toddler's repeated failures at recreating Ultima VII are all that central to the decline).

On topic - PS:T, Deus Ex, System Shock 1-2, Under a Killing Moon, The Pandora Directive, Azrael's Tear...

...and my own 'Oblivion experience': Wizardy 1 and Ultima 2: the very first crpgs I ever played, at the dawn of the dungeon crawler and open world genres.

FUCK, ANOTHER thing to remind me I'm old.

Edit: one could add 'any game with a 'Keanu Reeves' style character, from 1995-2005', for different reasons obviously.

 

[laclongquan]

Planescape Torment: Getting out of the Mortuary... Woaaah~ And helping the alley birth... Woah~

Caesar 3: After finishing the tutorial and getting to the real missions... woah~

Silent Storm and Hammer & Sickle: after the 1st mission/tutorial... Woahh~

 

[RK47]

Command & Conquer
First time FMV hit the mark. Good stuff by Westwood back in the day.

 

[sser]

Civil War Generals. Might be lame, but as a kiddo I thought the idea of procedurally contiguous campaigns was the coolest thing since I saw Dragon's Lair animated on an Amiga. Having your soldiers get progressively beat up - and have a Doom-style bloodied representation of them in the corner - was just awesome. And your guys could camp! It'd be night and the field was nothing but dimly lit tents, or you could shift cavalry around for better positioning come the next morning. It genuinely felt like you'd grind out a battle with your enemy and then literally sleep a few hundred yards apart from one another. Hnnngh. I can't wait for a Civil War games revival.

 

[Machocruz]

"The Polito form is dead, insect." And the walls dropping and the whole set-piece and dialogue that ensued. Excellence of execution. Oh, that's System Shock 2 btw.

Playing NES Castlevania and Contra for the first time , at time of release. Dat music. The real video game love begins here.

Mutant child alley gang-rape in the beginning of Silent Hill.

Street Fighter 2. I could feel the quality from across the arcade, before I even touched the stick. Characters were humongous, visuals in general were vibrant and lept off the screen. Best 'new arcade game' experience ever.

Phantasy Star. Not an open world game, but did allow you to a couple places before you were ready. Was amazed by this and was the origin of my RPG love.

Ultima 3: Exodus. See Phantasy Star, x10

Ultima 7. See Ultima 3, x OMFGWUTISTHISELECTRONICSORCERY?!!!o_O

Oregon Trail on Apple 2C. Video games can do this (speaking in terms of simulation aspects)?! This shit's like life on a floppy!

Dwarf Fortress. Simply genius. Game of forever.

 

[stony3k]

I'll vote for PS:T as well - some of the writing just blew me away. I was also wowed by Diablo and SS2 purely for the atmosphere

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy - first open world game, for the Famicom standards it seemed so huuugeee and non-linear, a pity it hadn't save game option

Street Fighter 2 - it began love for fighting games and still can't be beaten gameplaywise by any newer title

Punisher / Cadillacs and Dinosaurs - beat'em up genre peek, so many coins wasted

Mortal Kombat 1 - atmosphere, violence, simplified but solid mechanics, best rooster ever

Doom - just... wow

Duke Nukem 3D - shake it baby, wanna dance?

GTA1 - it gave so much freedom that I just could ignore doing quest bullshit and just driving around hunting for these orange bastard to do that Gouranga kill

Postal 1 - sensless violence and sick humour are my soft spot in video games so this was a fucking Eldorado

Blood 1 - as above

Quake 1 - how twisted your mind must be to invent a GUN WITH NAILS AS AMMO????

MDK - large open areas which gave a feeling of real battlefield stronger than any modern cod shit of nowadays

Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines - fresh, unique, haven't played anything like that before

...stop...



Sadly, next to none newer games (post-2000) had such impact on me, I cloud mentioned only:

Bulletstorm - despite being full of modern fps sins like cinemashitness, gun limit, checkpoints, on-railsness, health-regen etc. it actually managed to convert them into extremely fun and satysfying gameplay, actually it's the only proper popamole shooter in existence and what's so rare these days - very replayable

SMT (especially Nocturne) - occult-themed dungeon crawlers with high customization and mechanics that forces player to use his brain instead of sensless grinding - beyond awesome, I waited all life for something like that

 

[Scruffy]

entering the church in the first diablo, i knew i "was" there, it wasn't just pixels anymore, i actually felt like i had traveled to another place, and it was dangerous
the first baldur's gate, after getting to the friendly arm inn, and being ambushed there. i met khalid and jaheira, rested and realized that the sword coast was there, ready for me to explore
morrowind
torment and fallout ofc
and dune 2000, even if it wasn't a very good game, for some reason made me feel good about it
oh and arcanum, travelling the western part of the world map, the maps indicated a bridge, but there was no bridge when going back to the game from the map. so i started coasting the shore westbound until, after 10 minutes or so... the bridge! WOW, this is a whole, organic world i can explore, cool!

 

[Xeon]

GTA III:
I played GTA 1, 2 and London before but doing the same things in 3D was pretty amazing.

Fallout 3:
First Fallout game I played and honestly I loved the introduction or whatever its called, You being a kid and growing up and all that and later being able to kill almost anyone was a first and unique experience I think and I kinda enjoyed that.

PST:

Spoiler

In the second location or something, You try and talk to some guy alone about something and he kills you with his friends IIRC, I thought it was strange how you were not being resurrected but then moments later the killers started talking about meeting in some place and leaving and then you resurrecting sometime later. That was pretty amazing.

MOTB:
I honestly never thought I could play a real evil character until I played this game. Almost every game you get to play a good character, selfish character, duchy and juvenile or retarded evil. The things you were able to do in the later parts made my jaw drop. MOTB was a pretty great experience.

 

[Night Goat]

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Shock and Awe. I did not see that coming. Needless to say, my emotions were engaged.

 

[Zetor]

- Star Control 2. That game was just... immense, especially in a time of no "lol I'm stuck, let me just look at gamefaqs". Still the best storytelling of any game, ever.
- Pandora's Box MUD. A massive world to explore, some fairly deep combat systems, and a whole lot of other players to interact with, in 1996? Sheeeit.
- System Shock 1. This game just oozed atmosphere, even though I played the version without voice acting. I'm still terrified about the invisible mutants sneaking up on me on level 3, and the race against time in the Beta Grove (I'm still too much of a wuss to try a playthrough with the time limit, btw).
- Torment. I was well-used to RPG tropes by now, so it was really refreshing to play a game that decided to reverse them.
- Freedom Force. I was never a comic book fan, but holy shit, this game is just like the comics! Nuclear Winter is still one of the most memorable villains ever.
- Dark Souls. There's something about the minimalist and oppressive atmosphere that really gets me, even when playing with keyboard/mouse (suuucks). I didn't even care that most levels were basically glorified sets of 2-3 tunnels with a side-branch or two and that as a caster most boss combats devolved into 'homing soulmass, lock on, soul spear, roll, soul spear, roll, soul spear, roll, soul spear, win'.

 

[DraQ]

• Frontier: Elite 2. More precisely, it made me go WHOA around 2006 despite being made in 1993.
• Unreal.
  
• Homeworld.
• Morrowind.
• PS:T

 

[DalekFlay]

Command & Conquer
First time FMV hit the mark. Good stuff by Westwood back in the day.

Oh man the start of Red Alert 2 was a total whoa moment for me. I'm not even that big a fan of RTS but after that intro I was all LET'S FUCKING DO THIS.

 

[Abelian]

Command & Conquer
First time FMV hit the mark. Good stuff by Westwood back in the day.

Oh man the start of Red Alert 2 was a total whoa moment for me. I'm not even that big a fan of RTS but after that intro I was all LET'S FUCKING DO THIS.

I know the feeling. Hell March was an awesome track for getting pumped-up:

 

[dnf]

- Star Control 2. That game was just... immense, especially in a time of no "lol I'm stuck, let me just look at gamefaqs". Still the best storytelling of any game, ever.

Yeah, enfasis on was. The game massive size is just smoke and mirrors and lots of padding. I think the game just with the story bits are just 10 or 20 hours long, and that's the time you realize you are just doing repetitive shit over and over again. Still a good game tough.

 

[shihonage]

Fallout 3:
First Fallout game I played and honestly I loved the introduction or whatever its called, You being a kid and growing up and all that and later being able to kill almost anyone was a first and unique experience I think and I kinda enjoyed that.

Understandable.

Everyone in the Vault was retard-faced and it gave you a sense of belonging.

 

[80s Stallone]

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, stopped using my NES afterwards for years... Because I realized the greatness of PC gaming.

Doom, additionally

 

[Sunsetspawn]

Ocarina of Time
Gothic 2
Star Control 2
Dragon's Dogma
Dark Souls
Deus Ex

I'm sure there are more but those come right off the top of my head.

 

[DwarvenFood]

I guess for me, it were games that did something really new, mostly graphics-wise but also due to the immersion and pure fun they could provide;

The good..

Doom Wow what an improvement over Wolf3d, totally blew me away with what was possible, and lots of fun making my own levels, changing sound files, etc.
Half Life So different from previous FPS's, started more like an adventure really - and the physics of the engine were quite impressive.
Elite Ridiculously huge world to explore, lovely newtonian physics, sci-fi fan's wet dream
Syndicate Bold step to go for high-res with the limit to 16 colours, can you even fucking believe that they pulled that off ? Super fun game on top of that, cyber-noir future at it's best.
Another World What vectors, smooth, and nice gameplay too. Quite amazed.
Civilization (series) I guess the most amazing thing about this, is what a time-sink it is for me. Some things will always stand out, like China wanting to trade Rice for Plutonium.
Comanche The Voxel-based graphics were quite amazing, still are. Shame the technology took a second seat to polygon graphics.

A lot of C64 games really impressed me, but looking back it's hard to pick something that stands above the rest.

Honorary mentions:
RtcW MP Beta/Demo Played this one to death and beyond. Was playing it, and got news of the 2nd Gulf War starting through it's chat. Memorable moments. Kept playing way after the full game was released, with some other die-hard's.
Trade Wars (?) I'm not sure if this was the one, but a BBS doorgame, my first multi-player experience, where you could launch missiles against other players' worlds.

Horrible mentions, lest we never forget:
Oblivion Very hyped for this, but when I finally played it, it was more of a horse riding game, than anything else.
Fallout 3 Very hyped for this. But have you seen my father ? A middle-aged man ? Saddest thing is, playing this has made me hate the engine and interface so much, that I just cannot progress in FO:NV

 

[Cazzeris]

Horrible mentions, lest we never forget:
Oblivion Very hyped for this, but when I finally played it, it was more of a horse riding game, than anything else.
Fallout 3 Very hyped for this. But have you seen my father ? A middle-aged man ? Saddest thing is, playing this has made me hate the engine and interface so much, that I just cannot progress in FO:NV

This part of your reply should go to this thread:
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/games-that-made-you-go-shit.90986/page-6

 

[wwsd]

Heroes 2 when I first played the demo at the age of 10 or so. The demo just had the Broken Alliance map. Up until that point, I had only played some RTSes, and Heroes introduced me to turn-based. I loved the "one more turn..." feeling, exploring for artifacts and all that.

Freespace was more of an "ah-hah" moment than "woah", but it still gets me how involved you can get in a story that's mostly told through briefing screens and in-game occurrences, rather than by elaborate cutscenes.

Transport Tycoon was on my first ever PC when I was 7, making it one of the first games I played ever. Just the idea of a game being more than just jumping around or shooting at things was enough of a "whoa" effect for me.

I'd never played the original before, but the Pirates! remake certainly made me go "whoa", just because of the sheer fun of it. Of course the minigames got monotonous after some time, but initially, I was really having a ball.

I'm sure there's more buried in memory somewhere, but these are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.