Hey, hey! My kind of topic!
I don't even know when or how to start. So I'll just try to think of a feeling or emotion and type out what PC game best suits it and how.
AWE
There's been a great number of oohs and ahhs throughout my PC gaming experience from launching a Death's Head in Scorched Earth to, say, first setting foot on Vvardenfell. But what takes the cake? Perhaps most poignant for me involved Quake II. Before that, I was messing online on
Mplayer, eager to play Aliens versus Predator with a few friends. I'd soon find out that I couldn't play the game because my (new) computer didn't have a video card. Instead we came across Quake and found out that we could play the Quake demo online together which we did numerous times.
Soon enough we all decided to get
Quake 2 (1997). Since I had no video card, I was playing the game in software mode 300x400 which I thought was fine at the time. I decided to get a Voodoo 3 3000 so I could finally have a video card and be able to play some AvP as well, but I remember Quake 2 being the very first thing I tried it on. Needless to say, going from 300x400 software rendered to 3Dfx's 800x600 rendering may indeed be the best graphics advancement I've undergone, and I remember dragging everyone within a 100-foot radius to come take a look at it.
APPREHENSION
This seems to be a harder feeling to pull off in games as it requires a good amount of immersion to pull it off truly well. And what better place to look for immersive PC games than
Looking Glass Studios? LGS itself has a couple of candidates, but for the sake of brevity I'm just going to pick
Thief Gold (1999) and
The Metal Age (2000). Both of the first two Thief games are perhaps
the most immersive experiences that I've come across for any gaming platform. Here's a game where you'd actually be holding
your breath as guards walked by you or when you were making a critical kill/knock-out on someone from behind. The sensitivity of Garrett's thieving missions really became my own and, subsequently, so did all the apprehensions of his profession.
FEAR
Somewhat recently I sat down and played through Resident Evil 4 for the first time at the behest of a friend and the amazing amount of praise it got. I heard a lot of people calling this the scariest game they've ever played as well. And while I can't help but feel it was a fun experience, I don't think it ever scared me. Gruesome, sure. Horror, yes. But scariest? That title still (easily) belongs to
System Shock 2 (1999). Fear takes a lot of immersion to be effective as well, and RE4 never really immersed me--it was more that I was just watching/playing Leon and not being him. System Shock 2, another Looking Glass game, is truly maddeningly terrifying. I'm not talking about monsters jumping out of walls making loud noises, I'm talking about a suffocating web of fear and paranoia enveloping the entire Von Braun starship...
You had mutated hybrid-humans, the former Von Braun crew, who would walk around the ship talking/screaming/mumbling amongst themself(ves) until they saw you--then they'd scream quasi-human pleas of "Kill me!" and "I'm sorry!" in between them trying to bash your face in with a wrench or whatever else they were wielding. There are a ton of haunting audio logs and emails that detail the ship's descent into dementia:
"Last night I had the strangest dream. I was in my room by myself, but all of a sudden it was not just me there but a hundred me's--a thousand me's. The strange thing was it felt good. I felt like I was part of something... like I belong. I hope I have the same dream tonight." Or logs with crew members wondering why some guy had sent for all the female nurses to gather on a certain deck--and the haunting experiments that ensued. And that's really just the tip of the iceberg.
If you manage to get through the game without ever turning 180 degrees and seeing a cyborg assassin right on top of you, consider yourself lucky. For you just saved yourself a good chunk of time and money by not having to buy new pants.
SHOCK
By shock I'm talking about scariest moment, and though System Shock 2 is my scariest game, my scariest moment actually came from Thief Gold. It's also pretty humorous at the same time. Anyhow, at the time I had a 56k connection and also had a download accelerator/resumer called Go!Zilla. I don't know if anyone else has ever used GoZilla, but whenever a download finished it would play a nice, loud Godzilla-roaring sound and I had the program set to disconnect from the net after the download finished. In the meantime I'm playing through Thief Gold, cautiously sneaking around in the Haunted Cathedral mission where you're walking through the debris to get to the cathedral.
There's one part in the mission where you drop down into a pitch black series of rooms that are now buried underground and in these rooms a flaming spirit (basically a patrolling Hammerite except their body is consumed in flames) is walking around. I remember pelting away at him with arrows and retreating and generally wearing him down and then I finally dropped back down for the coup de grace. I loaded up a water arrow and shot him square in the back. He turned and seemed to be looking straight at me, but didn't do anything. He just stood there. I remember loading up another water arrow to sort of zoom in on him to try and see what he was doing. I leaned in towards the monitor a bit for an even better look, and sat there for a while just watching him watch me--everything strangely at a standstill. And then, in the blink of an eye, the game super-fast-forwarded. The spirit ran straight at me--right through me (they run away and disappear when you "kill" them)--in the span of a half-second. At the very same time GoZilla, which was running in the background, finished downloading and let off an amazingly loud roar. I slammed back into my chair with my hands raised up in front of me and everything. I couldn't play the game again the entire day.
I eventually realized that the game sorta "paused" while GoZilla was disconnecting my modem and caused it to sort of hang for a moment. As if to get caught back up to real time, the game ran what had happened during the pause in super-fast-forward while GoZilla roared. It was truly incredibly scary and I've already retired that moment as the scariest single thing that's happened to me in a game--I don't think anything will be topping that for a long, long time if ever.
Well, there's a few gaming memories and moments at least. I'll try and post some more when I find more time.
Why do say this? I just find it interesting as most peeps seem to enjoy the mouse and keyboard combo much more for it's accuracy and ease of use (or I guess what they think, since you prolly don't find it that way).
