Fun moments in gaming

[ShadowHM]

I thought I would share this one, and see if anyone has other moments to share.

On the weekend, I was playing Hellgate: London and using Ventrilo to talk as I played. The quest of the moment was to find and slay a number of Tormenters in the Abandoned Tunnels. As I announced over Ventrilo that I needed one more Tormenter, my husband happened to be passing in the hallway. He immediately summoned the three children who were at home to troop into my presence and demonstrate their finely honed Tormenting skills.

[KingOfPain]

Most recent moment would be when lil (in college?, yup lil ) Ms Occhi sang for the Low_Renters and sent us off to the Far Hills

KoP

[Kylearan]

Hi,

I remember a fun moment in gaming I had...well, to be honest I didn't found it funny at first, only in retrospect.


I played (and still play) Nethack, a turn-based Diablo predecessor and still one of my favorite games. They main difference to Diablo is that only hardcore mode is available and that it's hard, very hard. You die a lot - and I really mean a lot. I lost hundreds(!) of characters before finally, after years of gaming, I had a character (a Valkyrie) in the last dungeon for the first time. There, you have to get to the altar of your god and pray to win the game. To get there, you have to fight through all kinds of nasties, but - I made it. My character was low on hitpoints, blind, hungry and most of my items were cursed, but there I was: Standing on the right altar, about to pray and ascend to demi-goodhood! I was overjoyed, happily looking at the monitor and enjoying the scene (it's turn-based, remember?), before finally reaching towards the keyboard to type the "pray" command...when my wife came in, saying "man, this room really needs some fresh air!" and, on her way to the window, accidentally stepped on the main power switch of my computer and monitor.

It was like in a bad movie - she had inadvertently killed the game on the last turn. She's no gamer, and it took a while to explain to her what she'd done...but in retrospect, we both have to smile thinking back to that day. (It helped that I managed to ascend a character only two months afterwards...and some more later on)

-Kylearan



P.S.: Sorry, couldn't resist: Yay for variants!

Code:

Voluntary challenges:

                                         You have been illiterate.
                                         You have never genocided any monsters.
                                         You have never polymorphed an object.
                                         You have used 3 wishes.
           ------                        You have not wished for any artifacts.
            ....|                        --More--
     ---------..--                                 ---       --..---------
     |.%%....|...--                                 $       --...|%......|
     |....%).|..!.---                                     ---...$|%.....@|
     |..%_...-%....-  )                              $    )%.%.J))...@@..|
     |.%%%.%.|...%---    )%%  -                     $     ---%..$|@%.....|
     |....%.[|...--       %  --          ---         $      -!...|.......|
     ---------..--      -%----                      -%-      --..---------
             ...|          -----               -----  )       |...
            -----        %  %!  [|                            -----
                         -----   --         --   -----
                                ` --       --
                                   ----|----   -
                                    %    %  %
                                  ------------
Xorphitus the Reaver       St:25 Dx:18 Co:18 In:8 Wi:15 Ch:9  Chaotic
Astral Plane $:0  HP:249(327) Pw:35(35) AC:-13 Exp:21 T:81707 Satiated

An invisible choir sings, and you are bathed in radiance...--More--

[Roland]

Neither of these are very recent, but they stick out in my mind the most at the moment.

1) Playing Battlefield: 1942, American side (was never very fond of playing Axis powers, but I would to keep teams balanced). I believe the map was Iwo Jima (that little U-shaped island with the airstrip; that, or it was Wake Island, one or the other). Flying around with a buddy I had met through the game, harassing the Japanese with our Corsair fighter / bomber. We'd swap places from time to time, but this time around he was piloting. We took some heavy fire and I had to bail in the ocean. I don't recall if he bailed before me (landing on solid ground), or if he held it together long enough to land at the airstrip for repairs (I believe he bailed, and got a new plane). Unfortunately for me, I landed so far out in the water that I would drown before I could ever reach shore. Despite this, I began swimming. To make matters worse, however, I was nearby the Japanese aircraft carrier, and a small group of Japanese troops had spotted me while heading for shore in a landing craft. So there I am swimming pathetically slow towards an unreachable shore, with a landring craft plowing towards me, spraying bullets all around me (some from their rifles, some from the mounted machine gun on the craft). I start yelling (in chat, of course) to my buddy about the situation I'm in, and he tells me to hang on, he'll be right there. I gave him my position, kept on swimming, and watched as inevitable doom fast approached. Then, around the corner of the island I see my salvation, an angel in blue-gray - my buddy flying another Corsair. He makes a beeline for me, drops in low, skimming the surf of the waves as he flies right towards me. Meanwhile, that landing craft is nearly in top of me, and they haven't let up the rain of bullets hailing down upon me (NONE of which hit me, by the way). Down my buddy swoops over the water (I swear, another inch lower and he would have landed in it) and just as he passes overhead, I grab on and haul myself into the tailgunner seat, victoriously spraying the landing craft with bullets as we soar out of sight (they literally passed over where I had been in the water less than a second after I got picked up). One of the best multiplayer, and gaming, moments I've had.

2) Similar to the first one, I was playing Battlefield 2: Modern Combat on my Xbox (American, as usual). I had picked one of my favorites, and anti-vehicle armament (complete with a laser painting device). It's a tense urban battle, and I'm following along one of the man streets, ducking behind buildings for cover. Nearby is an enemy airstrip, where several helicopters are parked, just waiting to be filled and taken into battle. These things are nasty, and can completely change the tide of battle, so I'm trying to sneak around towards the back side of their airstrip, hoping to catch one during liftoff, before they can gain enough speed and lift to avoid my rockets. Sure enough, I see one coming over the buildings. I pull out the laser, lock onto my target (which takes about a solid 10 seconds, and you have to keep the target in view of your reticule the whole time; breaking view for more than a second or two completely wipes out the lock), and proceed to run along the buildings, trying to maintain lock long enough to fire the rocket. Keep in mind that the pilot of the craft gets warned that he's being "painted", and so he has the added-advantage of early warning to take evasive maneuvers. Well, this poor chap didn't quite make it, and before long a rocket comes streaming across the sky to slam into the chopper. Fire and debris rains down, killing the pilot and his 3 or 4 occupants, and I smile to myself at another well-earned set of kills (not to mention further stalling the enemy advance). As I turned away and began making my way back towards the thick of the battle, a strange thing occurred - up pops a whole slew of "deaths" (people not killed by anyone specific, they die from other means, be it accidental or suicide), about 4 or 5 in all. Confused, I look up into the sky, wondering if maybe the chopper fell on someone as they bailed out (it can happen), and what do I see? The chopper I shot down, which was high in the air, had fallen onto a poor, unsuspecting teammate's chopper, filled with troops, that had been flying lower. I couldn't believe it. One stroke - 8 - 10 deaths. I had single-handedly wiped out almost their entire team, with a single rocket. Granted, I only got credit for the initial kill, but still it was incredibly gratifying.

Just thought I'd share those, since we're in a sharing mood.

[Deceptus]

I know it's an old topic, but I laughed like hell. It deserves some necromancy.

Kylearan - that deserved at least a log of: "Kylearan, the wannabe demi-god, has been killed by his housekeeping wife."

I know these things. I do not play Nethack, though. I play ADOM. I picked that up before Nethack and now I just am too uncomfortable about Nethack's interface. ADOM however brings back a lot of memories. It is quite similar to Nethack, but you have a lot of different endings. Your quest is to (Spoiler!) save the world of Ancardia by closing the gate of ChAoS pillaging the land. You can close the gate or ascend it (and it requires a lot of experience, preparation and certain hard to find items) and become a ChAoS God (or an avatar of balance or order).

1: When I was playing my dwarven elementalist in ADOM. He went to 13 level and I was mopping up the game. My mom told me to stop, but I just wanted to clean the Pyramid. And that led me to doom... I had a rough time of killing a - I thought - a rather easy monster. I suddenly... died... WHAT?! That was my FIRST character that got to the Pyramid! Of course, the cause of death was the cause of about every single death in a roguelike - your idiocy. I was so sleeeeeepy that I didn't notice a troll king happily pummeling my poor dwarf. Nuts.

2: When I got a really badass dwarven priest. He was great. And I got bored with a 18 level who had a great potential... Yes. There's the little thing that ChAoS causes - corruption. You grow horns, or you are doing an "unholy aura" thing that scares people off and drives shopkeepers to kill you. And I got the one that teleports me randomly through dungeons. I got BORED of having to babysit my character, especially as I couldn't buy anything in any shop (and mind you, the shops are RARE.). Nuts. I killed him in a spectacular way by using my wand of far slaying, powering it to the maximum and aiming it against the wall. It bounced (like many missiles, which can be your advantage or your doom) and ripped my character that he got LITERALLY 532'ed.

Yup. -532 hit points. The number of hit points at which characters die. (I'm not as good as Sirian, sue me.)

3: When I had a promising, but low-level character - although your character isn't really promising early - indeed, early on it's babysitting aside from the melee characters, though they do have the hard time too in certain situations. I was playing and then I advanced to the next level. A friend of my brother decided to poke fun at me and randomly pressed the button. This earned me one of the most useless, especially in my situation, traits. You gotta be kidding me!

Roguelikes are awesome, although they can be interpreted a bit as a time-waste. And it really frustrates. It got monotonous for me . Although I found that the rule of moving mountains in a succession game is true even in roguelikes. I started an ADOM succession game on a certain forum with a really horrible character (a very weak dwarven necromancer) and almost every team has won. (there were four, three won.)

I'm sure that roguelikes are yet to touch by RB-ers.

[Occhidiangela]

1. Connecticut, 2000, playing D1 left handed and drunk on bnet with a DSF colleague who (IIRC it was Virgil Tibbs) traded silly remarks with me for the whole time. I was on a 56.6 k dial up.

2. First time I played with Charis, KoP, and the usual suspects in an RB game as I played an Amazonian variant. I was flinging throwing axes about with mad abandon, prompting numerous funny remarks from the usual suspects.

3. "Gulzar, you idiot!" The Legion of Greiz had many superb moments, including Sergeant Sarissa's use of the whip.

4. The first time I heard Shadow's voice over Ventrilo, and the jokes we cracked.

5. Hawkmoon's out of left field jokes in Friends of Sysiphus. FIGWIT comes to mind.

6. The first time EvilTeletubby and I ran a D2 raid. It was hilarious.

Occhi

[WarBlade]

Here's one I recounted recently in a slightly ranty post in the Guild Wars forums that still gives me a chuckle. Fort Aspenwood is a base defence mission when played from the Kurzick side and the Luxons are the attackers in 8 vs. 8 competitive play. I was defending with my buff brutish Warrior Ragnar and fellow RB guildie Mucco (Necromancer) happened to turn up on the opposing team.

Yellow is open chat channel, blue is team chat and green is guild chat...

Foolish Luxon: say 1 if ur monk on kurz side
Ragnar Of Syvesten: 1
Foolish Luxon has left the game
Ragnar of Syvesten: XD
Amused Kurzick: xD
Mucco Buchholz: Bastard. :D

Ahh fun times...



Further back I used to have this little prankish question. I would zone into some busy district and ask, "Which of the world's militaries has the best snipers?" A little bit of further egging and button pushing and sometimes a town could degenerate into a near riot. By that point I would smile to myself and quietly slip away.