Six from Kermit (Off-Topic)

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Thursday, August 20, 2015, 17:05 (3470 days ago) @ cheapLEY
edited by Kermit, Thursday, August 20, 2015, 17:12

Flawless Cowboy sequence in Halo: CE. Landing on Halo for the first time felt like a revelation. Halo seemed like a pretty but conventional corridor shooter on rails until that moment.

Coming out of the tunnel and seeing the Covenant and Flood battle it out in the snow in Two Betrayals. Rarely in a game have I felt so important, yet part of something bigger.

The Last of Us ending. No video game story rocked my world like The Last of Us did.

Title sequence for Mirror’s Edge. Still gives me chills and a bit of vertigo.

The found music in BioShock Infinite. “Tainted Love” in the bar was one freak-out moment. I mentioned my born-in-the-19th-century grandmother the other day, so I’ll elaborate a bit about how and why BioShock Infinite spoke to me personally. My grandmother was Elizabeth’s age, and learned to play piano at an early age, and learned a lot of songs her father wanted her to play that were already old when she was a young girl. I grew up hearing them. Like many people my age and younger, I knew the hits from REM, CCR, and Soft Cell like the back of my hand, and hearing them done in a different style I also knew well was surreal. That said, there probably weren’t as many gamers who knew the old songs in the game like I did. Hearing one of my favorite semi-contemporary songs, God Only Knows, was meant to be disorienting, but even the songs played when the game launched or while the game loaded worked like a time machine in my head and evoked a lot of my childhood by proxy through my grandmother’s music making. (I didn’t even mention Revenge of the Jedi. I also read The Devil in the White City, which is required reading if you want to understand where Ken Levine’s head was, and I watched a few documentaries about the Chicago World’s Fair, so I was well primed for the game.) And yes, the ending was amazing. (The DLC less so.) And Cody, that racism charge was total B.S.

The visor cracking in Halo: Reach. It was the perfect note on which to end Bungie’s stewardship of the Halo franchise. Knowing the game and its mechanics intimately, we knew what it meant. No more respawns. Play until you die. And you will die, like everyone else on this planet.

Can’t dig out video for these because I’m at work, but there you go.