QOTW: The Wow Factor

Ask a gamer what their favourite moments with a pad in their hands and their face in front of a screen are, and it's always amazing just how varied the answers are.

For some people, that time they had a Kill/Death of 24-0 on Battlefield 2 is pretty important; others might recount the story of the time they finally beat that spawny twat of a mate that everyone has who always wins at everything, and is intolerably smug about it at some game or another. (HINT: If you don't know anyone like that, it's you)

A lot of people, however, will refer to what I call "wow" moments in video games: A scene or event in a game that leaves you in awe, jaw agape and tongue slack for a second as you take in what you've just experienced - moments that make you glad to be a gamer, or shatter everything you know about your hobby. Whether it's with visuals, in game events, cut-scenes, story elements, whatever: The best games carve their own niche in your memory banks and set up shop, staying with you forever.

My personal favourite "wow" moment came a few minutes into Resident Evil 4, on your first visit to the Ganado village. Slight mechanical spoilers abound folks, but here goes: As the townsfolk attacked I, the experienced Resident Evil player, climbed a nearby clock tower in order to rain down some 9mm pain in safety. I'd played these games before; I knew my shit.

"Good luck getting up here" I thought, "you stupid fuckers can't even climb stairs"

Yeah, not so much.

[caption id="attachment_291" align="aligncenter" width="580" caption="That don\'t work no more, mate. (Pic courtesy of Gamespy)"][/caption]

As I looked down at the base of the ladder I had just climbed and looked in horror at the procession of murderous bastards ascending towards me, a firebomb landed at my feet, igniting poor Leon: shitting your pants and burning to death at the same time isn't exactly the best way to go (If you're interested, I want to drown in a bowl of custard whilst thumbing through a book of naked pictures of Sophie Ellis Bextor).

Meanwhile, as the death scene played out on my screen, Leon flouncing about like the big flappy coiffured drama queen he is, an explosion could also be heard inside my own head. It wasn't a gunshot or an explosion, though: The sound was everything I knew about Resident Evil changing forever. I sat there, thumb on the analogue stick, my mind playing back the last few moments of my virgin life in RE4.

Shit just got real.

Shit just got really real.

Everything has changed.

"Well, at least I can still shoot them in the head" blustered my big fat cocky mind, somehow still doing things like this to me despite 24 years of being proven wrong, me somehow still believing it after 24 years of being let down by it. "They're faster and cleverer, but at least a bullet to the brain will take them down."

So what do the malicious little tossers do? They make it so thst shooting their heads off makes them more dangerous. How is that fair? I'd been doing this shit for years and if there was one thing I knew to be fact, it was that if you shoot a zombie in the head, they fall over and die. When George Romero (in my mind) wrote the rules of Zombies like some sort of rotting, pus-filled Asimov, he was very clear on one thing: remove the head from the body, you neutralise the threat. They do not, I repeat do not, find a whole new lease of life, speed up and become a bajillion times more deadly, with sinew and claws and green gunk all over the place as they come at you. They never do that.

Except Capcom clearly hadn't got that little memo, and decided to make me cry in front of my girlfriend.

The rest of everything had changed forever.

[caption id="attachment_292" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Have you not been paying attention, you floppy haired knob?"][/caption]

My world changed twice in a single game. The me who spent hours picking off slow, stupid zombies from slight elevations was fucked, torn apart by zombies who had snuck up behind him, climbed up to him and jammed their thumbs in his eyes before tearing his brains out. This was survival horror at it's finest - everything you knew about surviving had been thrown out of the window in two simple moments, and the fact that every advantage I had had been taken away from me after years of learning these games not only left me in awe, but also almost literally browning my trousers.

Shit had just got real, and if you shot shit in the head a thing would burst out of it and one-shot you. That's how real it was now, and that's exactly how much it just didn't give a fuck any more.

The list of these beautiful, terrifying, humbling, defining and instantly memorable moments is too long for one man to list here: I could include the end of Shadow of the Colossus when all of a sudden you realise that oh shit, you're the bad guy, the trip in the bathysphere that Bioshock opens with, or the first time you find yourself behind the scenes in Portal and think "Oh God, what in the fuck happened here, and what the fuck am I going to do?" or many, many others, but this is where we open the floor (well, the comments box) to you guys: What are your video gaming "wow" moments?

RDR:UN

My hands flick the reins again.

I survey the horizon, my eyes scouring the dustbowl for any more of those abominations as I refill my revolver with bullets. There is nothing to be seen, but my ears alert me to danger - behind me.

I turn, and hot on my steed's hooven heels is a small pack of wolves; Their jaws slavering and red, their eyes glowing in the moonlight, their ribs yellow and defined against the matted black fur.

I concentrate, and suddenly the world around me begins to move in slow motion. I unholster my pistol at breakneck speed, and line up four neck snapping shots in a mere moment.

Four explosions rattle the air, four undead whimpers chiming in an obligato accompaniment.

Turning back to face my destination, I slip four bullets into the chambers of my revolver.

My name is John Marston, and all this comes easily.

Because I am an unremitting badass.

Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare does something that I've never experienced before in nearly 20 years of gaming: It makes you feel like a bonafide hero. It makes you feel like the saviour of towns, scourge of the animated dead, and a complete and utter, gold-plated, cool-dude motherfucker. Riding into a zombie infested town with pistol or rifle drawn and clearing it of brain sucking scumbags in a storm of hot lead, hotter fire and ice-cold targeting stimulates the part of your brain that Bayonetta clipped a car battery to; that part of your brain that is designed for processing cliched, over-the-top action and then releasing serotonin like a hose, whilst choking any questions of sense or logic before they have the chance to become fully formed thoughts.

I've ruminated long and hard on what it might be that Undead Nightmare does so well in order to evoke this - what that one thing is that just makes the whole thing work so perfectly, that defines the experience - but that's just it: It isn't simply one thing. Almost everything about the game does its own little bit to make you feel the way it does. The towns for example, are brittle, defenseless bastions of humanity that you and you alone can save from an entire game world of unrelenting hordes of limping, shambling, spitting monsters: the residents can hold out for a time once settlements come under attack, that much is true - but only YOU can clear them out and make them safe for a time. You are the fulcrum, the tipping point and the see-saw - without you there would be no change.

Now, I know what you're thinking: That's how games work. Take the player out of the game and it's nothing more but lines of code on a disk - nobody to make anything happen or to experience it and contextualise it - If a zombie attacks an NPC and there's no player there to witness it, does it really happen?

Undead Nightmare goes a step further than simply providing a playground for a few thousand pixels to prance about in though. The game world is a living, breathing, sweating, dusty place that crucially, is just at the right scale: In GTA you always felt anonymous, just another criminal in a city full of faceless life, but here in RDR the locals know you; after all, you're the man who saved their entire perception of civilisation, the only man who can stem the undead flow. Civilisation is few and far between in Undead Nightmare; in GTA you're drowning in Liberty City every moment of every artificial day, but the islands of life (rather than un-death) in Undead Nightmare float like oases on turbulent (and dangerous) seas, meaning that the sight of a building, a bed, and human beings who aren't trying to tear your face off are always welcome sights.

Of course, Marston's combat skills help the whole hero thing manifest itself: It's one thing riding into town and unloading ammo into the faces of a few life-challenged brain slurpers, but flinging a bottle of Boombait into a mob of 'em before dead-eyeing a few in the skull, the explosion of the boombait scattering re-deadified ragdolls across the town centre is a whole other, on its own separate level of cool. Marston's swagger is also infectious, making Red Dead the first Rockstar open world game in which I didn't just want to run everywhere because walking simply meant time between arbitrary missions. I'd tether my horse and saunter to my destination if possible, just because the damn game made me feel so cool doing it - it's just a shame that there weren't so many human, non agressive NPCs to tip my hat to like in the main game. Red Dead encourages you to wallow in the world in which it creates, soaking you in pathos as the setting seeps into your every pore - you spend more time staring at the horizon, the wildlife and the scenery in Red Dead than in any other game, and thanks to the game's leisurely pace (In comparison to its car stealing cousins, that is), you've got plenty of time to do it as you're travelling from town to town.

And let's not forget those random encounters either: Witnessing a bereaved lover take their own life after shooting their partner dead, or coming across a small gang of survivors who can be torn to pieces in front of your very eyes if you don't get busy with your trigger finger are pretty powerful. With these events, you're immediately thrown into the middle of somebody's tale: a tale that means life or death for those involved. It's beautifully poignant, if only because the game pays them no mind, simply discarding you at the side of the road like rubbish for you to discover. These are real events happening to real people, real people who will die if you don't help them.

It says something about the state of games in general when saving the world from a zombie invasion doesn't feel quite as important as protecting a town or homestead - Even somewhere like Bearclaw Camp, a pathetic smattering of cabins hidden with very few residents in the snowy northern woods, becomes unbearably important when you're there. Around you the residents whoop, holler and scream, and it's their voices that drive how important this moment is while you're pinned against a doorframe, firing the last of your revolver ammo at the dead mob screaming and groaning towards you. Game writers seem to have lost focus on the little things nowadays - They'd rather you save the world, be the best soldier, or something else suitably epic in scale than do something small and merely important. Undead Nightmare breaks all that down and pays attention to the minutiae that normal shmoes like you and I can relate to: Protecting your home, protecting your family, the idea of community and kinship. Fuck saving the world; there's a hamlet of log cabins in the woods that needs my help, and I'd rather feed myself to a zombie bear in order to protect those ordinary folk than save a faceless, polystyrene world which you won't let me see.