Once again, it's up to Tommy to do everything. Tommy will receive a call from Lance shortly afterward. The latter felt humiliated after Tommy berated him in front of the boys. Lance refuses to admit his mistakes and says he can't take them anymore.
GTA Vice City players knew something was wrong with him. It's revealed that Lance always had an inferiority complex. This is best seen on the White Lies mission. Victor calls out Lance for his repeated failures. In response, Lance tries to throw away their cocaine shipments. Lance suffered from several crippling addictions and a thirst for power. He always thought of himself as a leader. But in reality, he was better suited to be a follower. He eventually controls over half the city.
There is no doubt that Lance felt powerless by comparison. He wanted a bigger slice of the pie. Lance makes the fatal mistake of siding with Sonny Forelli. Despite their numbers advantage over Tommy, the latter kills them all.
But this chapter is important for Halo as a series. The very act of including a second playable character in Halo 2 enlarged the scope of an already epic-sized story. It also gave us a look into the inner workings of a previously inscrutable alien race. The low-poly count may look unappealing today, sure, but back in it was pure magic. But in full 3D? Actually soaring up and down and left and right, gazing down to see the abyss below? Entering a level in that way added just an extra bit of surprise and whimsy to a game already overflowing with each.
Red Dead Redemption is a game filled with moments that make you feel incredibly small in an impossibly-large world. Quietly riding across the American south, spilling blood across the prairies, and soaking in the views bring forth those feelings that Sergio Leone and John Ford emblazoned on the big screen in the past.
A point-and-click adventure that was as much a hour-long playable comedy sketch as it was a video game, The Secret of Monkey Island was infused with hilarity in every scene and interaction. Insults flew as the swords clashed, and players had to scroll through a list of possible comebacks in order to determine which line was the most appropriate and funny counter for the put-down just hurled their way. In December of , Capcom brought their inventive platforming adventure Bionic Commando to America.
In that game, hero Rad Spencer uses his futuristic grappling arm to wage war against an army of Nazis, ultimately leading up to a final confrontation with Adolf Hitler himself — whose head explodes in as much bloody gore as the 8-bit NES could muster. Just a few years later, the company that would go on to bring us the Doom and Quake series first cut their teeth on 3D, first-person shooting with Wolfenstein 3D, an over-the-top firefight of fury starring hero B. Blazkowicz mowing down Nazis left and right during his escape from a German prison.
Well, OK, not entirely himself — he was instead made into an appropriately intimidating final foe by being rendered as a mutant cyborg named Mecha-Hitler, complete with four massive Chain Guns in the place of his arms.
Despite the increased firepower, though, he dies with just as much gratuitous gore as before. Miranda Lawson opens Mass Effect 2 with boundless praise for Shepard's feats. On what should have been a simple mission with your loyal companions, Mass Effect 2 sends Shepard's closest thing to home and companions into a nightmare when they're attacked by the then unknown Collectors. Understandably, Shepard goes down with the burning ship when trying to get everyone safely off-board. Coming off the heels of a triumphant adventure in Mass Effect, it's difficult walking through the destroyed sections of the Normandy.
Shepard gets Joker to an escape pod, but runs out of time to save themself. Of course it is only the beginning of Mass Effect 2, so you know everything turns out alright for Shepard. Still, seeing Shepard tumble through space while slowly suffocating is as shocking as it is sad.
Chapter Stowaway starts off as a simple fistfight in front of an open door of a cargo plane. But then quick-thinking Nathan Drake decides to deal with the bad guy by pulling the parachute off a cargo container.
The problem is that this is tied to all of the other cargo, which then begins to fall out of the plane and take him with it. The resulting battle takes the netting fight from The Living Daylights and pushes it to The entire scene is very scripted but still offers players quicktime moments and a challenging firefight to give them more agency than a Hollywood movie. And Drake, as ever, survives something no stuntman would ever endure.
A Link to the Past started a trend that many Zelda games would follow: Complete an introductory series of quests to find the Master Sword, and pave the way for a plot-twist that would expand the scope of the adventure.
And then with the spin of the Master Sword, the Dark World theme begins. To this day, the Dark World theme remains one of my favorite compositions, due to this moment alone. After exploring so much of Hyrule in the Light World, it was exciting to find a new land to explore. The city of Kvatch had already burned to the ground. The entirety of Tamriel was counting on you to fight back against the invasion of hell itself! But how could you focus on any of that when lush green hills, and a world of unlimited possibilities beckoned your fresh tracks?
Shigeru Miyamoto once said that his inspiration for The Legend of Zelda came from exploring caves when he was young. A smile at the thought of coming full-circle—this big, bright, beautiful world of Cyrodiil was just waiting for the next generation of budding game designers to do their own spelunking.
Bats and rats. Crocodiles, wolves and gorillas. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Well, OK, there are no tigers. There are panthers, though. But even after things turn supernatural and foes like demons and mummies appear to oppose Lara in her exploration, little prepares you for the moment when a towering Tyrannosaurus lumbers out from behind a corner and begins to chase Lara down.
At this early point in console gaming history, the Tomb Raider 1 T-Rex was the most intimidating foe yet encountered in any 3D adventure — and its appearance was especially timely given the massive box office success of Jurassic Park just three years earlier.
Truly impressive gaming accomplishments abound today, as gamers have had decades to invent, practice and perfect such wildly difficult challenges as finishing the entirety of Ocarina of Time while blindfolded. In the NES era 30 years ago, though, no feat of achievement was more worthy of acknowledgement and praise than taking down Mike Tyson in the game that bore his name.
If you were serious about taking away his championship belt, you had to bury your pride, dig in and practice, practice, practice. Memorize the timing. Perfect each and every move. Any single punch from Iron Mike would send Little Mac to the ground, so your dodges had to be spot-on accurate.
And if you did it? If you actually invested the time it took to master this bout? If you were one of the few to honestly, legitimately earn a viewing of the Punch-Out!!
You became the stuff of playground legend. Protagonist prince Arthas of Lordaeron showed a willingness to slaughter innocents to stop the threat of the scourge, eventually alienating longtime friend Jaina Proudmoore.
The fall of a hero into villainy is a trope that Blizzard utilized more than once in their games, but Arthas is perhaps the least redeemable of these characters. Not only does he slaughter his father, but later series regular Uther. These dark moments encapsulate the new direction Blizzard was taking the series — no character was safe, no cow was too sacred.
The undead scourge would be a formidable new enemy and Azeroth would never be the same. It was a bold move by Capcom to throw in such a tough enemy in the opening hour of the game, but the gamble paid off, as his appearance immediately set the tone for Resident Evil 4 and forced players to adapt to its new gameplay style right away. Half-Life starts out like a normal day at work and ends with you floating around an alternate dimension, closing a dimensional rift, and being frozen in time on a space train.
The initial chaos of the resonance cascade sends the top-secret research facility of Black Mesa into a frenzy — headcrabs flying every which way, zombie scientists lumbering around every corner, and increasingly bizarre alien foes to contend with. But after a few bloody chapters, you learn that government officials have finally arrived. After navigating several rooms full of suspicious sentry guns, you eventually encounter a shocking scene: a marine gunning down a fellow scientist who thought the soldier was part of the rescue team.
The realization hits you then, but really begins to sink in once you enter a nearby lift and the music starts up — there is no rescue team. The marines are here to contain the situation, which means killing aliens and human witnesses alike. It comes at you as a giant ghostly hand, which sears a burning purple void into the air as it reaches into your reality to crush you. Not because of its signifigance to the narrative, not because of its unconventional use of the game's mechanics, and not because you suddenly find yourself participating in an opera.
What's impressive about the opera scene is how much Squaresoft manage to make the player actually feel. Love, loss and song all compressed into a bit cartridge and relayed through your TV's crummy speakers.
And yet, somehow, those sprites bouncing around on screen, "singing" their hearts out, managed to be one of the most believable and gut-punchingly real moments the medium had yet delivered. Then you gotta fight a purple octopus. Your told upon first arriving at the city that the unexploded bomb should be left alone and I even tried shooting at it to see what would happen — oops. I admit, it was a tough decision to make for me — I liked Megaton, but it was a dump compared to getting my own luxury suite at Tenpenny Tower.
I even felt enough remorse to return to the smoking crater that was Megaton, just to see firsthand the damage I had caused. I went beyond morality — I had erased dozens of characters from existence; their quests, stores, and homes. It hits harder considering Megaton is often the first place you find after leaving Vault , and it takes a certain kind of evil to repay that hospitality with an unwarranted nuclear blast.
Just the sight of it alone is reason enough to ensure you have plenty of time left on the final day to warp back in time, otherwise you'd risk encountering the game over sequence where the moon crashes into the world, and a giant blast engulfs Link and everything in its path.
What is the deal with this moon? Did it always have that creepy face? This mystery comes to a major point when you finally fight Skull Kid for the last time, and the mask itself retreats into the moon — beckoning you to follow. It's hard to know what to expect, but none of us were prepared to enter a large sunny field with a giant tree in the center. The inside of the moon, and the spooky masked children playing in the shade of the lone tree raise a lot of questions about what Majora truly is, and whether its actions are something we were ever meant to comprehend.
Secrets have been a part of the Super Mario series from the start, with Warp Zones being the earliest and most shocking ones to discover. When Super Mario Bros. Three Warp Whistles in all, actually, and gamers of the day might have happened upon any of the three as their first moment of discovery. The second Warp Whistle was a bit easier to come across, as its placement mirrored the hiding place of the first Super Mario Bros.
The third and final Whistle was buried deeper into the game, hiding behind what at first appeared to be the furthest boundary of the second overworld map. A correctly-placed Hammer bash opened up the road to it, though! Once any of the three were claimed, a toot on the horn summoned a whirlwind to whisk Mario away to an isolated island full of world-skipping Warp Pipes.
And if you had two Whistles in your inventory before tooting on the first? You could toot yourself directly to World 8 and its final gauntlet of challenges leading up to Bowser.
Video games can make players feel frustrated, triumphant, intrigued, and even astonished. You play as Lee, a man who becomes something of a father figure to Clementine, a young girl he finds stranded alone in the walker apocalypse. They go through many adventures over the course of five episodes, culminating with the two of them sitting in a room, with Lee on the verge of turning into a walker himself. You can choose to have Clem turn away, leaving him handcuffed to the wall to become a zombie.
Or you can have her shoot him, freeing him from the horror of turning, but traumatizing her in the process. Either way you go, the two must say goodbye. So much of the appeal of EarthBound is its heart. While EarthBound is a great game long before the finale, looking back on everyone is when it stands out for the truly special, unique experience it is. You could spend a lot of time trying to figure out what Inside is about, and it would still make no sense.
Without any dialogue, the goals of your adventure constantly change with each new encounter. Are you a boy just trying to avoid capture by mysterious people? No, you're on a mission into the heart of a city of mind-controlled slaves, but are you meant to free them?
No, you're meant for something greater, something lying at the heart of everything going on in this twisted world. And then you see the blob. It was amazing to think that objectives can be conferred not just because you can only move on a 2D plane always going forward, but because you know just by looking that this was what you were meant to do from the moment you were first put in control of the main character.
And then it got stranger — you stopped being the boy, and became something else. But maybe you never stopped being the main character. Maybe the protagonist of this adventure has been working through you this entire time — it is a game about mind-control, after all. Pyramid Head is undeniably one of the most iconic horror game monsters of all time, despite its mere handful of appearances throughout the Silent Hill series, but not without good reason.
Learning the upsetting truth about James during his journey through Silent Hill also casts light on the true nature of Pyramid Head itself, making its official introduction even more disturbing. After catching a glimpse of the red triangle-headed entity behind a barred-off hallway, James later walks right into a room where the creature is assaulting two headless mannequins. It isn't until the end of the game that we realize the scene served as a mirror of James' own inner violence, and dark foreshadowing for the reveal to come.
Pyramid Head has since had a number of weak cameos outside Silent Hill 2, but it's hard to deny what an impact that first introduction had on both fans and horror games alike. Games are more terrifying when they break their own rules, and you can no longer trust the information you are given. So it is with Batman: Arkham Asylum, somewhere between the punching, sneaking, and exploring that Scarecrow appears and changes the rules. Suddenly, voices start whispering, getting louder — angrier.
Even that pales in comparison to the final dose of fear-toxin, as Arkham Asylum goes so far as to trick you into thinking your game glitched out and crashed, with just the right amount of visual and audio distortion to freak you out. It goes beyond terrifying Batman - it terrifies you. Surprise, soldier. Standard video game stuff, right?
After your nameless protagonist soldier awakens from cryo-sleep with amnesia, his only hope is to seek out the one surviving human on the ship — Dr. Janice Polito. Long dead. So it is that System Shock 2 casts aside any sense of normalcy and instead becomes a game wherein you yourself are an underling doing the bidding of the primary villain.
Instead, you and your team step out of an elevator into a standard modern airport. Your squad mates bring up their weapons. Your weapon appears in your hands too. Then the shooting begins. Try it. This level is clearly designed to make you feel bad. Or maybe they wanted to make a point about the violence at the heart of these games.
For a while there, most war games treated violence about as seriously as a game of football. Explosive set pieces and skyrocketing kill counts took center stage, while the horrors of what actually happens on battlefields got glossed over. Spec Ops: The Line has no time for that kind of whitewashing. They decide their only choice is to use white phosphorus, an extremely potent chemical weapon.
Your job is to target clusters of enemies from above while your teammate launches missiles loaded with the stuff. What happens next is unforgettable for anyone who played through the game. You make your way through the newly cleared city and come face to face with the results of your actions. The few enemies still alive claw their way across the ground, their limbs blown off.
It turns out a civilian camp had been set up right in the middle of the town you bombed. Now every one of them is dead, innocent children and adults, huddled together in a tableau of charred flesh. After learning to trust and rely on Colonel Campbell for your main mission objectives two games in a row, you discover the person Raiden has been talking to this whole time was an AI based on the real Colonel.
But it's the leadup to the reveal that makes it so eerie. Where he once fed you useful information, his codec calls are suddenly full of nonsense. But it gets weirder, from his eerie skull face and disjointed voice to the original Metal Gear clips that flash during calls to a live action video clip of a woman in the upper corner that feels unsettlingly at odds with the tone of the level.
External circumstances bring them together, and they grow close as they journey across the country, fighting clickers, dealing with desperate survivors, and even finding the occasional friendly companion. Trust that you can share a vulnerable moment when you stumble on a herd of giraffes in the city. The real test comes when she asks what happened. He lies to her. He says the Fireflies have stopped looking for a cure. Ellie looks at him searchingly. Does she believe him?
But none of those were a fraction as scary as Resident Evil. But once your team enters the mansion, things start getting creepier. Before long, you find yourself walking down a nondescript hallway. Too quiet? Your first instinct is to run, but when you turn the corner, another dog breaks through the glass.
There are plenty of spoiler-filled moments on this list, but somehow this one feels more significant than a plot twist or a character death. Even now, we hesitate to talk about it, because it was truly shocking — and more importantly, the feeling it evoked was the defining moment that made The Witness one of the best puzzle games we've ever played. The puzzle boards are fun and challenging, but once you take a closer look at the world around you they almost felt like distractions, intentional misdirection from the really amazing parts of The Witness.
It honestly feels like a whole new game, and in many ways this is where The Witness really starts. After 20 to 30 minutes of grueling survival involving stocking up on weapons, ammo, and other gear, surprise shoot-outs against other players, and maybe even some stealthy cat-and-mouse action, finally making it into the top 10 feels like a victory in itself.
And unlike most moments on this list, the circumstances are always wholly unique. Halo: Combat Evolved wastes no time dropping you in the middle of the action. Unfortunately, the bad guys have caught up with you and are invading the ship.
You narrowly escape on a lifeboat. Then comes level two. Now you find yourself on an Earth-like environment, complete with grass, trees, streams, and waterfalls. Enemy ships begin descending on your position, drawing your eye upward, where you notice that the whole ecosystem is situated on the inner curve of a colossal Halo ring. It was an early showpiece that hinted at the power the then-new Xbox could harness. With a game world that impressive and smooth controls to match , Halo: Combat evolved set the standard for a whole new era of console shooters.
There are a lot of moments that stand out in the short hour or two it takes to finish P. Turning that first corner. Completing your first loop. Finding the baby in the sink. Encountering Lisa. Even as a short demo, the then-mysterious P. The horror genre was deeply saturated in Slender clones then and true gems felt hard to come by. But it would be unfair to P. Actually walking through that door for the final time felt like a true achievement even without the post-game bonus.
Most horror game puzzles are pretty obscure, but P. Its basic structure of a constantly looping L-shaped hallway, which could be changed only by observing subtle differences with each revisit, forced players to become intimately familiar with their terrifying setting. Journey is a game that crams its lean 3-hour adventure full of unforgettable moments, but none stuck with us quite like that fateful moment at the end of your ascent up the mountain.
As your nameless traveler trudges through deeper and deeper snow, the wind all-but tearing apart your scarf, you begin to slow down. Each step becomes a herculean task in and of itself. The moment is especially affecting if you ascend the mountain alongside another nameless stranger. Watching them begin to stumble and realizing that neither of you will be able to complete your abstract goal is nothing short of powerful. Three shining Poke Balls rest on a massive table.
Your rival looks on and whines as Professor Oak gives you the go-ahead to choose your first companion. Within the first minutes of Pokemon Red and Blue, you make one of the most important decisions of the game: picking your starter.
While many RPGs have set party members with sometimes few options, Pokemon allows you to pick one of three that you won't have an easy time getting later on. But what's more important is that this Pokemon is with you for your earliest trials.
The Pokemon you choose here, whether it's Bulbasaur, Squirtle, or Charmander, determine how you'll progress through the rest of your adventure. It's probably the first you'll see grow as a reflection of your hard work. And though this Pokemon doesn't have a written personality, you'll discover and imprint your own feelings onto it as you defeat gyms and explore Kanto. So you step up to the table, examine each of the cute Pokemon's descriptions, and select your new best friend.
It falls to your sword to become your only companion, in a way that would be echoed throughout the series. It may have been a small comfort at the time, but knowing we had some help with a trusty sword gave us courage to press on.
Also, it helped for cutting down those pesky Octoroks. But the final world, which toys with the concept of time running in reverse, turns this all on its head. Uncharted 2 is the pinnacle of Naughty Dog's venerable franchise and its train sequence might be one of the most impressive set pieces in gaming history.
What starts as a rescue mission eventually sees series protagonist Nathan Drake running along the top of a moving train as it careens its way through a mountain pass. Along the way, he kills dozens of armored goons and manages to shoot a helicopter out of the sky, but he's ultimately undone by betrayal.
Gunshot, and literally hanging on for dear life, Nate begins the third act of Uncharted 2 exactly where we found him in the prologue, answering the game's biggest questions and delivering an explosive and lengthy action sequence in one fell swoop.
Three Leaf Clover starts out like almost every other GTA mission — you meet up with your colorful Irish friend Packie and your other disreputable partners in crime in order to rob a bank — pretty standard GTA mayhem.
But things quickly spiral out of control as the heist goes sideways, leading to one of the most intense, memorable, and unpredictable missions in GTA history. If you just fight him traditionally, you get a pretty somber ending. But it turns out, that down-note is only the beginning. If you find a series of specific items before your encounter with Richter, you discover a way to break his curse without directly killing him.
The Last of Us is an emotionally draining journey that packs harrowing moment after harrowing moment. We grew to love Joel and Ellie as we walked alongside them on their journey across America, which made every terrible thing that happened to them along the way hurt all the more. But one single positive moment of catharsis did shine through the darkness.
Near the end of the game, our heroes stumble upon a group of giraffes completely removed from the insanity of the world. The pair are able to stop and reflect on what life was like before the world went to hell. Sometimes this comes off as pure exposition — how else is Dr. Kleiner supposed to update Gordon on the events of the last several years?
You step off a train into a world completely different than the one Gordon knew: a future dystopian nightmare complete with televised propaganda and militarized police ushering confused citizens through the relocation process.
The scene operates as both tutorial and world-building. It teaches you how to pick things up and throw them. It gives you a choice. You can pick up the can and throw it away, in which case the Combine will move out of your way and let you pass.
Or you can throw it at his head and let him chase you in circles. Your name's Lance Vance?! Poor bastard. Vic always treated Lance like a little kid and Lance would get them both in trouble, patterns that continued well into their adult lives. Lance arrives from his home and slowly ushers Vic into drug trafficking. Forbes often attempted escape and tried to trick the brothers, even leading them to a gay bar called White Stallionz.
Lance then suggests stealing a large shipment of drugs from Jerry Martinez. After Vic calls Jerry to mock him, Jerry reveals that he was allied with the Mendez Brothers , two powerful drug lords who were now out for the Vance's blood. Lance also becomes addicted to his own cocaine, as does Vic's girlfriend Louise Cassidy-Williams who both hide their habit from Vic.
Lance often blamed the missing drugs on their addict mother or a biker gang. Vic finds out and first accuses them of an affair, which they respond that they only get high as friends and call him judgmental a criticism Vic often receives. When Louise is kidnapped and eventually killed by the Mendez brothers who they briefly made peace with before a second war , Lance shows little feelings for her and tries to console Vic by saying family is more important namely, himself.
He only becomes involved with the Mendez war after his car gets destroyed. At the end of the game, Lance arrives at the Mendez penthouse to back up Victor, but he arrives so late that the shootout is already over. In , Lance flies Victor to a cocaine deal with Sonny Forelli's men when Victor is shot by a third party ambushing the deal. Lance, still in the helicopter, flies away unscathed.
They agree to help each other get revenge, though Tommy is slowly beginning to accept Lance. Lance on the surface appears cool and collected, but he is very impulsive. His quest for vengeance against Ricardo Diaz , the boss who betrayed them in the first place, results in his capture and torture by Diaz's men, and he is only saved from death in the nick of time by Tommy.
Tommy had risked his own life to save Lance's fighting through a swarm of Diaz's men. Lance redeems himself by supplying the M4 Carbines to Tommy, the two of them use to finish off Diaz and his Colombian gang. While and after the two of them overthrew Ricardo Diaz , Lance complains about being treated like a little kid such as after Cop Land and becomes irritated by Tommy's attitude and dominance in the gang.
The only time Tommy however shouts of at Lance is during the cut scene of the mission Bar Brawl for his mistake. Tommy never told Lance to not establish himself while Tommy built his empire, but all Lance did was complain and expect everything to be handed to him. Shortly before Sonny Forelli 's arrival, Tommy declares the Vercetti business is "my operation mine", implying that he views the criminal enterprise as a sole proprietorship rather than a partnership, as he did all the hard work in purchasing and establishing his assets and raising his gang while Lance just complained, and this was perhaps the last straw for Lance.
Eventually, Lance betrays Tommy to his old boss, Sonny Forelli , revealing that the cash payment was counterfeit, which prompts Sonny to come prepared bringing a large number of gunmen to the Vercetti Estate. In the ensuing gunfight, Tommy confronts and kills Lance on the roof of the mansion. Having killed the remaining Forelli henchmen in the process, Tommy proceeds to kill Sonny and cement his power in Vice City once and for all. A billboard depicting a character using his model with the face model of Cam Jones can be found around the state.
In a PC World article , Lance was voted as 17 of the top 47 "most diabolical videogame villains of all time.
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