Awesome Moments in Gaming: When you get to the final level...

[UberScout]

So there's this PC game i play called Shovel Knight, it's a retro throwback game that pays homage to the NES games of the 80's and 90's. The story revolves around Shovel Knight on a quest to save his beloved Shield Knight from the Order of No Quarter.

I played up until the very end, just until a level called "The Tower of Fate", one of the hardest levels in the game. I died plenty enough times, but there was one thing that made me keep trying...

THIS AWESOME 8 BIT MUSIC PLAYS IN THE BACKGROUND THE WHOLE TIME.

I love it when retro games do this! The music is so heroic and uplifting, it makes every blood vessel in your body kick into overdrive and start thinking "I've made it so far, i can't erase my save file now! So here i come, final boss! Nothing is gonna stop me from pummeling your face in with a magic shovel and saving a girl who uses nothing but a shield!"

 

[Judge]

LOL..reminds me of reaching the final level of "Wolfenstein" and going on to win.

Picking up successive medical icons going in reverse, while firing and facing my enemy, taking on some serious punishment.

Yeah I know- Wolfenstein. I'm showing my age.

 

[Mr Allen]

LOL..reminds me of reaching the final level of "Wolfenstein" and going on to win.

Picking up successive medical icons going in reverse, while firing and facing my enemy, taking on some serious punishment.

Yeah I know- Wolfenstein. I'm showing my age.

Yeah one of the first PC games I ever played was the original Doom, the follow up to Wolfenstein.

And then I played the original and several pants clones such as Blake Stone when "Shareware" games were all the range in the mid to late 90's.

As for completing games, the most modern game I completed without cheating was probably WWE Smackdown Vs Raw 2009 on Xbox 360, I completed Story mode and got the full 1000 achievement points.

 

[Judge]

Yeah one of the first PC games I ever played was the original Doom, the follow up to Wolfenstein.

And then I played the original and several pants clones such as Blake Stone when "Shareware" games were all the range in the mid to late 90's.

LOL...yeah I had Doom for Windows 3.1 as well. Fun games.

Though I still play Quake II & especially Quake III on my legacy computer.

Yet I've never actually gotten anywhere near the top level of Quake II.

 

[onlything]

Sans fight anyone? That was hard.

One of the few game fights so far where I felt like crap after winning.

 

[Mr Allen]

LOL...yeah I had Doom for Windows 3.1 as well. Fun games.

Though I still play Quake II & especially Quake III on my legacy computer.

Yet I've never actually gotten anywhere near the top level of Quake II.

Ah yes, Windows 3.1, the second worst version of Windows ever after XP IMO.

I only did ever complete the first 2 or 3 levels on Doom or Doom 2, and even that was with God mode on.

 

[WildCat]

Ninja Gaiden for NES, stage 6-2. Forget about the boss fights in 6-4 and 6-5, just getting past the portion before that...

 

[Judge]

Ah yes, Windows 3.1, the second worst version of Windows ever after XP IMO.

If you had to rely on DOS and Windows "out-of-the-box", yeah your experience with Windows 3.1 was likely an unhappy one.

One of the very first computer games I bought (LucasArts' Their Finest Hour) wouldn't even boot up in DOS. Drove me nuts trying to understand what "insufficient conventional memory" meant). I was like a dog with a bone. I just wouldn't give up. Took me some time, but I eventually learned how to hack root directory files like the Autoexec.bat and config.sys files relative to optimizing how Windows 3.1 operated. Being able to have control over things like conventional memory. It's what turned me into a computer geek.

After that I began to hack the DOS GUI that came with my computer. So when Windows 3.1 came along I could pretty much make most anything within Windows 3.1 "hum". Though back then I still had a number of DOS- only games that easily ran outside Windows 3.1.

But yeah- when Windows 95 came along, DOS became just a semi-functional add-on. Everything changed and I had to learn to hack Windows proper rather than DOS. Not as easy, and not as successful. When I look back on my much earlier days of computing I look back on both DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 with great fondness. When I had so much control of both the OS and a GUI running within it.

Unfortunately my fondness for games in 320 x 240 resolution goes only so far considering what we have today! Though back then getting decent frame rates wasn't such a pain with anemic graphics cards either. When all my DOS flight sims ran fluidly with ease.

 

[Misery]

I've got a couple that I can just directly show.

First there's this:

If you're wondering why a couple of those large bullets appear to pass directly over me without doing anything, it's because my hitbox is *very* small (which is essential for this genre to even work), and the hitbox on the bullets is also a little smaller than they look. I know *exactly* where the hitbox of absolutely everything is, so I can pull off tricks like that.

Second, everything about this video, but mostly the boss fight:

Let's see... what else...

Spelunky: Beating a full Hell run for the first time.

Crypt of the Necrodancer: Beating the final boss at all. It's a roguelike + a rhythm game, which presents some rather obvious problems.

 

[Mr Allen]

If you had to rely on DOS and Windows "out-of-the-box", yeah your experience with Windows 3.1 was likely an unhappy one.

One of the very first computer games I bought (LucasArts' Their Finest Hour) wouldn't even boot up in DOS. Drove me nuts trying to understand what "insufficient conventional memory" meant). I was like a dog with a bone. I just wouldn't give up. Took me some time, but I eventually learned how to hack root directory files like the Autoexec.bat and config.sys files relative to optimizing how Windows 3.1 operated. Being able to have control over things like conventional memory. It's what turned me into a computer geek.

After that I began to hack the DOS GUI that came with my computer. So when Windows 3.1 came along I could pretty much make most anything within Windows 3.1 "hum". Though back then I still had a number of DOS- only games that easily ran outside Windows 3.1.

But yeah- when Windows 95 came along, DOS became just a semi-functional add-on. Everything changed and I had to learn to hack Windows proper rather than DOS. Not as easy, and not as successful. When I look back on my much earlier days of computing I look back on both DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 with great fondness. When I had so much control of both the OS and a GUI running within it.

Unfortunately my fondness for games in 320 x 240 resolution goes only so far considering what we have today! Though back then getting decent frame rates wasn't such a pain with anemic graphics cards either. When all my DOS flight sims ran fluidly with ease.

That's what I hate though, most of the good stuff from the mid to late 90's like the Lucasarts point and click adventures, the Wing Commander games, Theme Park and Hospital etc don't work under modern versions of Windows without emulators or serious technical faffing about.

Most annoying.

At least you can play games on a Windows though, annoyingly there are almost no games for Chrome OS except possibly a few pants "Shareware" bits.

 

[Judge]

That's what I hate though, most of the good stuff from the mid to late 90's like the Lucasarts point and click adventures, the Wing Commander games, Theme Park and Hospital etc don't work under modern versions of Windows without emulators or serious technical faffing about.

Most annoying.

At least you can play games on a Windows though, annoyingly there are almost no games for Chrome OS except possibly a few pants "Shareware" bits.

Indeed, annoying as hell. That's why I eventually took my other computer and turned it into a "legacy" system. Dedicated to hardware and software not much later than circa 2002 on a Windows XP SP3 platform using an Nvidia GeForce 3 Ti200 graphics card from Leadtek.

Very old stuff by todays's standard, but it all works perfectly for all that very old software I still cherish.

Then I stripped it of all the security functions to make the most out of 1.5 GB of RAM having disconnected it from the Internet altogether with many of the games using "No CD" hacks to they can be run directly from a removable hard drive. One drive I use exclusively for games, the other for productivity software that will no longer run on platforms like Windows 7 and beyond.

When I use that computer sometimes it feels like using my own time machine.