Moments In Gaming That Brought You Genuine Joy

The Sonic series has never been afraid to call back to its mainline past and that’s very tell-tale in Sonic Mania’s opening two Zones, which are a remixed Green Hill Zone from Sonic 1 and a remixed Chemical Plant Zone from Sonic 2. It’s business as usual as you speed down the slopes and through the loop-de-loops as you approach the end of Chemical Plant Zone Act 2, but suddenly your dropped into a funnel, the gameplay shifts entirely and your engaged in a match of Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine!



The recent Sonic games have taught you to expect throwbacks to the Mega Drive and Dreamcast games, but never before had Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine been recollected in any way. I thought this was absolutely genius when I first played it, a totally unexpected surprise and one of the few moments I remember where I paused a game and shouted out loud in glee! I was sat in my flat by myself too, which is admittedly riddy behaviour but I was just so happy when I realised what was going on.

This is a very minor one but I thought it was very clever and it made me really happy all the same. Any time you boost, take pole position or collide with another car/hit any scenery in Horizon Chase Turbo your driver will produce a little speech bubble with a remark about what’s happened. There’s one very particular one that I only seen for the first time after about ten hours on gameplay; I was knocked off the track by a rival and put all the way back to the back of the pack on the last lap. My driver simply quipped “I’m losing my favourite game”, which is a very specific reference to a 1990s rock song where the video sees the singer drive through the desert in a convertible.



Again, it was one of these moments where I just thought ‘that’s absolutely class’, I thought that was so cool.

Not my favourite of the series at all, this.  XCX tried to make Xenoblade into an MMO, combined with hard sci-fi, obtuse battle systems, and unlikeable underdeveloped characters and plot.  It had some horrifying moments, and some very quick unpleasant deaths at the hands of giant surprise enemies, but not many examples of true joy - apart from one.

It happens about 80% of the way into the main story, ridiculously.  You get to ride the big robots, 'Skells', at around the 50% mark - but at the 80% mark you get one of the game's biggest selling points.  Yes this is silly.  Anyway, that's when you get the chance to fly.  You ride out of the game's main and only city, where you're told to take off and retrieve something from the rocks floating overhead.  So you take to the air for the first time...

...and this plays.



Does this mean anything to anybody who hasn't got to that point in the game?  Probably not.  But it's a world away from the music playing elsewhere, which is more on the lines of 'here is a hostile oppressive world, try not to die!' (This is the theme you're hearing otherwise, for contrast.) The blast of synth as you take off into the skies is the first time the game really felt like it was saying, 'Have fun!' That's as you watch the world you spent ages running over (and away from) disappearing beneath your chunky mech feet, and realise that the sky itself is full of areas to explore too. Sorry TotK, XCX got there first! The mech in the air is a joy to control, a power and speed leap over where you were before, and you can zoom to anywhere on the map (that isn't guarded by mech-killing robots) quickly and easily. Another example of 'everything on the horizon is yours', but not to adventure: to conquer.

It doesn't last. The game's enemies scale up quickly to be able to wreck your mech, and that's if you don't run into the giant airborne dragon near your take-off point. And it doesn't cure any of the game's existing problems. Nonetheless, there's a moment there when you take off that was true, unfettered, genuine joy.

When I created that horrible thing, with two spokes still sticking out of it and a kind of table on its bottom, and it worked I absolute cackled.  And there are a bunch of moments just like it.  A joyous game.