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.

Look: there were points in playing TotK when I was, for one reason or another, just a little bit underwhelmed.  This was so far from being one of them.  The final battle where you fight a dark dragon on a light dragon and what is basically a Ghibli score plays was one of the best final bosses of all time.  I absolutely yelled!

Look, I couldn't find a picture of it, but if you've played SoS you know the moment I mean: when you actually get to the Sea of Stars, everything turns really really pretty and 3D, and this music plays.  Whatever I may think about the game as a whole, that briefly blew me away.

That SoS moment really was great, but having since played The Messenger, I can imagine folks that played that game thought we were about to get a wild visual change to 3D (I'm imagining chunky FFVII models, prerendered backgrounds, basically some PS1 era nostalgia) and that it might have been a missed trick not to do that.

I was enjoying just beating the bads and collecting the things, but then
This

And realising how many things had been in plain sight
But then on top of that, this

and ultimately this (and nailing it first try)

Not really a spoiler, but turning up in Melee Island, and freely-walking through what was a static scene in a point-and-click adventure - it was like being in a theme park based on a fond memory. Now we need someone to 3D-first-person-ify Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max, and The Dig.

Banjo-Kazooie was my obsession in 1998. My anticipation for it was at fever pitch long before it came out, it was a lot higher than anything else I can remember from that time of my life. Yet it was delayed a few times, past 1997 and until finally being confirmed as launching in July – right at the time I was off school. I’d spent the first few weeks of my school holiday pouring over Banjo-Kazooie’s previews and reviews in the likes of N64 Magazine and C&VG Magazine, I likely dreamed about it too. Official Nintendo Magazine’s 96% review sent that excitement into the stratosphere. And when it released at the end of July I was there for Electronics Boutique’s doors opening with my £50 in pocket money. It felt like I absorbed every waking moment into exploring its imaginative worlds, and just being utterly infatuated with every aspect of it. After getting through the ingenious Grunty’s Furnace Fun and eventually overcoming the dramatic and hard-as-fuck Gruntilda battle, I watched this ending in amazement:



It's one I’m sure we’ve all seen, or at the very least read about. Many of the magazines couldn’t wait to spoil it in the next issues, but happily I beat the game before Tom East and his wee roaster pals could ruin it. The unsubtle tease at a second Banjo-Kazooie game was exciting enough, but it was glimpses into Banjo-Kazooie’s unearthed secrets that just blew my mind. Fair enough, Banjo-Tooie was an overambitious sequel that ultimately disappointed in 2001 and those egg secrets didn’t really pan out the way anyone expected, not being delivered upon until Banjo-Kazooie was a 360 game ten years later. But still, at least for the time the possibilities seemed endless. The obvious shout was a Sonic & Knuckles-style cartridge, but there were all sorts of suggestions and rumours that got my mates and I very excited about what was left to come of Banjo-Kazooie.