It seems fewer and further between than when I was younger, but every so often while I’m playing a game, there’s a particular moment or event that’s just so damned satisfying. For you, it might be getting some great loot from a raid, blasting off three guys’ heads with a single shotgun blast, or getting revenge kills against that damn sniper with your spy.

We took a little survey here in Lungfishopolis, asking people about their most satisfying moments while playing video games.

The first moment that comes to mind for me is completing Ultima V. This was the first huge epic game that I’d ever finished. I’d played Ultima 3 and 4, but never finished either. This was before online walkthroughs, and getting through one of these games was difficult. It was also probably more time consuming than a game like Oblivion. When I finished Ultima V, I wrote the date on my calendar and celebrated it for a few years afterwards.

Staying home sick in 6th grade to beat Super Mario Bros. 2. I really was sick, but used my time home alone to beat this freakshow of a Mario game instead of getting better. After I completed the game I left the final screen up on the TV as proof for my brother when he got home from school, and then I went to bed.  I think I was even sicker the next day from not resting, but it was well worth it.

Actually finishing Resident Evil 2’s “3rd survivor” minigame. Once. You probably haven’t heard of “The 3rd Survivor”. It was a game that you unlocked after completing Resident Evil 2. You could make it from start to finish in about five minutes, but actually surviving for as long as a 60 seconds was incredibly hard. The game put you in tiny rooms packed with zombies, gave you very little ammo, and put you up against some of the game’s most difficult enemies and bosses. Thankfully, in true survival horror style, you usually didn’t need to kill any of them – you could just dodge them, which was still incredibly difficult. But after the hundredth run-through, I got pretty good at it.

Beating my friends at Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo as a handicapped colorblind player.  Anyone that has played Super Puzzle Fighter knows that you want to group up large quantities of same colored gems and then blow them up with a Crash Gem, only to dump those gems onto your opponent’s side of the screen.  This is how you crush your enemy, and color is the primary element of the game.  Well, being colorblind I couldn’t exactly kick ass by only being able to see the blue gems.  But I was never one to make excuses, so I picked up the controller and proceeded to defeat three of my evil color-sighted friends in a row.  You may call it luck but I prefer to think it was something bigger that allowed me to win. The Force perhaps?  Telepathy?  Mutant predisposition to puzzle fighting games?  I’ll never know for sure, but it was sweet while it lasted.

Finishing missions in Tenchu:Stealth Assassins without ever being seen once. You were allowed kill enemies as long as they never saw you. If the game were made today, there’d be achievements for it.

Finally beating Metal Gear Solid after putting it down for almost a year.  I was really into this game for about a month straight and had finally gotten to the end.  For some reason, I just couldn’t get past the Metal Gear REX battle and in frustration I shelved the game for at least 10 months.  Well, when Metal Gear 2 was set to come out on PS2 I figured I had to beat the first game before I even thought of buying the second.  I popped it in, got over whatever mental block impeded my progress the first time around and finished the game in an evening.  I felt stupid for putting it off for so long but it was a great feeling to have finally completed the game.

Starcraft. Popping up a dozen burrowed zerglings around a group of terran marines and absolutely destoying them was always very satisfying.

NFL2K1: Defeating some random person in my first ever online console game.  NFL2K1 was the first sports game I ever played that included online matches.  The Dreamcast was way ahead of its time, and being able to dial up their server and play against my brother in Fort Collins, or someone across the country was pretty amazing to me at the time.  After dialing up my first online match and playing SomeDude001, I defeated him pretty handily and was hooked on this new fangled way of playing my games.  It was a rush to be able to trash talk with the keyboard and see your name on the leaderboards.  Sure, it only lasted about 30 minutes before I was crushed in my next game, but damn it was cool back in 2000.

Armored Core: Perfecting my flying circle strafe. This involved flying in circles around someone and firing at them continuously from mid-air. This is not nearly as easy as it may sound. I found this to be the absolute most effective technique for taking out enemies. And if it worked well on computer opponents, it worked even better on real people. When I played my friends, using this technique nearly always led to a win.

No doubt about it, my single most satisfying game moment was when I took down a dragon by myself in Baldur’s Gate 2.  Ok, so technically, he was only half dragon, but still.

So, in the Throne of Bhaal expansion, you ran around finding the other children of Bhaal and invariably fighting them.  One of them was this half dragon dude who would start the fight as human, then call up some followers and eventually turn into a dragon and beat you senseless.  I tried and tried to take this thing out, and nothing worked so I had to start taking a different approach.

I was a hella high level Swashbuckler at the time with plenty of points in dual wielding, to the point where I had no penalty for my off-hand, I mean, I had a penalty, but it just meant that when I hit you with my off hand it would just hurt a smidge less than when I hit you with my dominant hand.  I also had plenty of points in Whirlwind, but most importantly, I had taken the feat that let me use any magic item.  With this it didn’t matter if it was a scroll or a staff or a wand.  If it was magic, I could use it.

So I checked through my party’s inventory and found exactly what I was looking for, a staff my magic user was using that kept her invisible as long as she was holding it and not attacking and a Time Stop scroll.  My magic user had already learned Time Stop, so this was just a spare.  I moved my party way, way back from where the fight was going to go down and then I set every single trap I could on the stairs leading up to the guy.

I equipped the staff so that I would be invisible, appoached the guy and popped Time Stop.  Then, with one magic sword that did extra damage against dragons in one hand and one that lowered my enemy’s armor class with every hit in the other, I popped Whirlwind after Whirlwind on this guy.  Then, two things happened, two things that always spelled my doom when I was taking him on in a more straight up fight, but also, two things that had to happen for this to be successful.

First, when he got to half of his hit points, he turned into a full on dragon.  Second, his first move as a dragon was to flap his wings and use his buffett attack to blow me across the area and down the stairs.  Once I landed, I equipped the staff so that I was invisible again, and thereby untargetable by our scaly friend.  He came after me, pounding down the stairs, right into all of the traps that I had set.  They went off, he went down and it was all over.  What had taken me hours of failure when doing a straight up fight took about five minutes of subterfuge and alternate thinking.  So remember folks, rogues do it creatively.