Current Events > What are some of the best moments of organic gameplay you've experienced?

(+) Yeah! (+)

By that I mean those instances where a bunch of little game mechanics line up just right to give you a memorable, completely unscripted, almost cinematic moment that you'll never again be able to replicate no matter how hard you try.

My personal bests include:

Skyrim - my second dragon encounter. Obviously there's the scripted first encounter at the Western Watchtower, but I was new to the game and didn't know that most subsequent dragon encounters were determined randomly. So I happened to be on the road just outside of Windhelm, where two wolves started howling at me. "Aaaoooooooo!" "Aaaaoooooo!" And immediately after they howled - almost as if it was answering them - there was a great "BWWWWAARRRRRRRRR!!" and a dragon landed on top of them. I didn't even see the son of a bitch coming, it just landed right in front of me and proceeded to nuke the uppity wolves. Never seen anything timed quite so perfectly it in the hundreds of dragon encounters since, and it was really special that it happened to occur on my first random dragon encounter.

Fallout 3 - I was in some metro tunnel with a unique-named raider, and thought I'd lay a trap for him with some mines in a short stairwell. Then, in what is easily the most spectacular kill I've ever gotten in one of these games, he tripped the first two mines which were set a few steps lower; this crippled both his legs, which caused him to collapse forward; as he did so, he somehow managed to land face-first on the remaining mine, which blew his head clean off.

The level of die-rolls that needed to line up just right for this to have played out exactly as it did must be astronomical. One of the worst things about explosives in Bethesda Fallout games is how splash damage can completely fail to register if even the slightest environmental object gets between the explosion and the target - I've seen enemies walk through Mini Nuke blasts completely unscathed because they happened to be standing behind a waist-high fence post when it exploded. But in this case it actually paid off, because otherwise the third landmine would have exploded along with the first two.

best one from a recent game i played was in modded rimworld. there's a mod where your base gets uploaded into a database and distributed as "ruins" to other players using the same mod, and one of the quests it introduces is a pristine ruins raid quest. so i entered a map to find a gigantic base with a huge nuclear power setup (another mod) that was apparently rapidly going through meltdown and several hostile factions all running in to steal what they could and murder everyone else around.