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I've been trying to think of some, and it's weird, but all I can come up with at the moment are a pile of moments from Metal Gear Solid 3, which probably goes to show how much that game squeezed itself into my brain.
Because there are *loads* of amazing moments in there. The best, though, has to be how it steals its storytelling structure (and only the structure) from the Connery Bond movies, and how that is most obvious right at the start.
So, SPOILERS for MGS3, then.
Strats off with you being asked to meet up with a defecting Soviet scientist in the shell of a destroyed facility, in the middle of a jungle. You get the mission briefing relayed during the parachute drop sequence, then have two or three hours of play, sneaking about and getting used to the new way of doing things, before you finally make the rendezvous. You begin to make your way back to the drop point with the scientist, before things go wrong and you're stabbed in the back - your boss and mentor betraying the mission, chucking you off a rope bridge and into a river hundreds of feet below, making off with the recaptured scientist in a helicopter.
Then you wake, and you've been washed up in a new part of the jungle. There's a lengthy cut scene where it turns out that your mentor isn't working for the Soviet regime, but has instead teamed up with a military officer who wants to grab some more power for himself, before he fires off a tiny nuke from a rocket laucnher. The scene jumps back to you, healing yourself against a tree, then everything's rocked, nuclear-winter style.
Silence. Scene whites out, then fades to black. The words 'Konami Computer Entertainment Presents' shimmer into view, then out again. A drum pounds - BOM BOM BOM BOHHHHM - horns shout out a fanfare, and the most amazing John Barry-style theme tune plays out over a full-on Bond credit sequence - period newspaper headlines fly about, there's a photo of a mushroom cloud, a red wash swishes across it all and 'METAL GEAR SOLID 3: SNAKE EATER' blows onto the screen like it's made out of powder, before blowing off again. Skeletal snakes writhe across the background images and a female singer belts out ridiculous lyrics.
Then, when all that's done and you're pumped, the intoductory cut scene to the story proper boots in, echoing the events from the first one but with Snake making his flight into the jungle with the aid of significantly higher tech.
Fucking astounding. There's simply no other moment in any game that can compare.
They also use it to make the ending (spoilers) work. The final battle takes place in a field covered in white flowers, petals blowing about in the wind, and as it progresses, the theme tune begins to play out again - just the vocals, no other instrumentation. It fits perfectly. |
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