2014 Recap: Our Favorite Gaming Moments of the Year

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One of the most amazing parts of gaming is those specific gameplay or story moments that stick with us long after we've stopped playing. While not every moment is Sephiroth dropping from the sky with sword outstretched, "Would you kindly?", or the final fate of Knights of the Old Republic's Darth Revan, 2014 still provided memorable moments of play. Here's the USgamer team's favorite gaming moments of 2014.

Jaz Rignall, Editor-at-Large

It's easy for me to pick my favorite games of the year. But moment? That's a much tougher one. I've certainly had plenty of satisfying ones while playing games throughout this year. Pulling off crazy kills in games like Titanfall and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare never failed to elicit a grin. Working my way through Wolfenstein and finishing it was pretty damn cool - even if the actual ending of the game very likely wouldn't make anyone's greatest moment list. Hitting level 100 in Warcraft in record time was also a favorite achievement, but it was tinged with a little sadness because at that point I was just beginning to realize that the new expansion wasn't as appealing to me as others had been in the past. Playing Elite: Dangerous with Oculus at GDC earlier this year comes very close too. Sitting in the cockpit of a spacecraft and tracking other ships as they flew around me was simply jaw-dropping. Definitely the best VR experience so far.

But while all those are great 2014 memories, I have to go back to E3 to pinpoint the best moment of the year for me. After a quite punishing three days, the last thing on my list to look at was LittleBigPlanet 3. As I queued up with a bunch of random people to play a four-player demo of the game, I realized just how tired I was, and how glad I was that the show was about to be done. I just wanted to get the demo over with.

However, once the four of us started playing, within moments we were all laughing and smiling. Two of the players didn't speak English, but it didn't matter - we all pointed at things and gesticulated as we used our collective skills to attempt to solve the game's environmental puzzles. This was multiplayer co-op at its best: it engaged us within a few seconds, and elevated our collective mood almost immediately. At a show where many of the games had been gritty, and more tactical in nature, this co-op game of pure fun seemed like a breath of fresh air.

I walked away from the demo feeling rejuvenated and happy. It was the perfect E3 reminder of what gaming is all about, and that's making you feel good, and having fun with friends – even ones you don't know.

Jeremy Parish, Editor-in-Chief

Favorite gaming moment of the year? Man, I don't know. Nothing really sticks out for me as being the one moment that surprised or intrigued me. I miss the days when something like being forced to sing the lead in an opera (Final Fantasy VI) or walking out of a cave and suddenly spotting a T-rex unexpectedly bearing down on me (Tomb Raider) would show up. Games have become so eager to present a spectacle that nothing really seems spectacular anymore — it's all noise, tiresome one-upmanship.

Fittingly, I suppose what I found striking this year were the quiet moments in games. The way Alien: Isolation took its sweet time not only to introduce the alien, but to pose any legitimate threat at all. Creative Assembly did a fantastic job of using action as a punctuation mark in the game's first half, building suspense through the threat and possibility of danger, but only bringing it to bear in a limited fashion. Crawling through Sebastopol Station created the most palpable tension I've felt in a game in years, maybe ever, and by doling out opportunities for death at such a deliberate pace, the game managed to hold that tension in a perfect suspension — danger wasn't so pervasive as to become meaningless, but remained present enough to keep me on edge.

But even more than that, I found myself impressed by the use of quiet and downtime in Wolfenstein: The New Order to keep things interesting. Machinegames took an unusual approach to the first-person shooter. TNO hearkens back to Wolfenstein's roots as a dumb, old-school shooter, with play mechanics that exist because they make the game more fun even though they don't jive with the narrative framework. Each mission contains multiple scenarios that differ from the last, keeping things lively in a Half-Life "theme park" style of FPS design.

And yet… despite the game's thrill-ride approach to design, it never gives in to the mistake of trying to be a non-stop thrill ride. It doesn't try to keep the energy level at 11 the entire time the way a Halo or Call of Duty campaign does. Unlike most shooter campaigns, where the "quiet moments" consist of a few minutes of letting you pretend to explore an environment before the scripted shooting starts, TNO varies its mission design by presenting interstitial chapters in which no violence happens whatsoever. You can dwell in these spaces for as long as you want, either leaping ahead to the next mission or soaking up the remarkable world design at your leisure.

These moments remind me of the couple of parts where you stop in the allied bases in Half-Life 2, but unlike in that game (and the countless shooters that have used HL2 as their design bible), there's never a sense of an invisible hand at your back shoving you through what amounts to a tube full of friends between shootout. You can see the legacy of Machinegames' previous shooters at work here — the semi-RPG styling of the Riddick games — though expressed in a different way. The result is the same, though; these moments make TNO a much richer, more engrossing game than you'd expect from an FPS where you can dual-wield machine guns.

If any game from this year should be an inspiration to other big-budget titles, please, dear Lord, let it be Wolfenstein. This is my prayer for 2015: That the FPS genre can support single-player campaigns, and that they can be legitimately entertaining again.

Mike Williams, Associate Editor

I have a bad memory, so it took me a while to hunker down and come up with my favorite gaming memories of the year. My earliest memory is probably jumping out of the dropship in Titanfall for the first time. Leaping across the landscape, wall-running, and jumping from vertical surface; the game features a freedom of movement I haven't had in a first-person shooter in a long time. Titanfall may not have been my Game of the Year, but it nailed that enhanced movement in big way.

That's before we get to the point where you can launch your Titan for the first time. Now, I didn't enjoy playing as a Titan on a regular basis, but seeing it drop from the sky, reach down, grab you, and slamming into that cockpit? That's an amazing moment there. Riding a Titan in Titanfall is just so perfect. There's a sense of speed and weight in the game that makes the Titan feel real, without it feeling plodding and boring. Hawken has a similar feel, but it lacks that moment of transition from human pilot to mechanical Titan.

There's also the moment in Shadow of Mordor of where you gain the ability to turn the Orc you hunt to your cause. Prior to this, Shadow of Mordor's Nemesis System contains a great ebb-and-flow between taking down specific targets and using them to weaken others. There's a sense of planning and foresight in choosing when to take down a Captain, because empty slots in the army aren't empty for long.

Once you can dominate an orc's mind? You revel in the game-breaking glee when you realize the sky is the limit. Instead of killing orcs, you just dominate every single orc captain you fight, since there's no limit to how many orcs you can control. By the end of the game, it's Talion's Army, not Sauron's. Monolith should probably look into that for a sequel, because it should be fixed in the long-run, but a little game-breaking between friends shouldn't hurt anyone.

Oh, and there's just cruising in Forza Horizon 2's beautiful European countryside. So relaxing.

Kat Bailey, Senior Editor

I've had a few, actually. There was the fanatastic boss rush in Shovel Knight. There was the Orlesian ball in Dragon Age: Inquisition. And I'll never forgot the first time I had to break out of an interdiction attempt while hauling a big load of cargo in Elite: Dangerous.

But as for gaming moments that will stick with me, I suppose I have to go with my winning the Quadruple—that is the FA Cup, the League Cup, the league title, and the UEFA Champion's League—in one season in FIFA 15 as West Ham United. And all that without quitting and restarting even once. It took six seasons, a lot of practice, and a white knuckle shootout with Chelsea—my constant nemesis—in the FA Cup semifinal, but I finally reached the summit last month.

I wrote about my experience at some length here, and about how I was able to capture the essence of sports by letting go and accepting failure. Sports games are great for wish fulfillment—god knows my teams aren't becoming a dynasty anytime soon—but sometimes it's better to just let the narrative unfold. After all, how sweet is a victory when you win every single game?

I realize that most of you reading this probably don't like sports games much, but year after year I'm struck by their dynamism. We like to toss around buzzwords like "emergent gameplay" in connection with the likes of Shadow of Mordor; but for sports games, emergent gameplay is old hat. And even now, no sports game handles narrative better than FIFA 15, where storylines are constantly being spun out of signings, injuries, and player morale. NBA 2K comes very close, but 2K's outstanding basketball series can't quite match the elegance of FIFA's career mode.

To be honest, this hasn't been a great year for gaming; and that goes double for sports games, where most developers either opted to play it safe with their feature set or found themselves cutting popular modes. But my rise to the top in FIFA 15 will stick with me for a long time to come.

Bob Mackey, Senior Writer

It's incredibly hard to narrow my favorite moment down to a single one. And those I'd like to talk about, like Danganronpa 2's amazingly unpredictable final act (that I finished at the end of a five-hour marathon session), can't be discussed without dropping some weapons-grade spoilers on our kind audience. So, instead of committing this unforgivable sin, I'd like to talk about a certain type of experience I've come to treasure in 2014.

Like I said in my 2014 recap on Danganronpa, I typically multi-task when I game. Slightly shameful, yes, but it's becoming increasingly difficult for me to play something without the experience being accompanied by a podcast and the many distractions available on my phone—I gotta make the most of my limited free time, you see. For the most part, I don't feel all that guilty, since listening to the latest episode of Comedy Bang Bang while grinding in Final Fantasy XIV doesn't exactly make the experience measurably worse.

But the games that demanded all of my attention have made for some of the best experiences I had in 2014—ones where I had no choice but to block out the rest of the world around me. Playing The Vanishing of Ethan Carter or The Long Dark felt downright transcendent with a hefty set of headphones and a cool breeze wafting in from the window. Danganronpa 1 and 2 took me on an emotional rollercoaster ride where I went from fist-pumping through court victories to having my heart broken when another beloved character bit the dust. And I've recently gone back to the Ace Attorney series with the 3DS Trilogy (as well as last year's Dual Destinies), which, like Danganronpa, gives me the same emotional response I get when I get sucked into a good book.

These experiences aren't all that common, which is why I've come to value them so much. Last year, only the stellar Gone Home did that for me, but 2014 provided even more compelling reasons to put my damn phone away and give a game my full attention. Hopefully, this trend will continue into 2015 and beyond.