The gaming moment I am most proud of came from beating The Goonies II for the NES.

The game's indoor sections are riddled with cryptic, unintuitive, and often monotonous puzzles. In spite of those discouraging challenges, I managed to get all the way through the game. Had it been lacking its fun, action-oriented outdoor sections, I almost certainly would have resolved to stop playing the game!

As fun as the outdoor sections are, they are very non-linear. The Goonies II was actually one of the first 'Metroidvania' games I ever played, and although there is an in-game map feature, navigating within the game is exceptionally difficult. That's because you can - and must - travel from areas on the front of the map to areas on the back of the map, yet the map doesn't clarify which areas are linked. That being said, once I got the hang of the game, I realized I had to devise my own map to get a complete understanding of how to transverse the game's world.

The Goonies II is a mixed bag. I definitely would have enjoyed it a lot more if the indoor sections had been omitted or simplified. Nevertheless, at a young age, the game had lessons that I sort of picked up without fully realizing them until long after the fact.

The lessons I learned are as follows:

- as unfair as it may seem, I can't expect all challenges to be fair or intelligible;

- sometimes I need to rely on myself and my own tools, not others or the tools they may provide me with, and;

- you never know when you may find yourself lost and in need or backtracking or recalling information that's easy to forget.

My proudest gaming moment was completing Max Payne 1 on first play-through in one sitting. It was on a Sunday when I also had a school report due on Monday morning which I hadn't started yet. I started working on the report at 1am and still managed to get it in on time (and got a pass mark :))

I don´t know when my proudest gaming moment is, because there are a lot of them, and l can´t choose one over others. ;) So I will say what my first proud gaming moment was. And it was, when I was a kid, the first time I reached 200 lines playing the Game Boy´s Tetris game. Not only I accomplished something I thought was remarkable, but unlike many times before, the game didn´t laught at me.

I think that not only the proudest but also the most significant was for me finishing Missionforce: Cyberstorm. Every attack on Cybrid's HQ is a huge challenge in this game, not to mention that the last one was an epic and ferocious battle, which I can't compare with any other strategy, RTS or TBS.

Most importantly, it also gave me a motivational boost to finish other older games, which I've tried in the past (sometimes even 20 or more years ago!) but never finished them. So next months were my triumphs over Doom 1, Doom 2, Duke Nukem 1,2 and 3D, Warcraft 2, Quake 1... And many others. I'm really happy that finishing Missionforce: Cyberstorm gave me that incredible and hard to explain impulse, to complete other "old games" which I've met for the first time in my younger years. It's still a mystery for me, why finishing this particular title has influenced me in such a spectacular way.

Hmmm, I don't think that my proudest moment has happened yet, but it will after July 24th of this year, less than a month away. On that day, I will finally be able to blow off the digital dust and boot up The Stanley Parable again and as such, accomplish without cheating the Go Outside achievement. sigh...five long years.

Other than that, probably during freshman year of college early 2000s when our entire dorm floor played Counterstrike against each other. At one point, I was getting wasted early every game and losing money like I was at the House of the Rising Sun. Finally decided to just give up on purchasing anything at the beginning of the game and instead go with the standard issue pistol. Snuck behind the enemy lines, took out there sniper in the lower canal and then proceeded to single handedly take out the entire team from behind with the sniper rifle I took.

Next best moment would be on LOL, casual play but while hiding in the bushes near the river, saw two opponents go to hide in the bushes just below me. I was Amumu and Lee Sin was with me. They were obviously waiting to gank the upper lane but I jumped in and Lee followed me initiating the brawl. I used ultimate perfectly to trap four of there guys to allow our reinforcements to get there. Eventually, our team of 4 eliminated all 5 of the opponents with no casualties in part due to great tanking from the Lee Sin and myself.

Lastly, getting my wife, nongamer, to join me in at least a few levels of the chaos known as Overcooked.

Broken Sword. A goat. Nuff said.

Getting the true ending for Ghouls 'n Ghosts on the Genesis.

In 2017, around the winter holidays, I introduced the 3 1/2 year old son of my cousin to his first ever video game -- A Hat In Time. Him attempting to hold and use a controller was a challenge at first but after a short time he figured out how to use the joystick to move around, jump, and explore! It wasn't always smooth, but hey, he tried. And persisted. It makes me proud to see that he didn't just initially give up but instead he used his natural curiosity and drive to figure things out on his own, qualities that would serve him well not just in gaming, but also in life.

The sense of wonder and glee of a child, seeing the smiles, experiencing a glimpse of the wonderful world of gaming as an enjoyable medium is a treasure upon itself and exemplifies gaming's capacity to illuminate, entertain, inspire, and unite. Proud times, good times.

At this age I've raided hundreds of deadly dungeons, repelled countless alien invasions, and fought on almost every battleground from ancient Troy to Nha Trang. With my trusty controller -- or mouse and keyboard -- I've saved the Earth from total annihilation on a weekly basis, but the gaming moment I'm most proud of is none of these virtual achievements.

I grew up in the 70's and 80's with the "birth" of consumer video games -- where the arcade was just starting to move into the livingroom and gaming on the personal computer was ubiquitous with sprawling text adventures. My bedroom wall was plastered in advertising for Atari Age Magazine, King's Quest, and Zork. I lived and breathed video games, but simply playing them wasn't enough.

Spurred by shareware played in the school computer lab (one computer), I'd begged my parents for a RadioShack MC-10 and they came through with both the computer and a class in Basic. Twice a week for a month I made the trip 30 miles away to learn IF, THEN, and GO TO. And every night I'd spends hours upon hours upon hours applying what I'd learned on the little 4K machine (expanded to 16K!)... saving everything to my handy audio cassette drive. The month passed in no time flat.

When the class ended, I presented my middle-school masterpiece "Castle Escape," a text adventure with a very few simple graphics and a bare bones RNG battle system. Yes, it was almost a complete "rip-off" of some shareware I'd played not long before ("Castle of Dracula"?), but it was mine... all 20 minutes of it (if you played very, very slowly). And while I self-deprecate, it was a great feeling -- having other people play a game I'd worked so hard to make (and even a few courteously claimed to enjoy). So while it wasn't saving the universe from Space N@zis or killing the murderous King of Dragons and acquiring his unrivaled horde of gold, "Castle Escape" was certainly...

... my proudest gaming moment.

I've always loved to read and been a firm believer in the power of story-telling. It was the humour and intelligence of the Monkey Island games that made me realise as a child that that power could be found in gaming too.
Many years later, I found myself sharing Broken Age with my nephews, and watched how it helped them engage with story-telling like nothing had ever done before. Not only were they solving puzzles and laughing at jokes, they whispered theories to each other about what would happen next, came up with their own ideas about the world, and made fanart.
Never have I felt prouder to be a fan of point-and-click adventure games!

My sister-in-law has regularly preached on the valueless, time-wasting trash that are video games. They make people violent, stupid, and lazy.

This year, I bought an Oculus Quest 2 and when she visited, she sound d interested to try it on. I sent her on a tour of a city on YouTube and she thought it was boring. She wanted to *do* something.

So I loaded Super Hot.

It was so funny that her husband took secret video. She giggles with excitement as she exclaims "I have a gun! I shot him in the head! I want to do that again!"

She tried other games but kept.going back to Super Hot. She was enthralled.

After an hour of play, she took it off and we questioned her about video games. Her opinion changed a bit.

For me one of the most striking game moments is when i Beat Beyond Good and Evil, to me it was just the amazing completion of a story and it has stayed with me all these years.

My proudest gaming moment was when I meet Sonic in real life when I was a little kid!!

...

It was also a disenchantment when I discovered it was not the real Sonic.

By the way my proudest gaming moment is when I spend them with my family - when my father played Sonic, or when I played Minecraft with my little sister - or with friends - on GoldenEye or Perfect Dark. It's a sweet moment of sharing, which forges memories.

And a few year later I'll have my another proudest gaming moment when I'll play video games with my little daughter :)

I've had many moments throughout the years, but one I still remember fondly is when I finally got to 100000 Honorable Kills in World of Warcraft, back in Wrath of the Lich King. I haven't done as much PvP since, but it was a hell of a grind in Battlegrounds and World PvP!