Games that absolutely blew you away when you first played them?

[Syt]

Steel Panthers. It's what caused me to get my first computer.

That reminds of one.  Combat Mission.  Despite ugly log-people graphics I was blown away.  The WeGo system was great ( I don't know why everyone didn't adopt that), and the fact that 3D actually added to the game in a substantial way instead of being a graphic gimmick.

Good call, but for some reason CMBO didn't quite impress me like CMBB.



Btw, there were some games on SNES that were jaw dropping good - F-Zero with its incredible speed, Contra III with its excellent action and soundtrack, and Zelda which felt absolutely epic. Actually, the original NES Zelda had me so drawn in I created a simple board game version of it. 

[Razgovory]

Yeah Zelda 1 and 3 were fantastic.  I first played Zelda 1 in a Walmart before I could convince my folks to buy me one.  I remember not being able to distinguish what the hell I was fighting most of the time, but it was one of the first games were you could explore.  I got a paper route so I could buy a SNES, and there were some great games on that.  The Zelda game for that was fantastic.

Sometimes it's small things in PC games that impress me.  Like I remember in Doom 3 you when typed in a keypad it didn't change to a different screen.  That impressed the hell out of me.  Likewise in Half-life 2 where you could see several monitors where things were going on and it didn't have to change screens for that also impressed me.

[Syt]

Those little details are great. One of my favorite details in most recent Bethesda games are the doors; I first noticed this in their Fallout. They only open in one direction, as proper doors do. The vast majority of games out there is lazy and has "swinging" doors that open in either direction when you walk through them.

[Viking]

Harpoon (in addition to others mentioned here).

My best moment. I took on the entire russian north fleet with the illustrious and support ships. Never in the course of electronic events have simulated AEW helecopters done more for the cause of sinking simulated russian guided missile cruisers. The fuckers chased me from the faroes to le havre while I launched 20 strike missions with my 6 harriers one after the other until they ran out of air defense missiles. If the bastards had found me once the sky would have darkened with soviet SSNs.

[fhdz]

Yeah Zelda 1 and 3 were fantastic.

Yes.

[Razgovory]

Yeah Zelda 1 and 3 were fantastic.

Yes.

This one was less fantastic.

[DontSayBanana]

Battlezone

For a kid who started with firing bananas from a cannon at King Kong on a 386, this was an eye-opener.  Probably my first 3D game.

Flight Simulator 98

The amount of graphic goodness Microsoft Studios packed into that game was almost completely unprecedented- I lost many a night doing flyovers of my home and running flight paths to distant friends and relatives' locales.

X-wing vs TIE Fighter, then TIE Fighter, in rapid succession

A friend let me borrow the Collector's Edition 3-pack.  At first, I got sucked in by the better graphics on XvT, but once I got into the TIE Fighter campaign... to this day, no flight sim has been able to dethrone TIE Fighter for me.  Not even X-Wing: Alliance.

Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

This game was just pure "nucking futs," as my dad would put it.  You start off playing a Zelda game, crawling the dungeons, and just when you think the game's over, it fakes you out and starts you off completely new as an adult.  The game's one of the best-balanced I've ever seen, and some of it was just completely off the rails (thinking particularly of the twisty corridors in the Forest Temple, the leaps of faith in the Shadow Temple)... it could be remade with better graphics (which they did slightly up for the 3DS remake), but the game was insanely advanced for the time, and it's held up incredibly well since then.

Some honorable mentions...

Angband

My first Roguelike; I was skeptical that you could do that much with an ASCII character set, but I've since lost entire nights to that one.

Metroid Prime

I found the game to be kinda "meh" in the end, but it sure was gorgeous.  Probably marked the first game I played with water physics.

[Syt]

For nostalgia's sake I re-installed Morrowind, with the Complete Overhaul mod. It sucks me back in. 

[Ideologue]

Street Fighter II: Championship Edition.  I'd always wanted to play as Vega, Sagat, or Bison, and now I could.  Those three are still my favorite characters.  Along with the tweaks to the original characters, SF2:CE is pretty much the perfect SF game, never surpassed, and if it was, only by its own Hyper Fighting variant.  It also had the advantage of not requiring thousands of hours of practice and the reflexes of a replicant to even maintain a competitive edge, let alone master it, unlike some latterday entries into the series.

Mortal Kombat II was also a sequel that far outshone the original, at least for me, even though MK1 was really great.  You get to be Shang Tsung, and by extension have access to every move by every selectable character in the game, including their fatalities?  And that awesome one/two/three fireball?  Excelsior.

EU2 and WiTP of course.

Super Mario Bros. 3.  Amazing level design throughout.  I've still never beaten it on the game's terms, but I feel that I did in spirit, since I killed Bowser (I just happened to fall in the pit after him ).

[Warspite]

Space Quest
Civ 1
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
SimCity 2000
Mechwarriors 2
Command and Conquer
Battlezone
Fallout
Half Life
European Air War
Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord

Guess I haven't really been "blown away" since adulthood - a lot less time to get sucked into games.

[11B4V]

Mechwarriors 2
European Air War

Forgot about MW2, I also liked Mech Commander.

[katmai]

Red Baron
Aces of the pacific
Wasteland
Front Page Sports Football
Pong
to name a few.

[mongers]

I don't think any game has "blown me away", maybe more a long the lines of "cool, that's a neat game".

So for that criteria, Civ 5 G&K is doing it for me now.

In the past:

Arcade - 'Defender' 'Space Invaders' 'Crazy Planets' 'Star Wars'

ZX Spectrum - 'Codename Mat'

PC - 'Day of the Tentacle', 'Gods', 'Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe', 'Gunship 2000', 'Civilization II', 'Master of Magic', 'Populous 2', 'Europa Universalis 1 & 2' 'Hearts of Iron', 'Lord of the Realms', 'Transport Tycoon Deluxe', 'Nox', plus a few more I'm bound to have missed.


edit:

How could I forget the original 'Colonization'. 

[crazy canuck]

I think I saw a Sask sighting 

[fhdz]

'Nox'

Holy shit, I loved that game. I especially loved playing Ogreball online.