10 Huge Gaming Moments That Didn't Matter At All

A far cry from the binary blocks of yesteryear, video games these days have become a full blown artistic medium for incredible character development and narrative storytelling. Whether it’s the world-spanning adventures of Final Fantasy or the more esoteric lore of Dark Souls, you can’t switch on a modern game without some form story to get yourself truly lost in.

Just like film or television though, a story has to have some pretty big moments to keep the players engaged, and it’s not always the easiest job in the world to make these moments stick. Whilst some games manage to pull this off and create story beats with ramifications across generations of games, every now and then the pressure to create tension and excitement is too much, and these previously massive deals either drift inconsequentially into the narrative, or have their significance reversed as soon as they appear.

Be it characters, locations, battles or plot twists, these are the times that the cardboard sets fell down, and the world the games created turned out to be more hollow than they previously appeared.

Despite its simple premise of going fast and collecting rings, Sonic 1 was a game where you were always on the edge of a slip up - and you felt it.

Speeding through the levels, its easy to lose all your life-saving rings, or watch the timer run out on a bit of surprisingly tricky platforming. Add this to Dr Robotnik’s increasingly inventive boss battles, and a water level that can get right in the bin, the game could often become a trial-and-error affair if you weren't used to it. Still, the sense of reward was substantial as you reached closer to the finale.

Oh, you did remember to pick up the Chaos Emeralds though, right?

You better hope so, because after all that slog from Green Hill to Final Zones, if you missed the six emeralds hidden in the tricky Special Zones, you would be greeted with a post credits panel of Robotnik juggling the Emeralds you missed with the simple command: ‘Try Again’.

On seeing it for the first time many gamers will have panicked, thinking their work has all been for nothing and that they have failed. Fortunately for them it doesn't really change anything, you still finished the game ok - and if anything it serves as a cheeky reminder that just because you finished the game doesn't mean you've beaten it.