I would have to say the entire The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, it's a thril to know your playing an instant classic.

When I beat Mike Tyson in Punch Out! for the NES

Playing through Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast (the only game that makes you feel your a Jedi)

Both of mine are from TF2.

I hit a Soldier that was rocket-jumping in mid-air first time I played a Sniper. And I killed a Spy I didn't see right before he back-stabbed my doing a rocket-jump.

Every single battle of Shadow of the Colossus. Also, being the one and only on search and destroy in Call of Duty 4, and taking out the entire opposing team, always sits nice.

when i got omnislash on ff7 *sp?* without glitching. and when i got my first chainsaw kill on gears....

First time playing Unreal Tournament, instagib CTF game. Got the flag, and zig-zagged back to my base, seeing red laser beams land millimeters to my left and right by pure luck.

LoZ: OoT. All of it.

Beating my schoolyard buddies at Pokemon, repeatedly. And getting all 151 of them, thanks to a friend who had a Mew (Where'd he get it? I didn't ask, he didn't tell).

Not sure if Exhilarating or just damn funny....
Medieval Total War - im on top of a hill defending with a few hundred troops and the enemy is attacking me with approx 800 troops. I have a few catapults that are launching boulders at the enemy and I decide to click to follow the missile path on one of them. I watch the boulder fly at the enemy ranks and land smack in the middle of the unit of royal knights and watch the counter of enemy dead move up 1 (it was only about 10 out of the 800 enemy dead at this point) and got the message "The enemy king has been killed in battle!"
Another great thing in the same game was I was the english and to expand had to keep attacking the french, and the pope kept excommunicating my faction due to attacking another christian faith and it was seriously hurting my happiness. So I got fed up and invaded the papal states with a huge army. 2 battles later I got the message "The Pope has been overthrown and you have installed a puppet pope on the throne! All previous excommunications are null and void" I thought that was awesome.
Both times I laughed really hard.

Oh and gears of war,playing multiplayer for the first time on a friends HD widescreen. After several matches I did the first curb-stomp on my friend (we didnt even know it was possible) and the horrified expression on his face at the brutal death and the reaction of "What did you just do to me?!??!" was priceless.
HL Counter Strike - AWP sniper shot got 4 people with one bullet in a map based in a 747 plane.

Hmm...I actually have a new one related to Portal, though you may not believe it.

The first time I played the final boss fight, I idiotically failed to notice where the second brain-orb-thing went (the one that lands up above on the high platform) for a couple of minutes and lost a lot of time. I didn't expect to have enough time left but kept trying anyway. When trying to drop the last orb into the fire, I had almost no time left but seemed to have just enough. I placed the portal over the fire pit, ran over to hit the button, and shot the other portal under the orb.

I was a bit off. The orb bounced out of the pit.

With about 10 seconds left I dashed back over in a desperate but probably hopeless attempt to finally drop it in. I placed the first portal again, hit the button again, and made the second portal. This time my aim was perfect and the orb fell right into the fire, much to Glados's dismay. Apparently I had managed to do it fast enough. But the awesome part was when I looked at the clock to see just how close a call it was. Know how much time I had left?

One second.

...No, I'm serious. Without even meaning to I had won without a moment to spare. And on my first try, too.

It was just too amazing for words...a ridiculously unlikely action-movie-like ending that actually happened on its own. I almost thought the developers somehow planned it that way.

TF2 has too many to count, but one of the funnier ones happened recently when I was playing as Spy...I walked up behind an engineer, who was hammering away at his upgraded sentry gun and had a dispenser nearby. Naturally I immediately backstabbed him. The sentry was pointed the other way, so as it tried to turn around to blast me apart I tossed a sapper onto it, disabling it. I threw another one on the dispenser as I ran out the door and back to my own base. The sentry and dispenser both blew up shortly after, since they had no other engineers. "All in a day's work."

That makes it sound more amazing than it was, but it was pretty hilarious at the time.

Beating contra without the konami code. (I should have filmed it)

Winning Mike Tyson's Punchout was amazing and without a broken controller to speak of. Good thing those old nintendo controllers were built sturdy, man I whipped that thing across the room a lot.

In COD4 having a 20 kill streak and just continually calling in the chopper hoping my turn will come up, (damn 50 person servers). I felt like I was totally on the defensive running and gunning, hiding until I could call in a whole bunch of easy kills and finally getting them.
Hard to repeat at least for me but man did I have butterflies in my stomach and a giant bloody smile on my face the whole round.

Playing Crysis at the moment. There's a new and even more exciting "This is so awesome!" moment every level! Loving it!

Looking back though, I'll never ever forget the first level of Goldeneye when you take out the Ruskies on the dam and then at the end when you (er... well Bond really) jumps off the edge.

There's so many other moments in so many game though that it's hard to know where to start really. Good topic choice!

In single player beating Halo 3 on legendary using the mongoose at the end.

In mulitplayer when my team in Halo 3 ACTUALLY USED tactics so I flanked the whole red team and killed them with 2 grenades and ended up getting my 1st steaktacular.

Razzle Bathbone:
Final level, maximum difficulty, Elite Beat Agents.

Struggling to make it through those last few phrases, then seeing that spinner come up, signalling that you're almost there and all you have to do is spin really freakin' fast for about five or ten seconds and you've got it...

Damn, what a finish.

I second that! That was flippin' difficult

conqueror Kenny:

Janosuk:
Playing Halo on legendary co-op, At the end the driving sequence was extremely ... intense!

does it really matter about the difficulty?

yes, bigger blasts, more enemies and i'm fairly sure a shorter time limit (perhaps im wrong)

Beating Sephiroth in FF7 after a 20 minute battle. Apparently, my mother came in halfway through and asked if I was ok since I was so intensely staring at the screen and flipping through orders. I've no recollection of it.

In Rome: Total War I had a massive army of the Julii marching on Athens when the elderly general (Gneaus the Merciless) died of old age. I'd foreseen the problem, and had been honing his grandson in the roman Scriptorums and Arena's, filling him up with a proper retinue and having him take care of some peasant uprisings to get his skills on a bit. With the Gneaus dead, I put Lucius on a ship and moved him to Greece. The army was a bit inland, so Lucius had to go by land for a bit. Against all my planning, he had to spend one turn unsupervised, trekking through greek lands.
I clicked "Next turn" turned a whiter shade of pale when I saw a massive army move out of Corinth to charge my future conquerer of the eastern lands. Almost a thousand hoplites versus a general and 30 of his bodyguard, no retreat possible. I was determined to inflict maximal casualties then, and took command of the battlefield. I was on the lower part of a mountain, long lines of Phalanx moving towards me.

Wait, phalanx? Slow moving, slower turning, only dangerous at the frontside. I let the greecian pigs come down the mountain, and then charged past them, turned around and cut through the first group of hoplites like a gladius through butter. The other groups were turning around, trying to surround me but careful running kept my general free.
In the end, hundreds of hoplites lay dead, I had lost two bodyguards. The unit was promoted to the first gold rank, and Lucius was an instant Roman Hero. I cheered in my seat.
And repayed the greeks by burning all their cities to the ground, of course.

Playing Goldeneye with 3 friends and coming into a room where they were all in the middle of a fierce battle. I just stood there watching it for a few seconds and then tossed in a timed mine. It was worth it for the stunned looks they all gave me at exactly the same time.

That's a tough one. I'd say the first time I managed to get Ryu to beat a boss in Ninja Gaiden Black stands out right now. That game is so hard that when I beat that guy in the dojo I was like "Wow, did I just do that?".

I had several in Half-Life 2.

Playing Burnout 3 for the first time was probably the most exhilarated I'd been by games for quite a while. I'd also like to add the sequence where you enter the tripmine room in the original Half-Life. Nothing quite as tense as knowing that if you make one mistake you're going to be a smear against the wall.

Starcraft: Any time I get the chance to drop in a full control group's worth of shuttles carrying goliaths into someone's base. It's not the most viable strategy by far, but the look on people's faces when they suddenly find their base infested with fully upgraded goliaths is just priceless.

GloatingSwine:
The entire last hour or so of Mass Effect. Basically. Everything from the landing on Ilos to the end.

I loved that bit too! Especially fighting with no gravity on the Citadel!
Note: The previous sentence contained spoilers.

Also, running across Sandtrap on Halo 3 carrying the enemy flag in a Big Team game, and getting five kills with it along the away. I was rather suprised I survived that long.

Any moment while playing SplinterCell on the Wii with the terrible control scheme is an exhilarating moment. My heart continually leaped into my throat when I was trying to hide from some enemy and the Wiimote spontaneously decided to take the screen for a spin by gliding to the side of it. [To avoid a shit-flinging fest, that's the only Wii game I own with that control scheme problem. Metroid, I believe, had a similar one with moving the camera, but it was handled much better in term of controls.]

Any roleplaying game where I'm fighting some enemy - especially the last one - and my last life or death move ends up killing him/her/it off.

Everything after you set the Explosives on the Shagohod in MGS3.
The Attack against the Krogan breeding facility and the Finale in Mass Effect.
Fighting the Final Boss in Persona 3 (I was way underleveled but I did it damn it!)
Halo 2, leaping onto the back of the giant spider tank.
Uncharted: Drakes Fortune, the chase after the German U-Boat on the Waterfall incident.

Getting 19 kills in a row on Halo 2, snipers only...was pretty pissed off I didn't get the 20th though :(

Any racing game where I'm in 2nd, am slower than the car ahead of me, manage to pass him and then have to try and hold onto the lead. It's so awesome when you pull it off.

Any online FPS where you have to try and defend somewhere, or survive, and you get into those close-quarter crazy shooting/butting situations...they rock!

In The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, when you go in the moon... the game just builds up everything so well up to that point, and it was really surprising and definitely exhilarating.

Two specific levels in Donkey Kong Country: Temple Tempest and Croctopus Chase. Temple Tempest has you being chased through a large temple by beavers embedded in giant millstones, while in Croctopus Chase, you get chased by whirling octopuses through a maze-like underwater area. Both levels had my adrenaline going and my heart beating the whole time.

Simply beating Zelda II was very exhilarating for me, it's the most excruciatingly difficult game that I've ever completed.

There's a guy named Ben Leffler who makes Flash point-and-click adventure horror games, and they're the most nerve-wracking games I've ever played. I've yelled out obscenities and dropped my mouse more than once, believe me.

Other exhilarating highlights for me include:

The last level of Portal...

The last bosses of Metroid Prime, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Paper Mario...

What I've played so far of System Shock 2 (freaky)...

...and many more.

Basically anywhere in Yantar in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. on Master difficulty. Evading two snorks that haven't seen me yet, only to see one smash into the wall in front of me, turn around to run, and see another land next to the wall, ready to pounce again. And it makes it so much better that almost none of it is scripted, so you can never know just what will happen next.

hmmm there has been a lot of times when literally after the game id be sweating a lil

1v5 in counterstrike and raping them with a mac-10 and a silenced SOCOM on office

starcraft 3v3, we orchastrated a perfect nuke attack, with 3 nukes bearing down on a protoss base, literally wiping him out with out a shot fired from us, then pretty much invading them when they are confused.

Company of heroes 2v2, i saw a break in the far left of the other teams defenses, where there was only a fortified bulding with a sniper, a machine gun squad and a reg. squad with a bazooka. I saw an abandoned AT gun, but i didnt see the building, so i sent a squad to get it and they got raped, so then i rushed it with 5 squads, got the AT gun and killed the building, then realized this was a unguarded hole into their defenses, so then sent all my forces through the street, eventually destroying them when my ally broke through in the other side, in a great pincer move.

hmmm well i put metal slug on my external hard drive and brought it to school, and so in computer applications, me and my friends had a bet that i couldnt beat metal slug 3 in the time period of 55 minutes
needless to say it was hard, and it was intense cu if my teacher caught me, then hed make me stop, but luckily he didn, and i barely made it with 3 minutes to spare.

thats all for now, im sure ill think of more later

o and last level of portal of course

Mine was when I sent the garden gnome in Half Life 2:Episode 2 into space and got the achievement called "Little Rocket Man", because it took me the whole freaking game to do it. I had to carry that tiny statue either in my hands or with the gravity gun, and was constantly putting it down, picking it up, losing it, finding it, ect. all the way up until the 6th chapter.(WHICH IS THE END OF THE GAME) You have no idea how fucking satifying it felt to strap that little bitch into a rocket pod and launch it half-way across the universe when I arrived at Eli's Lab.

Participating in a completely unplanned raid in WoW in which everyone stripped naked, had a huge RP dance-off, and ran from one end of the continent to the other in a vast naked train of people before having a party in a neutral town and invading the nearest Alliance town. It all got recorded, posted on Youtube, and everybody finally logged out with most likely their heads in their hands - know I did.

ah and in COD2 we were playing a full house 16v16 CTF and we were neck in neck the entire game, and the last point took forever to acquire because the flags were always gone

Razzle Bathbone:
Final level, maximum difficulty, Elite Beat Agents.

Struggling to make it through those last few phrases, then seeing that spinner come up, signalling that you're almost there and all you have to do is spin really freakin' fast for about five or ten seconds and you've got it...

Damn, what a finish.

Fuck. Yes.

JUMPING JACK FLASH

Playing 2 on 4 against my smack talking buddies in Halo 2. My friend and I beat their asses and since we were playing on a LAN, we went and rubbed their heads as our just reward.

Beating Freebird on Expert. I don't really do practise mode because it's no fun so I wasn't really ready. Getting through it was awesome.

I have to say one of the craziest and most fun gaming moments i've ever had was playing through God of War on God Mode. The end was the most difficult battle ive ever been in. Did I beat it? You're damn right I beat it.